"The explanation is simple. We were here before the Germans. This great lake was discovered by your Captain Speke in 1858, you remember, but it was not until Stanley came here in 1875 that the attention of Europe was really called to Uganda. You have heard, no doubt, of Stanley's famous letter to the _Daily Telegraph_, asking for missionaries to be sent out here?"
"Well, when Stanley came, he found the king, Mtesa, much perplexed about religious matters, and he wrote a letter asking that English missionaries might be sent out to evangelize the people. A friend of Gordon's, a Belgian named Linant de Bellefonds, happened to be here at the time, and he volunteered to take Stanley's letter to Europe by way of the Nile. On the way, poor fellow, he was murdered by the Bari, who threw his corpse on to the bank, where it lay rotting in the sun. An expedition sent to punish the Bari found poor Bellefonds' body, and on removing his long knee-boots they discovered the letter tucked in between boot and leg. It was sent to Gordon at Khartum, and thence to England, and thus it came about that your Church of England mission began its work in Uganda in 1877."
"Oh, our mission, as I told you the other night, was started by Cardinal Lavigerie at Tanganyika. He thought that France should not be behind England in good works, so he sent some of his White Fathers northward to Uganda, and that is how we came to have a station at Bukumbi."
"After the missionary comes the trader. Your Joseph Thomson was the first to prove what splendid commercial prospects Uganda presented, and then, of course, there was a scramble. It would be too long a story to tell you of treaties and schemes; of the fickleness and treachery of the vicious King Mwanga; of Lugard and Gerald Portal and Sir Harry Johnston. But in 1890 Central Africa was parcelled out among Britain and Germany and the King of the Belgians, and you British, with your genius for colonization, have really done wonderful things. I admire your success; and there is one thing at least in which you and we are quite agreed--we both detest slavery, and the slave knows that whether he flies to the British trader's bungalow or the mission-house of the White Fathers, he is sure of protection."