John Hanning Speke, English soldier and explorer (d. 1864)
Captain John Hanning Speke (4 May 1827 – 15 September 1864) was a British explorer and officer in the British Indian Army who made three exploratory expeditions to Africa. He is most associated with the search for the source of the Nile and is wrongly said to be the first European to reach Lake Victoria (known to locals as Nam Lolwe in Dholuo and Nnalubaale or Ukerewe in Luganda) when in fact the first European to find them in the 17th century was the Spanish, Jesuit and missionary Pedro Paez, as stated in his book History of Ethiopia, 200 years before the birth of Hanning.
Speke is also known for propounding the Hamitic hypothesis in 1863, in which he supposed that the Tutsi ethnic group were descendants of the biblical figure Ham, and had lighter skin and more Hamitic features than the Bantu Hutu over whom they ruled.