Georg August Schweinfurth

Who was Georg August Schweinfurth?

Georg August Schweinfurth was a Baltic German botanist, traveller in East Central Africa and ethnologist.

He was born at Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. He was educated at the universities of Heidelberg, Munich and Berlin, where he particularly devoted himself to botany and palaeontology. Commissioned to arrange the collections brought from the Sudan by Freiherr von Barnim and Dr Hartmann, his attention was directed to that region; and in 1863 he travelled round the shores of the Red Sea, repeatedly traversed the district between that sea and the Nile, passed on to Khartoum, and returned to Europe in 1866.

His researches attracted so much attention that in 1868 the Humboldt-Stiftung of Berlin entrusted him with an important scientific mission to the interior of East Africa. Starting from Khartoum in January 1869, he went up the White Nile to Bahr-el-Ghazal, and then, with a party of ivory dealers, through the regions inhabited by the Diur, Dinka, Bongo and Niam-Niam; crossing the Congo-Nile watershed he entered the country of the Mangbetu and discovered the river Uele, which by its westward flow he knew was independent of the Nile. Schweinfurth formed the conclusion that it belonged to the Chad system, and it was several years before its connection with the Congo was demonstrated.