Lake Victoria Lake Victoria Lake Victoria (' in Luo; ' in Uganda; "" 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. Speke accomplished this in 1858, while on an expedition with Richard Francis Burton to locate the source of the Nile River. With a surface area of approximately , Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake by area, the world's largest tropical lake, and the world's second largest fresh water lake by surface area after Lake Superior in North
John Hanning Speke highlands of today's Rwanda and Burundi into the Lake across the Kagera Region of today's Tanzania. Much of Speke's "Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile" is a description of the physical features of Africa's races, in whose condition he found "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures." Living alongside the negroes, Speke found a "superior race" of "men who were as unlike as they could be from the common order of the natives" due to their "fine oval faces, large eyes, and high noses, denoting the best blood of Abyssinia" –; that is, Ethiopia. This