John Hanning Speke John Hanning Speke John Hanning Speke (4 May 1827 – 15 September 1864) was an English explorer and officer in the British Indian Army who made three exploratory expeditions to Africa. He is most associated with the search for the source of the Nile and was the first European to reach Lake Victoria. He is also known for propounding the Hamitic hypothesis in 1863, in which he supposed that the Tutsi ethnic group were descendants of the biblical figure Ham, and had lighter skin and more Hamitic features than the Bantu-featured Hutu over whom they ruled. Speke was born on
John Hanning Speke from Zanzibar in October 1860. The expedition approached the lake from the south west but Grant was often sick and was not able to travel with Speke much of the time. As during the first trip, in this period of history, Arab slave traders had created an atmosphere of great distrust towards any foreigners entering central Africa, and most tribes either fled or fought when encountering them as they assumed all outsiders to be potential slavers. Lacking a great deal of guns and soldiers, the only thing the expedition could do was make peace offerings to locals, and both men