The Emergence of the Emin Pasha Gulf (Tanzania) as an Object of Hydrographic Knowledge

Africa’s largest lake, known to this day by its colonial name Lake Victoria, features an indentation in the south-west that many texts and maps refer to as Emin Pasha Gulf (Fig. 1). Located in the Tanzanian part of the lake, this indentation has a surface area of around 2,600 square kilometres and thus is about five times the size of Lake Constance. Besides being named after the German explorer and colonial official Emin Pasha, the term “gulf” needs an explanation: Hydrography usually uses this term to refer to bays of seas, not to inland waters. How has the categorization of this part of the lake as a gulf been established? In search of an answer to this question, this article provides insights into the larger history of research expeditions and cartographic knowledge production during German colonial expansion in East Africa.

In the Hook of the Lake

The history of this naming indicates the high importance of inland waters in colonization processes. Since early modern times, large lakes and rivers in distant regions of the world were of particular interest to European maritime powers, as such waters seemed to promise comparatively easy access to riches and trade networks inland. Although such hopes often turned into disillusionment after experiencing the pitfalls on the ground (Benton 2010: 41, 44f.), interest in large inland waters did not wane in the 19^th century. Driven by Enlightenment views of nature, scientists regarded such bodies of water as key elements of geography that give insights on how a region was connected in geological, botanical, or zoological terms. Under the new term “hydrography”, such research was particularly interested in Africa, about whose inland areas hardly anything was known in Europe.

The people who lived on the shores of the largest lake in Africa knew different names for it. It was called “Lweru” in Orunyambo, spoken on the southern shore, and “Nalubaale” in Luganda, spoken on the northern shore (Katoke 1975: 91; Kenny 1977: 720). In other languages it was called “Nyanza” and “Nam Lolwe”, further names could be added. The name “Lake Victoria” goes back to the British explorer John Hanning Speke, who reached the south-eastern shore near present-day Mwanza in August 1858 on his search for the sources of the Nile. Since the independence of the riparian states in the 1960s, several attempts have been made to replace this colonial name with an African term, but this has never been achieved. So far, no political majority could be found for any of the possible alternatives.

The Zinza-speaking societies who lived at the indentation in the south-west referred to this part of the water as the “arm of the lake” (“Mukono gu’ Enyanza”). It was also said that one was “in the hook” (“omu ikondo”) when he or she was living in this area (Rehse 1914: 267). What is interesting about the metaphors of the arm and the hook is that they seem to refer to the outline of the lake. Accordingly, the lake was thought of in the manner of a top view or bird’s-eye view, although Zinza-speaking societies did not visualize the area on paper maps or similar media as far as is known.

Speke had not reached the indentation in the south-west in 1858. He neither reached it on a second journey he undertook with the Scotsman James Augustus Grant in 1861 (Grant 1864; Speke 1863). Two following explorers, Samuel White Baker and Charles Chaillé-Long, travelled only on the northern shores of the lake (Baker 1866; Chaillé-Long 1877). Thus, Europeans still knew only little about the south-western part during the 1860s and early 1870s (Chrétien 2003: 202–5).

Geography and Violence

In the mid-1870s, a large research expedition led to a substantial increase in knowledge about Lake Victoria on the European side: On a journey through tropical Africa from east to west from 1874 to 1877, the British-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley with a retinue of about 360 porters, servants, informants, and guides travelled large parts of the lake by boat. In July 1875, the group passed the indentation in the south-west without landing there and camped on the uninhabited island of Nazinga (Stanley 1878 vol. 1: 278f.). A map by Stanley published in the New York Herald in October 1875 does not feature an outline for the south-western part of the lake (Fig. 2).

Stanley’s self-image as a bold explorer involved the conviction that he could use violence for the cause of geography in order to assert himself in the social and ecological environment of Central Africa, which he regarded as hostile (see on Stanley: Bierman 1990; Driver 1991). His crossing of the continent was a forced march that cost the lives of more than 100 members of his retinue. To what extend the violence he describes was actually useful for the progress of the expedition or rather served as a way of showcasing himself to his reading public remains to be investigated (Greiner 2018: 191).

Either way, Stanley believed that the death of porters or those who stood in his way was justified if it served geographical research (Schwarz 2016: 158). In the south-western part of the lake, Stanley and his men attacked the population of Bumbire Island in August 1875 after conflicts over the procurement of provisions. According to Stanley, who described – and probably exaggerated – the attack in an article for a newspaper, several dozen islanders were killed and more than a hundred wounded (Stanley 1970: 257–60). In Britain and the United States, the event sparked a debate about the use of violence in research expeditions (Bennett 1970: xiii–xxxviii).

Despite this criticism, Stanley’s expedition was widely regarded as a breakthrough in hydrographic research. For the first time, it provided clarity on questions about the course of the Congo and its connections with the East African Great Lakes and the Nile, which had previously only been discussed on the basis of hypothetical assumptions. In Europe and the United States, Stanley’s widely read travelogue Through the Dark Continent (1878) drew enormous interest to Central Africa and the resources believed to be there.

However, the expedition did not produce any medium- or large-scale maps, but only a poorly detailed Map of Central Africa ​​that illustrated the route as an appendix to his report. “Stanley’s map is merely a sketch, and very, very far from accurate,” judged the Scottish Presbyterian missionary Alexander Murdoch Mackay in 1883, who had crossed Lake Victoria by boat himself (Mackay 1884: 273–83).

Assumption and Authorization

Missionaries as Mackay, inspired by Stanley’s expedition, set out for the lake area in the late 1870s, but initially did not produce any maps and visited the south-western part of Lake Victoria only sporadically. The northern shore seemed more important to them, as they feared a spread of Islam through Afro-Arab traders in the kingdom of Buganda (Austen 1968: 20; Betbeder 1971: 748). Accordingly, the German colonizers in East Africa could not rely on precise maps of the lake when they expanded their conquests and land grabs from the coast to the inland from 1890 onwards. In the absence of funds for systematic mapping of the colony – known as German East Africa ​​from 1891 onwards – the colonial administration required officers to survey the area surrounding German stations with sketches, route books, and the like (Hafeneder 2008: 56–84).

The first of these stations on Lake Victoria was constructed in November 1890 in Bukoba, a landing place frequented by many trading canoes on the western shore. The colonial administration had commissioned Emin Pasha, whose real name was Eduard Schnitzer, with the establishment of a station on the shores of Lake Victoria. Emin Pasha had only recently joined the German colonial service after several years in the Egyptian administration (Mackay 1884: 275; Schweitzer 1898: 551–97). While he travelled ahead as a passenger on a trading canoe, the colonial officer Franz Stuhlmann led 300 soldiers overland to Bukoba. Stuhlmann, a zoologist with a doctorate, had joined the army of Reichskommissar Hermann von Wissmann (“Wissmann Troops”), the precursor of the official German colonial forces, in 1888. Since then he served a dual mission as a military officer and scientist. Stuhlmann collected botanical, zoological, and ethnographic objects on an immense scale – including skulls he had taken from graves – which he sent to museums and research institutes in Germany, where he was soon considered a leading scientific expert on East Africa (Gollasch 2020).

By choosing Bukoba on the western shore of Lake Victoria, Emin Pasha had violated his orders, which had called him for the establishment of a station on a trade route south of the lake, and Stuhlmann had supported him in doing so. With his unauthorized action, Emin Pasha wanted to forestall a British seizure of the south-western part of the lake, and to enable German colonial forces to gain a strategically advantageous position to intervene in the civil war that took place in Buganda at that time. Due to this and other presumptuousness, Emin Pasha lost the support of Wissmann (Austen 1968: 29f.).

Stuhlmann, however, sought to show his appreciation for Emin Pasha. In a report about his trip to Bukoba, during which he produced a survey of the indentation in the south-west in October and November 1890, he stated: “I propose the name Emin Pasha Gulf for this large bulge of the Nyanza, which is almost the size of Speke Gulf.” (Stuhlmann 1892: 127).¹ The first map to use this name was published in a German colonial journal in 1892 by the geographer Alexander von Danckelman, who relied on Stuhlmann’s survey (Fig. 3).

The Berlin map publisher Dietrich Reimer, who produced an “official” 30-sheet map of the East African colony on behalf of the German Foreign Office, also adopted Stuhlmann’s terminology. The name Emin Pasha Gulf appeared in 1896 on sheet A3 of this map series (Fig. 4) and thus became authoritative knowledge according to the geographic standards of the time, even though it was placed somewhat inconspicuously on the lower left edge of the map.

Spaces of Hydrography, Spaces of History

Stuhlmann has chosen the designation “gulf” not according to hydrographic criteria, but based on nationalist and imperialist considerations. As British mapmakers had named the indentation in the south-east a gulf and chosen the British explorer Speke as eponymist, the German side should name the indentation in the south-west a gulf as well and choose a German explorer. Despite this context of origin in the rivalries of the age of high imperialism, the name is still in use today as a hydrographic category.

Histories of the construction of such hydrographic entities also deserve attention because they are often linked to the idea of ​​a historical space. Since a large body of water confronts the people living in the surrounding areas with the same conditions and induces them to adopt similar life strategies, it can, in the course of centuries, create a socio-economic area with a specific culture. Regarding the history of Africa, this assumption is clearly evident in the widespread term “Nile civilization”, but it implicitly underpins arguments about many other lakes, rivers, or delta regions as well. However, as early as the 1980s, the French historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien expressed doubts as to whether the “Region of the Great African Lakes” is actually a historical region. Studied closely, many societies in the “region” of the Great African Lakes were so closely linked to societies far away from the waters, according to Chrétien, that the claim of a historical space is not tenable (Chrétien 1986). Could the assumption of a historical space have arisen from a careless projection of hydrographic parameters onto history? Without deepening or deciding this debate here, the history of the Emin Pasha Gulf indicates that it is worth to shed light on the historical construction of hydrographic entities.

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1. In the German original: “Ich schlage für diese große Ausbuchtung des Nyansa, die fast die Größe des Speke-Golfs erreicht, den Namen Emin-Pascha-Golf vor.” [↩]

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