50 MILES: BURUNDI AND THE SOURCE OF THE NILE

Among the world’s great rivers, the Nile undoubtedly occupies a unique position in every culture. For a start, it is the world’s longest river at more than 4,100 miles (slightly longer than the Amazon). It was also the birthplace of Egyptian civilization: ‘the gift of the Nile’, according to the ancient Greek historians, because of the river’s annual flood that fertilized its valley and the surrounding desert. Moreover, long before the reign of pharaohs, in prehistory, the Nile valley was also the route by which our earliest ancestors migrated from their origins in east Africa and populated the rest of the globe.

Last but not least, there was the source of the Nile, a challenging mystery for millennia. In the ancient world an extraordinary range of individuals were curious to locate the source, such as Alexander the Great and Herodotus from Greece, Cyrus and Cambyses from Persia, Julius Caesar and Nero from Rome. The Romans even had a proverb: Nili caput quaerere, Latin for ‘to search for the head of the Nile’. It means ‘to attempt the impossible.’ But, like many countries, the people of Burundi lay claim to the very source that has long intrigued historians and explorers.

Located about located 115km from Bujumbura, on Mount Gikizi’s slope lies the southernmost source of the Nile. The location is commemorated with the Rutovu pyramid, built to replicate the pyramids in Giza, Egypt. Although nothing more than a tiny tributary, it is believed to feed into larger lakes, connecting it all the way to the massive Nile River.