|
|
 |
        
|
First shown in February 2000
|
|
||
| Only 150 years ago, Africa south of the Sahara desert remained a vast, dark, unexplored wilderness. For the Victorians, it was a place of myth and danger. It also held a secret that obsessed geographers: no one had yet found the source of the White Nile river. To the person who could solve this would fall the greatest geographical prize since the 'discovery' of America.
In 1856, two starkly contrasting Englishmen set out for the centre of Africa in search of the source of the White Nile. In command of the expedition was the celebrated explorer, scholar and linguist Richard Francis Burton. He took as his second-in-command a 33-year-old Indian Army officer, John Hanning Speke, with whom he had already explored Somalia. In the programme Death, Deceit and the Nile, the present-day explorer and writer Michael Asher follows in the footsteps of these two men. For Asher, one central mystery lies at the heart of Burton's turbulent life: why, after this groundbreaking expedition to Africa, which should have guaranteed his place in history, did Burton become an outcast, finally buried in an extraordinary tomb in an obscure west London cemetery? The author of a forthcoming biography of Burton, Asher has searched for clues to explain how, in the space of two years, Burton and Speke, once close friends, became mortal enemies. In the process, he has revised his view of the complicated characters of both men. Why was it that Speke claimed that he, not Burton, was the discoverer of the true source of the White Nile? And why was it that, on the day before Speke's claim was to be publicly evaluated, he met a violent and mysterious end that has never been satisfactorily explained? |
