Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
INTO THE WILD
The Victoria and Albert Nile, February - March 2014
A
t the westernmost point of Lake Kyoga the river rose again, depositing itself into Lake
Albert two days further north-west. By fall of next night we had reached the outskirts of
Masindi, a favourite haunt of, among others, Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway,
the kind of place that drew adventurers and explorers from times past. The chief town of
the Masindi region, it has a population that far exceeds the towns and villages we had
tramped through since Jinja, with almost 50,000 Ugandans calling this home. An urban
sprawl of red dirt roads and shanty shacks gathered around a square where modern banks
and a public hospital suggested a tiny corner of modernity, it was the last significant town
we would come to before we reached the vast Murchison Falls national park.
Masindi was an important milestone for another reason: it was here that the British ex-
plorer Samuel Baker had based himself from April 1872 until June 1873. Baker, beaten by
John Hanning Speke to the source of the White Nile at Jinja, had turned to his other over-
riding passion in life - the abolition of the slave trade. And it was from Masindi that Baker
locked horns with the local Bunyoro king, Kabalega, to kill the trade at its source.
Samuel Baker was born in June 1821, the eldest son of a London merchant family,
whose considerable wealth had been built on the thriving trade in sugar. Marrying young,
Baker, his wife and extensive brood left England to oversee the family's plantation in
Mauritius and, later, Ceylon - but, after his wife was stricken with typhoid fever, Baker
found himself a widower at the youthful age of 34. Leaving his children in the care of an
unmarried sister, Baker embarked on a new career, constructing railways and bridges in
central Europe.
Baker's life was to take a startling, almost fairy tale turn when, in 1859, circumstances
brought him to Vidin, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Visiting the slave market in the
city, Baker became enraptured with one of the girls about to be sold. A white slave, she
seemed destined for the harem of the Pasha - or honorary Lord - of Vidin; but Baker had
other ideas. Though he bid to buy the girl himself, the Pasha's resources far outweighed
