[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Lake Victoria Uganda-Africa’s Largest Lake-The second largest fresh water lake in the whole world” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:left|color:%23019000″ google
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Lake Victoria Uganda-Africa’s Largest Lake-The second largest fresh water lake in the whole world” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:left|color:%23019000″ google_fonts=”font_family:Montserrat%3Aregular%2C700|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal”][vc_single_image image=”4637″ img_size=”1500*1000″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Only next to Lake Superior in North America, Lake Victoria, in East Africa, is the second largest fresh water lake in the whole world and arguably the largest in the African Continent with the surface area of about 23, 146 square miles (59, 947 square kilometers). It is also to be noted that Lake Victoria is the reservoir of River Nile, well as the largest River flowing into the lake is the Kagera River, in Rwanda. In this article, you will get to know some of the facts about the world’s second and Africa’s largest great lake:
Location and size
Lake Victoria is shared by three different East African countries; Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya, whereby Tanzania covers the largest percentage with 49% (33,700 square kilometers/13,000 square miles), the second being Uganda covering 45% of the total surface area of the lake (31,000 square kilometers/12,000 square miles), well as Kenya has the smallest share of the lake with only 6% (4,100 square kilometers/1,600 square miles). The lake occupies a shallow depression in Africa and its maximum depth ranges between 80 to 84 meters (262 to 276 feet) and the average depth is 40 meters (130 feet). Lake Victoria’s catchment area covers 169,858 square kilometers (65,583 square miles). The lake has a shoreline of 7,142 kilometers (4,438 miles) when digitized at the 1:25,000 Level, with islands constituting 3.7 percent of this length.
Origin of the Lake’s name
Lake Victoria comprises of various local names according to different countries and tribes, of which the Ugandans refer the lake to as; Nalubaale, the Rwandese refer it to as; Nyanza, well as the Luo refer it to as; Nam Lolwe, and the lake is one of the African Great Lakes. The lake was named ‘’Lake Victoria’’ by an explorer called John Hanning Speke, who was the first Briton to document it, and he called it so after the by then Queen of England, Queen Victoria. Speke accomplished this in 1858, while on an expedition with Richard Francis Burton to locate the source of the Nile River. Lake Victoria (Nam Lolwe in Luo; Nalubaale in Uganda; Nyanza in Kinyarwanda and some Bantu languages) is one of the African Great Lakes. The lake was named after Queen Victoria by the explorer John Hanning Speke, the first Briton to document it. John Speke accomplished this in 1858 while on an expedition with Richard Francis Burton to locate the source of the Nile River.
History and Exploration
The first ever recorded information about Lake Victoria comes from Arab traders plying the inland routes in search of gold, ivory, other precious commodities, and slaves. An excellent map, known as the Muhammad al-Idrisi map from the calligrapher who developed it and dated from the 1160s, clearly depicts an accurate representation of Lake Victoria, and attributes it as the source of the Nile.
The lake existed and was known to many Africans in the catchment area long before it was sighted by a European in 1858 – when the British explorer John Hanning Speke reached its southern shores while on his journey with Richard Francis Burton to explore central Africa and locate the Great Lakes. Believing he had found the source of the Nile on seeing this “vast expanse of open water” for the first time, John Speke named the lake after Queen Victoria. Richard Burton, who had been recovering from illness at the time and resting further south on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, was outraged that Speke claimed to have proved his discovery to have been the true source of the Nile River