Story Of An African Lake

By Lake Tanganyika, the world's longest freshwater lake, our travel writer is woken up by chimpanzees as he retraces the steps taken by Dr David Livingstone and Jane Goodall.

- Ramdas lyer

Standing under the shade of a large mango tree in the small town of Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, I thought about Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley. This is where he came from England in 1871 to locate Dr David Livingstone, British explorer and missionary, who had lost communication with his family and sponsors for four years, and he finally caught up with him and uttered the now legendary words “Dr Livingstone, I presume”.

Livingstone, who had explored several regions of southern Africa along the Zambezi River, decided in 1866 to explore the central African watershed near Lake Tanganyika to propagate the gospel and end the slave trade.

But internecine tribal warfare and poor health eventually made him return from the western shores of the lake in the Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) to the eastern shore town of Ujiji in current day Tanzania to convalesce from bouts of tropical diseases.