FOREWORD. 



Less than sixty years ago the country of Uganda 

 was utterly unknown to the civilized world. No 

 European had ever set foot upon its soil, and 

 geographers found no place for it upon the map of 

 Africa. All that part of the great continent where 

 the Victoria Nyanza and the countries surrounding 

 it exist was a blank. Later on vague stories of a 

 large sheet of water and of an organized kingdom 

 somewhere near the equator began to reach the 

 outside world, but it was not until 1858 that John 

 Hanning Speke, the explorer, travelling from the 

 south, reached the coast of the great inland sea, 

 and rightly believed that he had found at last the 

 source of the great river of Egypt, and had solved 

 a mystery of the ages. A few years later Speke and 

 Grant met Sir Samuel Baker on the western shores 

 of this great lake in the kingdom of Uganda. 



Here was a country considerably larger than 

 Great Britain, situated on the second largest fresh 

 water lake in the world — the very source of the Nile — 

 inhabited by a population of virile black races which, 

 after devastating inter-tribal wars, was consolidated 

 and organized under a king who ruled with power. 

 Yet this region was totally unknown, sealed up, and 

 hidden away from external civilization, a country 



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