Accident or suicide, it was never resolved. Burton hinted at the latter, aware that the suggestion of Speke having lost his nerve strengthened his own case. All the more bitter then must the truth have tasted fourteen years later when Stanley finally resolved the issue in Speke’s favour. It was the most painful lesson of Burton’s life. The prize had been within his grasp but he had failed to go the extra mile. In a poem reflecting on the tragedy of their venture, he acknowledged privately: ‘I did but half.’ To Speke – plodding, unattractive, repressed Anglo-Saxon Speke – belonged the glory.
Moreover, because he was the first European to visit Buganda, the most organised state yet to be encountered by the explorers, he became the bridge between Britain and East Africa.
FOR ALL THE grandeur of the approach to the lake, the site of Speke’s discovery had evolved into a seedy, unappealing place. Mwanza is Tanzania’s second largest town, comfortably poised to profit by commerce with Uganda and Kenya and the hundreds of islands on the lake, yet it exuded an air of defeat. I spent a morning walking the town, the sad and barren streets, the broken clocktower, and decided it was not a place to linger. Even the traders were forlorn; the fruit piled up in little pyramids was flaccid and the dull flesh of bog-eyed Nile perch, laid out in rusty wheelbarrows, broiled gently in the sun.
The granite pile of the Bismarck Rocks, rising near the water’s edge, were as solid as the old Iron Chancellor himself. Another lakeside landmark had endured less well. The flowering shrubs and lawns of the Botanical Gardens – ‘those inescapable amenities of the British Empire’, as Jan Morris called them – had long since been consumed by more robust species. But here at least a small flame of spirit flickered. Into the vacuum had moved a woman of majestic proportions and enterprise.
She told me her name was Victoria, the combined legacy of being born by the lake and having a father who served in the King’s Africa Rifles. A cheerful as well as ample sight in a gay rayon dress, she nevertheless had the focused gaze of the born commander. She was waging war on rampant papyrus and supervising a clean-up of botanical corpses that might have been bohenia and crocosmia. Three or four subordinates leapt to her orders.
Off to one side their campaign was starting to show gains. Victoria confirmed that the paddies at the lake edge were rice. Individual plants, flowers and vegetables, were being cultivated in plastic bags. She pointed to a thriving tomato crop. ‘Very popular with the people,’ she said. ‘Veeery popular.’ Her eyes flared in emphasising the point and she trilled it like the climax of a Bellini aria.
Clearly this venture was a relic of Nyerere’s socialism, ujamaa cooperative farming in action. The soil was of excellent quality and water was abundant, so now, instead of providing a gracious setting for the leisure of a colonial elite, the gardens were supplying the needs of the masses. I asked Victoria if the gardens were the responsibility of the ruling party or some public body like the Mwanza council.
She looked blank. ‘The party?’ Then she shrugged. ‘There is no party here. This is good land. We are using it. That is all.’
But what about the money, I asked. Surely under ujamaa the enterprise was regulated by the party.
‘The money is for me,’ Victoria said crisply.
AS WELL AS being a woman, Victoria was successful and a Sukuma. I hoped the combination would not prove malignant in her case, as it had been for so many before.
The Sukuma are the people of the southern lake region. They had a strongly developed chiefly system and a tradition of closely knit communities, a cohesiveness no doubt bolstered by a comparative blessing of resources, including fish from the lake. They were self-sufficient, having proved resistant to Christianity and Islam and suspicious of outside authority, whether colonial or post-colonial. Like most Bantu peoples, they retained their belief that witchcraft, bulogi, can be held responsible for almost any trouble. The concept of good fortune or bad had no validity. That a hardworking grower might have his crop wiped out by a hailstorm while his lazy neighbour was unaffected could be put down not to the caprice of nature, but an intervention from the spirit world. The most likely source of harm was thought to be the magic of an enemy employing sorcerers. In turn, those who felt themselves afflicted would consult a diviner, or nfumu, to identify the source. The nfumu could provide a charm or remedy but in unresponsive cases dealing with witches became the business of elders who considered allegations and meted out punishments, ranging from verbal warnings and fines to ostracism. In rare and serious cases, witches could be clubbed to death. The chief was the ultimate arbiter in all such matters.
Under the British, the chiefs were left in charge of grassroots administration. A great deal has been written, much of it critical, about this system known as Indirect Rule, promoted by Lord Lugard in East and West Africa. It was certainly not adopted for idealistic motives, but rather as a cost saving method by which a handful of white officials could exercise a degree of control over a vast domain. But while it is true to say that it did little to prepare the great mass of Africans for the modern world, it did at least keep the traditional social fabric intact during the colonial cataclysm.
At the same time, Indirect Rule set up a tension between the chiefs and the new intelligentsia produced by colonial education, who constituted the first wave of nationalist leaders. Tribal leadership became tainted with the brush of collaboration. One of the first acts of the Nyerere government after independence was to abolish the chiefs and vest their authority in party officials. When I spoke to him, Daudi Ricardo, a party man himself, described this social revolution as ‘the biggest mistake we ever made’.
Whether there was a direct connection between social dislocation and the mass killing of witches among the Sukuma cannot be said with certainty, but both began in the early 1960s. What is clear is that once the killings started they acquired a ferocious momentum of their own. In early reports of witch-killing among the Sukuma it was noted that in Mwanza district, mobs of men had taken to dealing with accused witches – usually women – by chasing them and beating them to death with freshly cut branches. But it was not until the 1970s that the practice became widespread. By then a new factor was aggravating social disruption – the forced relocation under Nyerere’s ujamaa policy of entire communities into model villages. The trauma was felt everywhere but particularly among those whose cultural values were deepest, notably the Sukuma.
It would start with a whispering campaign, usually instigated by an envious or malicious neighbour. A woman with a good crop of sorghum or cotton was a typical target. In communities already suffering confusion, it did not take long for hysteria to take hold. As the killings spread so the ways of witch-slayers became more sophisticated. Instead of being hunted down by mobs, the supposed sorcerer would be hacked to death with a machete by a paid killer, part of whose fee was spent on his own ritual cleansing afterwards. Far from being outcasts, these hired assassins were a focus of public gratitude as, for a while at least, the demons of anxiety and panic that had gripped the community were laid to rest.
By the mid-1970s witch-killing in Sukumaland was serious enough for the government to intervene. Hundreds of suspects were rounded up, and for a while the killings tailed off. Then twelve people died of beatings in custody. Four policemen were convicted and jailed. Government ministers were dismissed and the operation was called off. Here was proof to the Sukuma that even the government feared the witches. The witch-killings resumed and were soon worse than ever, intensifying through the 1980s.
Government statistics show that some 4,518 people were killed in incidents related to witchcraft in Tanzania’s thirteen regions between 1970 and 1988. Of these, 2,946 occurred among the Sukuma. Although Tanzania’s largest tribe, they are still less than 12 per cent of the population in an ethnically diverse country of 120 or so language groups. Yet they have been responsible for 65 per cent of all witch-killings. While the belief in witches is no less pervasive in other regions, suspects were generally dealt with by more traditional