The first Europeans to travel through the interlacustrine region of East Africa, between Lake Victoria in the east and Lakes Albert, Edward, and Tanganyika in the west, were John Hanning Speke (1827–64) and James Augustus Grant (1827–92), who were searching for the source of the White Nile between 1860 and 1863. Sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society of London and supported by their guide and translator known as Sidi Mubarak (called ‘Bombay’ by Speke),1 they travelled on foot from Zanzibar, through the Arab trading town of Tabora (then called Kazé), before turning north and wandering through the kingdoms of Karagwe, Buganda, and Bunyoro to the settlement of Gondokoro. Their roughly three-year journey was documented by Speke and Grant alike in extensive bound volumes.
While Speke is well known for the discovery of the source of the White Nile and his conflict with Richard Burton, very little research has been done on his influence on subsequent travels into East Africa and the colonial usage of his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, published in 1864. But due to the highly debated ninth chapter on the ‘History of the Wahûma’, which claims to present a ‘theory of conquest of inferior by superior races’,2 Speke’s writings are often mentioned and used in introductions to post-colonial explanations for the genocidal violence in Rwanda and Burundi in the second half of the twentieth century.3
In the published Journal, the Wahuma are described as having ‘a high stamp of Asiatic feature, of which a marked characteristic is a bridged instead of bridgeless nose’, so that it ‘appears impossible to believe, judging from the physical appearance of the Wahûma, that they can be of any other race than the semi-Shem-Hamitie of Ethiopia’.4 In 1969 these words led Edith Sanders to proclaim that Speke was seminal to the emergence of the so-called Hamitic hypothesis—the idea ‘that everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by the Hamites, allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race’.5
As far as Speke’s account is concerned, the Wahuma are deemed to be nothing more than a European phantasm.6 Nevertheless, in racial theories and ethnological encyclopaedias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term Wahuma evolved in European scientific discourse into a superordinate7 of the eastern branch of the Hamites of Africa,8, allegedly belonging to the ‘Caucasian’ race.9
In my dissertation I retrace the etymology of the Wahuma and the characteristics ascribed to them in travelogues and ethnological writings from the 1860s to the 1930s. I therefore aim to write the ‘History of the Wahûma’ as a history of European racial theories and imperial interpretive authority. My dissertation aims to shed new light on the history of knowledge, and more specifically on knowledge production before and during the colonial era and on the canonization of knowledge in imperial contexts.

Editorial Interventions
A close look at the manuscripts of Speke’s travel diary and the revisions of the Journal shows not only that his writings betray the so-called European lens through which Speke saw Africa, but also that they were heavily impacted by the editing process.
After Speke’s famous telegram proclaiming ‘that the Nile is settled’10 reached London from Khartoum in May 1863, the media hype around the journey rekindled. Upon returning to England in 1863, Speke turned to the Scottish publishing house Blackwood and Sons to publish his account of his travels. To his sorrow, John Blackwood soon discovered that Speke was unable to complete his eagerly anticipated travelogue without extensive help. To straighten out the narrative, purge ungentlemanly conduct and failures, and generally turn it into ‘the most complete characteristic picture of savage life that ever was’,11 Blackwood engaged an editor. John Hill Burton, who worked in secret on the Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. In certain passages Burton acted more like a modern ghostwriter than an editor, and he did extensive work before the book could be published in 1864. Sources concerning this process, such as letters regarding payment, problems with the text, requests from the publishing house, and the corrected proofs were discovered by David Finkelstein during his research on Victorian publishing practices in the 1990s.12
Such practices are a key factor in my research on knowledge production before and during the colonial period, enabling me to compare personal field notes with the versions that were ultimately published for the European scientific community and for a wider audience interested in new geographical discoveries and the acquisition of territory.
John Hanning Speke’s manuscripts, as well as two corrected proofs with marginal notes by John Hill Burton, are available under the shelfmark MS.4872–4 in the National Library of Scotland, which holds the full archive of Blackwood and Sons. Because Speke and Grant were invited to the company’s office in Edinburgh, many private letters and extensive international scientific correspondence were also archived, along with Grant’s travelogues, proofs, and drawings.
Reading through all this material gave me great insight in how Speke’s work, which was crucial for subsequent accounts of the Wahuma, came to be published, and where Speke drew his inspiration from. But most importantly, the archival material showed that several key passages identifying the Wahuma as a ‘distinct race’ were not written by Speke himself, but added later by Hill Burton. Whereas Speke clearly states that his account of the history of the Wahuma is a reproduction of tales heard from King Rumanika of Karagwe, Burton presented Speke as a proponent of an ethnological ‘theory of conquest of inferior by superior races’.13
While Hill Burton introduced a decidedly paternalistic tone into Speke’s work, certain drawings and narratives were also purged, possibly at the behest of John Blackwood, from James Augustus Grant’s publication A Walk across Africa (1864).14 This was not done to present Grant as an immaculate gentleman, as was the case with Speke, but to remove depictions of torture and executions. There is no definitive explanation for this in the source material. It could have been done to form a less diverse and more streamlined narrative of the more ‘civilized’ Wahuma as a ruling elite, or simply because the events concerned were deemed too graphic for public consumption. I hope to explore Grant’s drawings more thoroughly in a separate article, as they provided great source material for a work in progress about the European practice of bringing heavy furniture on highly mobile expeditions.15
Archival Research in Edinburgh
During my stay in Edinburgh in January and February 2025, I was able to leaf through several years of Blackwood and Sons’ bound correspondence, Speke’s letters concerning the publication process, the manuscripts and proofs of the Journal, as well as the archived letters of James Augustus Grant, who maintained a lively international correspondence regarding the exploration and industrialization of East Africa. Among the masses of material, two items stood out as my personal favourites. The first of these was the annotated copy of the published Journal owned by David Livingstone. Having taken part in the ‘Great Debate’ about the possible source of the White Nile, Livingstone marked passages in Speke’s work that had clearly been influenced by Richard Burton,16 with whom Speke had travelled from Zanzibar to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. The second was a very short letter by Speke himself, addressed to Blackwood at 45 George Street, Edinburgh. Speke thanks the unnamed recipient for a book recommendation about Prester John and expresses his hope that ‘it will throw . . . light on my Wahûma history’.17 The fact that the letter was dated 10 August without a year and the anonymous salutation—‘Dear Sir’—might suggest that the letter was meant for Hill Burton. Nevertheless, it shows that much thought and some puzzlement accompanied Speke’s racial theories, and that he did not deliberately and confidently invent the history of the Wahuma, as some claim.18

. . . and in London
In the bustling city of London, the relevant sources for my research were far less centrally located than in Edinburgh and were divided among different archives, each with their own regulations, application forms, and opening times. I managed to view, photograph, and in some cases download digitized versions of material in the British Library, the archive of the Royal Geographical Society, the Wellcome Collection, and the archive of the School of Oriental and African Studies.
The Wellcome Collection offered a surprisingly wide array of ethnological texts, the most relevant for my topic being those by Charles Tilstone Beke (1800–74). His publications generally had short print runs and are thus hard to access in Germany or online. Beke, who demanded that the Royal Geographical Society recognize him as ‘the theoretical discoverer’ of the source of the Nile,19 also carried out extensive, albeit largely unheeded research on the genealogy of certain tribes in what is now Ethiopia. His diaries and letters show his intellectual connections and influences, but sadly do not confirm whether Speke was inspired by his writings.
The archive of the Royal Geographical Society holds the official travel plans, financial arrangements, updates, and letters concerning the expeditions it funded, as well as full sets of the Society’s periodicals: the Journal and Proceedings of the RGS. As well as consulting a few letters by Richard Burton, Speke, and Grant, I was grateful to obtain permission from the descendants of Samuel White Baker to work with his estate, mainly his personal travel diary.
My stay in Edinburgh and London allowed me to collect a vast and diverse mass of sources, which will help me uncover the mechanisms that led to the invention of a people called the Wahuma and their integration in the European racial canon. I’m thankful to the GHI London for funding my stay and enabling me to sift through archival material for one part of my dissertation.
Feature image: National Library of Scotland, MS.4873, first corrected proofs of Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile by John Hanning Speke, with many stylistic changes by the author and by John Hill Burton, the editor of the work (1863 or earlier), p. 145. Digitized by the National Library of Scotland.
- Richard Burton recorded his name as ‘Seedy Mubarak Mombai (Bombay)’. Richard Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Equatorial Africa: A Picture of Exploration (London, 1860), 3. [↩]
- John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh, 1864), 246. [↩]
- e.g. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (London, 1998), 50–3. [↩]
- Speke, Journal, 246–7. [↩]
- Edith Sanders, ‘The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective’, Journal of African History, 10/4 (1969), 521–32, quotation at 521 . [↩]
- Peter Rohrbacher, Die Geschichte des Hamiten-Mythos (Vienna, 2002), 164. [↩]
- Heinrich Schnee (ed.), Deutsches Koloniallexikon, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1920), iii. 657. [↩]
- Giuseppe Sergi, The Mediterranean Race: A Study of the Origin of the European Peoples (London, 1901), 41. [↩]
- Charles Seligman, Races of Africa (Oxford, 1930), 96–7. [↩]
- Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 7/3 (1862–3), 109. [↩]
- National Library of Scotland, MS. 4177, p. 88. [↩]
- David Finkelstein, ‘Breaking the Thread: The Authorial Reinvention of John Hanning Speke in His Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile’, Text, 9 (1996), 280–96. [↩]
- National Library of Scotland, MS.4872-284 / Comparison of MS.4873-177F2 with Speke, Journal, 246. [↩]
- James August Grant, A Walk across Africa or Domestic Scenes from my Nile Journal (Edinburgh, 1864). National Library of Scotland, MS.17921, Scene No. 1 to Scene No. 6. [↩]
- Planned publication following the workshop ‘Beyond Instruments and Specimens’, Braunschweig, 18–19 Oct. 2024. [↩]
- National Library of Scotland, PDL.106/11, pp. xiii and xx. [↩]
- National Library of Scotland, Acc.8447. [↩]
- Rohrbacher, Die Geschichte des Hamiten-Mythos, 164. [↩]
- Charles T. Beke, Who Discovered the Sources of the Nile? (London, 1863), 4. [↩]
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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Lena Filzen (April 6, 2026). ‘History of the Wahûma’? Publishing Practices and Colonial Knowledge Production. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved April 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/160nh
