Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Baker's own - so, if he wanted to acquire her, some nefarious tactics had to be employed.
Baker decided that he would have to bribe the girl's guards and, though she had legitim-
ately been bought by another, he and the slave girl escaped in a carriage. Baker soon dis-
covered that the girl was the orphaned daughter of an aristocratic Hungarian family, whose
parents and brothers had been massacred during the uprisings of 1848. She was later to tell
him that her nurse had helped her to a refugee camp, from which she had been abducted
and sold to an Armenian slave merchant. It was this merchant who had brought her to mar-
ket in Vidin, having groomed her to join the Pasha's harem.
The girl, whose name was Florence, would go on to become Baker's lover, wife, and
companion in his African adventures. Together they set out to explore central Africa in
1861. By this time Speke and Grant had already discovered Lake Victoria, but - following
clues left by them - Baker and his wife would go on to discover Lake Albert to the north-
west. Although Baker wanted to claim this as one of the Nile's various sources, he was
never taken quite as seriously as the other African explorers. Even though the river rising
from Lake Albert did feed into the Nile further north, providing as much as fifteen per cent
of the river's northerly waters, Baker's standing amongst Nile explorers never rose to the
heights achieved by Speke or Grant. In part this was because he was always shunned by
Queen Victoria, who refused to meet him because she was certain he had been intimate
with his partner Florence long before they were formally wed. A civilian scandal involving
his brother, a decorated colonial officer later convicted of sexually assaulting a lady on a
train, also damaged Baker's reputation - but it didn't damage his zeal for Africa. By 1869
he was back, commissioned by the Khedive - or viceroy - of Egypt and Sudan to lead a
military expedition into central Africa and quash the slave trade there, opening up great
swathes of the interior for commerce and the advancement of civilisation. It was this quest
that brought him to Masindi, and into direct conflict with the local kings.
Boston and I stood at the river port on the outskirts of the town, beneath a baking sun.
Here, the river turns north, before banking west to flow through Murchison Falls National
Park and finally enter Lake Albert. This is the ancestral land of the Bunyoro tribe. Tradi-
tionally they were colonial resisters, and fought bitterly against Baker, seeing his exped-
ition as another way Europeans were bringing British influence to bear. But, after a year
of establishing his presence here, it was Baker who won out, with the king of the Bunyoro
captured and exiled, and the whole tribe severely weakened as a result.
'Lazy bastards,' said Boston, after yet another local porter had deserted us. 'Even worse
than the Bugandans. We'd have been better off with a woman. This Bunyoro couldn't carry
a bag for more than five minutes without complaining. What we need is a Sudanese or a
Nilot. Maybe a Kakwa. They were Idi Amin's old tribe. They're warriors. They don't usu-
ally carry things, but at least they're strong. If you pay them enough, Lev, they'll do it.'
