210 



THE LAKE REGIONS OF CENTRAL AFRICA. 



This fresh-water sea is known throughout the African 

 tribes as Nyanza, and the similarity of the sound to 

 " Nyassa," the indigenous name of the little Maravi or 

 Kilwa Lake, may have caused in part the wild con- 

 fusion in which speculative geographers have involved 

 the Lake Regions of Central Africa. The Arabs, after 

 their fashion of deriving comprehensive names from 

 local and minor features, call it Ukerewe, in the Kisu- 

 kuma dialect meaning the "place of Kerewe" (Kelewe), 

 an islet. As has been mentioned, they sometimes 

 attempt to join by a river, a creek, or some other 

 theoretical creation, the Nyanza with the Tanganyika, 

 the altitude of the former being 3750 feet above sea- 

 level, or 1900 feet above the latter, and the mountain 

 regions which divide the two having been frequently 

 travelled over by Arab and African caravans. Hence 

 the name Ukerewe has been transferred in the " Mom- 

 bas Mission Map " to the northern waters of the Tan- 

 ganyika. The Nyanza, as regards name, position, and 

 even existence, has hitherto been unknown to European 

 geographers ; but, as will presently appear, descriptions 

 of this sea by native travellers have been unconsciously 



Salim bin Rashid, and accepted by us. Yet I read in his discovery of the 

 supposed sources of the Nile : "Mansur, and a native, the greatest traveller 

 of the place, kindly accompanied and gave me every obtainable information. 

 This man had traversed the island, as he called it, of Ukerewe from north 

 to south. But by his rough mode of describing it, I am rather inclined to 

 think that instead of its being an actual island, it is a connected tongue of 

 land, stretching southwards from a promontory lying at right angles to the 

 eastern shore of the lake, which being a wash, affords a passage to the 

 mainland during the fine season, but during the wet becomes submerged 

 and thus makes Ukerewe temporarily an island. " The information, I 

 repeat, was given, not by the "native," but by Salim bin Rashid. When, 

 however, the latter proceeded to correct my companion's confusion between 

 the well-known coffee mart Kitara and "the island of Kitiri occupied by a 

 tribe called Watiri," he gave only offence — consequently Kitiri has obtained 

 a local habitation in Blackwood and Petermann. 



