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 Kirk (explorer) William Carnegie Kirk was author of "A British Garden Flora". The engineer, Alexander Carnegie Kirk, was John Kirk's elder brother. From 1858 to 1864 Kirk accompanied the explorer Dr David Livingstone on the Second Zambezi Expedition as a botanist and experienced his work to end the East African slave trade. He found Livingstone an inept leader and in 1862 wrote "I can come to no other conclusion than that Dr. Livingstone is out of his mind and a most unsafe leader"". In 1866 Livingstone’s began his next and final expedition, to find the source of the Nile, from Zanzibar. From