The Historical Role of British Explorers in East Africa

The major exploration of East Africa was accomplished over a roughly twenty-year period after 1856 in a series of journeys made by Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Baker, Cameron, Stanley, and some lesser figures. More varied European activities were to follow in subsequent years and eventually the establishment of formal colonial rule. But it is by no means certain that there is a direct historical link between the exploration and these later developments, or what the nature of that link is if it does exist. Since all the significant journeys were made under British auspices, this article will· be principally concerned with Britain in relation to East Africa. Writers of the colonial period, not surprisingly, found little difficulty in connecting up the work of the explorers with the advent of colonialism in what was assumed to be a continuous historical process. The Oxford Survey of the British Empire volume dealing with East Africa which appeared in 1914 states baldly that the explorer Joseph Thomson was directly responsible for the extension of British rule over Kenya, an assertion which modern historians of imperialism might find difficult to accept. Hugh Gunn's twelve-volume History of the British Empire, published to coincide with the great Wembley Empire Exhibition of 1924, sees the exploration as significant in itself as well as important for what was to follow: when Speke and Grant discovered Uganda in 1862, he says, it was one of those milestones in History that mark a new epoch.2 A much more recent work, still in use as a textbook in some East African schools, insists that the arrival of the explorers was a portent for the simple societies of East Africa which had hitherto lacked the stimulus that is given by meeting men with new ideas.,,3 This implies a significant responsive activity by those who were visited by the explorers. But in none of these cases is any historical proof provided. In what was for a quarter of a century or more the standard