History, European Influence

Curiosity about the source of the Nile led to European expeditions into the region. In 1862 British explorer John Hanning Speke was welcomed to the court of Kabaka Mutesa I of Buganda. Speke continued his journey and found the point where the Nile flowed out of Lake Victoria, correctly concluding that the lake was the principal source of the Nile. British explorer Samuel White Baker and his wife, following the Nile upstream, entered Uganda from the north and in 1864 reached and named Lake Albert. On Baker’s second trip, in 1872, Kabarega, the Bunyoro omukama, attacked Baker out of fear that his subjects would become vulnerable to slave raids from Sudan, and forced Baker’s withdrawal. Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley visited the court of Buganda in 1875 while en route from Zanzibar through the Congo rain forest to the Atlantic coast.