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
Nile (TV series) of discovering where the Nile was born, but for centuries the river kept its secrets close. The obsession grew and by the mid-19th century some were prepared to risk their lives to be the first to discover the source of the Nile. Nomads first settled along the banks of the Nile around 5000 BC and replenished by annual floodwaters grew into the Ancient Egyptian civilisation but the source of the miraculous waters remained a mystery to them. The Royal Geographical Society dispatched Richard Burton and John Speke to Lake Tanganyika to find the source in 1857 but unable to complete