Kalanga Boy explores the Nile

The Nile River as seen from its source. Picture: Bakidzanani Dube

On our way back to our point of entry, I asked Joel our tour guide a lot of questions about the Nile River. You may wonder why I was so curious about this river, out of all the things I had enjoyed or seen in this country. Well, that should be simple. The Nile is the longest river in the world and also the river where Moses who later on led the Israelites out of Egypt was hidden by his sister Miriam when Pharaoh had decided that all the male children in contemporary Egypt be killed. Therefore, it undoubtedly marks the origins of Christianity in a way. I am also a Christian myself. Thus by visiting where the Nile starts I was simply visiting a great landmark indeed.

Secondly, the Nile is undoubtedly the reasons why earliest civilisations like Egypt and Kush existed in the first place, and equally the reason why present day Egypt continues to flourish!

Those civilisations are a heritage to Africa, together with Great Zimbabwe back home and as a historian my curiosity was not unfounded because I always want to know more about such things.

Now, being 4 115 miles long, the Nile River is the longest river in the world! This length is equivalent to 6 853km, and this is 353km more than the Amazon which is the second longest river in the world. In fact, to make you understand why the Nile is so unique let me provide you a table below which compares the attributes of the top ten longest rivers in the world.

River	Length in miles	Length in km	Countries where it’s found	Continent
Nile	4 132 miles	6 853km	Ethiopia, Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Eritriea, Rwanda, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Sudan, Egypt	Africa
Amazon	3 976 miles	6 400km	Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana.	South America
Yangtze	3 917 miles	6 300km	China	Asia
Mississippi	3 902 miles	6 275km	1,5% in Canada, 98,5% in U.S.A	North America
Yenisei - Angara	3 445 miles	5 539km	97% Russia, 3% Mongolia	Asia
Yellow River (Hwang-he)	3 395 miles	5 464km	China	Asia
Ob-Irtysh	3 364 miles	5 410km	Russia, Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia	Asia
Parana	3 030 miles	4 880km	Brazil, Agentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay	South America
Congo	2 922 miles	4 700km	DRC	Africa
Armur-Argun	2 763 miles	4 444km	Far East Russia and North Eastern China	Asia

  

Source

As stated by Joel and supported by my research findings, the Nile is the only river amongst the top ten biggest that flows north consistently, and is the only river in the world that supplies eleven countries! It is also the only exogenous river in the world whose source is lakes. Observe that the source of the White Nile which I visited in Uganda is Lake Victoria which is the biggest lake in Africa and the fourth largest in the world after the Caspian Sea, Lake Michgan-Huron and Lake Superior in America. The source of the Blue Nile, commonly known as the Azure Nile in Ethiopia is Lake Tana in that country. Therefore, it can be observable that the sources of the two main tributaries of the Nile River are lakes.

Funny enough, during my research on the Nile River I discovered that instead of the White Nile, being the longest of the tributaries and originating from Lake Victoria the biggest lake supplying most of the water, it actually supplies only 15% of the water and the other 85% is supplied by the Blue Nile which originates from a smaller lake, awkward!

From follow-up enquiries and independent research, the reason for this is that the White Nile has most of its water is diverted through waterways into agriculture and other uses along the way. Thus, not all of its waters reach the Khartoum in Sudan, where the White and the Blue Nile meet.

Weird debates about the Nile

Like any other natural landform in the world, the Nile River is a source of debate and controversy for many researchers, who at least want to wrench away debates from one another.

Of one of the interesting arguments that I stumbled upon is the ongoing debate between explorers, geographers and environmental researchers alike concerning the source of the river. One school of thought has it that the White Nile does not actually start in Uganda. They claim it actually starts in Burundi.

Now, in Burundi there is a river called the Kigera River which drains into Lake Victoria. It is from the source of this Kigera River that some researchers started measuring the Nile. Thus adding the stretch from the source of the Kigera River to where the White Nile separates with Lake Victoria in Jinja, the point marked in my previous blog, that additional stretch can make the Nile to clock more than 7 000km in length, a record that surpasses that of any other known river in this world!

If so, Lake Victoria would immediately cease to be the source of the White Nile but become one of the water bodies along its course, just like Lake Albert, Lake Kyoga and others.

However, these suggestions have been dismissed by the second school of thought which treats the Kigera as one of the distant tributaries of the Nile, not to be necessarily confused with the source of the river which officially remains the one marked at Jinja, which gives it its currently agreed length.

The same debate about length has also affected the Amazon, the world’s second longest river and albeit the biggest, especially now that it contains 20% of the world’s fresh water. Infact, because of this confusion some accounts actually state that the Amazon is the longest river in the world and the Nile second longest.

However, whether measured from the point marked in Jinja or from the source of the Kigera River, the Nile still remains longer than the Amazon which itself is just 6 400km long. 

Facts about the Nile

The Nile gets its name from a Greek word “neilos”, which means river.

While the river supplies more than eleven countries in East and North Africa, the country which entirely depends on this river more than the rest for its source of livelihood is Egypt. Since the times of Ancient Egypt and Kush, the Egyptians have been benefiting food, transport and other materials from this river.

The Ancient Egyptians actually had their god, Hapi who they said was the god of the Nile and they appeased him requesting for the floods which always left behind fertile alluvial soils good for farming.

According to Joel and from my own independent observations, in Uganda, except that the Nile, the longest river in the world starts here, it is not as important as it is in Egypt or Sudan. Uganda is not desperately dependent on this river.

Even if you could pull out the Nile or bar Ugandans from using it, that will not matter because they have more water sources than you can imagine. Actually, the bulk of the lakes in The East Africa Great Lakes Region are concentrated in Uganda, plus many more rivers!

In fact, there are some people in Uganda who have never set foot or eyes on the Nile, yet their lives continue to flourish. Therefore, it is just one of the rivers in the country, just like Sezibwa, Bwanda amongst others.

Prior to 1962, the Nile used to flood between June and September, leaving behind black sediments which made the Egyptians to call the river “Aur”, which means black, taking it especially from the colour of the fertile alluvial soils left behind by the floods.

As a result, most Egyptians settled near the Nile as it was a source of food and transportation. But settling near the Nile always caused gross loss of life because many homes were always swept away by floods.

However, these floods began to recede following the completion of the High Aswan Dam that was built in the 1960s. Today the Nile actually has actually more dams on it namely the Roseires Dam, Sennar Dam and Owen Falls Dam.

Added to the dams, the Nile is dotted with many large cities like Jinja, Juba, Khartoum, Thebes/Luxor, Gondokoro, Karnak, Aswan, Cairo and Alexandria. A large number of these cities are in Egypt as the river influences their sprouting.

The Nile is home to a variety of wildlife

Moving on, my research made me discover that the Nile hosts a large number of wildlife. The river is home to the biggest crocodile species in Africa and the world. Added to that it hosts hippos, frogs, Nile monitors, turtles, tortoises, wildebeest mongooses, baboons and more than 200 species of birds.

Baboons are observable on the Karuma Bridge on the Gulu Highway in Uganda, just a few meters west of the Karuma Falls. I saw these on a different day as I was exploring the Nile River on my way to Gulu.

Karuma Bridge, along the Gulu-Kampala highway

Joel told me that crocodiles and hippos live side by side where the waters are murky. Thus between our point of entry on Lake Victoria and the Source of the Nile, a stretch of 2.5km there were no crocodiles or hippos because the waters were not murky.

Another phenomenon I discovered about the Nile is that it is full of beautiful waterfalls and gorges.

Of the phenomenal waterfalls are the Murchison Falls also known as the Kabalega Falls found in Western Uganda where the White Nile after Lake Kyoga is just 7 metres wide and the water tumbles down 43metres deep before flowing into Lake Albert. This is the narrowest point ever of the big river but not the deepest.

The most breath taking feature of these falls is the devil’s cauldron, which is a plunge pool at the base of the falls. The devil’s cauldron is an equivalent of the devil’s pool back home in Zimbabwe, on the Victoria Falls, observable from the Zambian Side.

Karuma Falls as seen from Karuma bridge

The other, much shallower falls are the Karuma Falls, just a few metres east of Karuma Bridge along the Gulu-Kampala Highway in Northern Uganda, 311 km from Kampala. 

Politics around the Nile River 

 

I discovered that there is a lot of politics around the Nile River.

Firstly, the politics surround its length. According to many accounts up to 2014, the Nile is the longest river in the world. However, some geographers seem to have taken away that title from the Nile and given it to the Amazon instead, arguing that the Amazon is 6 992km while the Nile is only 6 853km long.

The second biggest and possibly the most dangerous dispute surround the question of who owns the Nile.

“Egypt claims to own the Nile but that is an arrangement which was left by the British during the colonial era,” said one Ugandan.

“If so, how can it claim a river that starts in our country? Recently, our president suggested a 11 country conference concerning the dispute over the ownership of the Nile but Egypt did not attend and so it just ended like that,” he continued.

Looking at such statements, it shows that the Nile River is a disputed resource indeed.

According to the writings of Fred Pearce, a U.K based freelance journalist, “It would be expensive, and a major concession for Egypt to allow the main faucet on the river to move to another country — particularly its regional rival, Ethiopia”.

There seems to be indeed a dispute over the ownership of the Nile.

“A simmering dispute over who owns the waters of the River Nile is heating up. From its headwaters in Ethiopia and the central African highlands to the downstream regional superpower Egypt, the Nile flows through 10 nations. But by a quirk of British colonial history, only Egypt and its neighbor Sudan have any rights to its water. That is something the upstream African nations say they can no longer accept,” wrote Pearce.

Looking at the arguments that I raised earlier on concerning the contributions of The Blue and The White Nile, this may be explaining why the White Nile which is the longest and supposed to be contributing more water since it is coming from the biggest lake in Africa, is contributing only 15% of the water after most of it has been diverted before the Khartoum where it meets the Blue Nile.

Meanwhile, reports have it that while Egypt was entangled in its Arab Spring in 2011, Ethiopia was busy constructing its own dam along the Blue Nile.

If so, this spells doom for the countries downstream because very soon the contribution of the Blue Nile will drop from 85% to only God knows.

By the way, Egypt is the regional power but because of this river and other issues, other countries like Ethiopia and Uganda have since strengthened their own defense forces to withstand any military action from Egypt over the Nile. Thus, at least for now, the barrel may not be the answer to the ownership of the Nile question.

The White Nile starts from Lake Victoria in Uganda and the Blue Nile originates from Lake Tana in Ethiopia and then the two rivers meet at the Khartoum in Sudan and thereafter flows north via 10 countries to its mouth in the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt.