The Economic Expansion of Jinja, Uganda

Abstract

The municipality of Jinja, second town of Uganda, with an estimated population of 50 000, stands at an altitude of 3750 feet on the east shore of the Victoria Nile at the point where the river formerly issued from Lake Victoria in the Ripon Falls. (Jinja is the Luganda word for ‘stone’. This is taken to refer either to the rocks of the Ripon and Owen Falls or, more probably, to a sacrificial stone on a hilltop overlooking the town.) Over a century ago John Hanning Speke, discoverer of the source of the Nile, recorded that these falls constituted

by far the most interesting sight I had seen in Africa … that attracted one to it for hours—the roar of the waters, the thousands of passenger-fish, leaping at the falls with all their might, the Wasoga and Waganda fishermen coming out in boats and taking post on all the rocks with rod and hook, hippopotami and crocodiles lying sleepily on the water, the ferry at work above the falls, and cattle driven down to drink at the margin of the lake—made … as interesting a picture as one could wish to see.

The expedition had now performed its functions. I saw that old father Nile without any doubt rises in the Victoria N’yanza…¹

Thus ‘the subject of so much speculation, and the object of so many explorers’² was revealed to the outside world.