Sophia’s Visions · Explorers of Africa · Livingstone and Burton · B2–C1
Livingstone and Burton: Two Roads to the Nile
Sophia’s Visions: eighteen centuries from now, two British explorers born on the same day of the year will walk into the heart of Africa, looking for the river that flows past our city. One is a missionary, the other a scholar-adventurer; neither is what his admirers will claim. Comparing and contrasting (whereas, unlike, the former… the latter, X differs from Y in that…) and referring to sources (according to, X claims that, Y argues that), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Where does the Nile come from? Herodotus asked, and nobody could tell him. Tonight I have seen the men who will find out.
Men, certainly. Whether they are heroes is what you will have to decide. And watch for the people who walk beside them: they are the ones history forgets.
For thousands of years, nobody outside Africa knew where the Nile began. Around 150 CE, the geographer Ptolemy, working in Alexandria, wrote that it flowed from great lakes fed by snow on the “Mountains of the Moon”. In the 19th century, European explorers set out to test him.
They travelled with large caravans of African porters, guides and interpreters, and along routes that African and Arab-Swahili traders had used for generations. At that time a terrible slave trade still ran from the interior of East Africa to the coast at Zanzibar, and from there to Arabia and beyond.
Britain had abolished slavery in its empire in 1833 and saw itself as the enemy of the slave trade. But the same years saw the beginning of the European conquest of Africa. Explorers’ books were read in London by missionaries, merchants and ministers, for very different reasons.
Or try our free games and lessons.