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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The Emergence of Lake Rudolf as an Iconic Colonial Space
Author:Mirzeler, Mustafa KemalISNI
Year:2002
Periodical:History in Africa
Volume:29
Pages:321-336
Language:English
Geographic term:Kenya
Subjects:travel
History and Exploration
Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/3172167
Abstract:The legends about Lake Rudolf (Kenya), which is also known as Lake Turkana, puzzled explorers and armchair geographers long before the time of Count Sámuel Teleki and Ludwig van Höhnel, the first Europeans to 'discover' the lake and to encounter its inhabitants and elephants. The explorers knew nothing about the lake, but the story in the middle years of the nineteenth century was that there was a huge lake in the semidesert plains of East Africa that was one of the possible sources of the Nile. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary was fascinated by the story of this unknown desert lake, and he supported the expedition of Teleki and von Höhnel to this region in 1887 to investigate. This paper examines the rhetoric of exploration of Lake Rudolf in two recently published books: Pascal James Imperato's 'Quest for the Jade Sea: colonial competition around an East African lake' (1998) and Ludwig von Höhnel's autobiography 'Over land and sea: the memoirs of an Austrian rear admiral's life in Europe and Africa, 1857-1909' (2000). A simultaneous reading of these books enables the reader to see how narrative passages found in these books can offer a distinctive angle of vision in comprehending the creation of Lake Rudolf as an iconic colonial space. These two works delineate the ways in which European explorers 'discovered' Lake Rudolf with the help of their guides and porters, and how they transformed it through their writings and objective descriptions of the region. Bibliogr.
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