The search for the sources of the White Nile and Egyptian–Sudanese relations

Abstract

The exact southernmost source of the White Nile was discovered by the German explorer Burckhardt Waldecker on 12 November 1937. It was a thin trickle of water bubbling from a spring in the hills of Burundi. Other water sources of the Nile start their journey in the snow melt fed creeks of the Mountains of the Moon in Rwanda. ‘Waldecker set up a stela to mark the spot and on the nearest hilltop built a stone pyramid to remind people of the glorious destiny of the river.’ 1 The search for the sources of the Nile has had its own history since Biblical times Herodotus, who travelled in the Lower Nile Valley in the fifth century BC, wrote that ‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile’ and that its source was lying as much southward of Egypt ‘as one can travel by land or water in four months’. The location of the source of the Nile remained for so long shrouded in mystery that the Romans had a saying ‘Quaere fonte Nili’ – or: to look for the sources of the Nile – was equivalent to ‘looking for a needle in a haystack’. Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer and geographer, made the biggest advance ‘southwards’ when he put the sources of the Nile at the foot of the ‘Mountains of the Moon’, at latitude 12’30 S. As we now know (or assume?) the real source of the Nile lies four degrees further south. 2 According to William Daniel who undertook a journey to the Nile in 1700: There are different judgments as to its origin. Some will have its beginning to be in the Upper Ethiopia . . . from very high mountains which are called the Mountains of the Moon; but our modern opinions agree that the Nile is formed from the increase of two lakes, called Zembree and Zaflan. 3