In the footsteps of Joseph Thomson
The Greybeard of African Adventure, Kingsley Holgate passed through northern Zululand on his next adventure
This time Kingsley Holgate is following in the footsteps of Joseph Thomson, a Scottish geologist, naturalist and explorer who was the first European to enter several regions of eastern Africa.
Thomson’s gazelle, the most common gazelle of eastern Africa, was described by him and bears his name.
In 1882 the Royal Geographical Society launched what was to be Thomson’s major expedition, to try to find the shortest route from Zanzibar to Uganda.
He travelled unarmed from the coastal city of Mombasa, in modern Kenya, and Kilimanjaro, surviving two crossings through the country of the Maasai people, who had previously barred passage.
He was the first European to note the existence of Lake Baringo and he reached Lake Victoria on 10 December 1882.
He secured British trading rights at Sokoto and Gwandu, in present-day Nigeria (1885), travelled privately in Morocco (1888).
In 1890 he entered the service of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, making mining and trade agreements in what is now Zambia.
In Land Rovers, on foot and with a climb up Mt Kenya, Kingsley and his team will attempt to follow in his footsteps.
Apart from the geographic expeditions objective Kingsley and his team will continue to save and improve lives through this adventure through the distribution of mosquito nets to pregnant mothers and children under the age of five.
Through a project called Rite to Sight spectacles will be handed out to the poor-sighted, is it not incredible how something so small can change a person’s life?
Nearly one in five child deaths, about 1.5 million each year, is due to diarrhoea.
The Kingsley Holgate Foundation’s LifeStraw campaign, in which small filters are provided to communities in deep rural areas that have unsafe contaminated drinking water, continues to save and improve lives.
It will be an emotional historic geographic and humanitarian expedition, emotional in that the expedition will sprinkle Kingsley’s late wife, Mashozi’s ashes from her favourite place on top of the Ololoolo escarpment overlooking the vast wildlife plains of the Maasai Mara, just as she wanted it.
