START 10:39:12 An armed African sentry stands guard at the steel cantilever road and railway bridge spanning the River Nile shortly after it leaves Lake Victoria at Jinja in Uganda, eighty kilometres east of Kampala. An official notice sternly informs all who pass by that all attempts to reproduce an exact likeness of the bridge are forbidden under Uganda's 1939 emergency defence regulations. An AEC Regal bus motors across the Jinja bridge. A few local inhabitants try to catch fish from the fast-flowing Nile. Two children and two women, one holding a baby, use the bridge's pedestrian walkway. A view of the roadway on the steel cantilever deck truss bridge (the Uganda-Kenya railway line runs overhead). Views of the series of cataracts on the Nile shortly after starting its long journey from Lake Victoria through Uganda, the Sudan and Egypt.

10:42:05 In arid bush country in Kenya's Northern Frontier District (?), four British Army soldiers bathe naked in a rock pool. A view of a river (River Tana?) in bush country during the dry season. A well-built African (Sergeant Wernham's batman) strolls along the edge of the river and washes himself in the shallow water. Afterwards, he finds himself a spot by the river and surveys the scene. A view of the sandbars and fallen tree trunks scattered across a river bed in the dry season. Patterns caused by sunlight reflecting off the river and by wet soil drying in the heat.

10:43:28 Sergeant John Wernham walks to the edge of a precipice overlooking Thomson's Falls in the Aberdare Mountains north of Nairobi (?). Scenes showing men and women wash clothes in traditional style in the Ole Njau Naro River (?) from which the cameraman is briefly distracted by the spectacle of a pretty young African woman splashing herself with water. Washed clothes are left to dry stretched out on the ground in the sun. Horned African cattle gather by the river's edge and drink from its waters. Sergeant Wernham's batman takes a stroll along a stream and finds himself a rock to sit down on in mid-stream. He splashes himself with water and dries himself afterwards in the sun with his hands.

10:45:53 A view of a steeply-roofed European settler cottage at Thomson's Falls, with a Morris saloon car (?) parked in the circular driveway. Beyond its grounds can be seen Thomson's Falls from which torrents of water (considerably reduced in volume because it is the dry season) tumble several hundred feet down a precipitous rock face into a large rock pool below. The cameraman experiments with running the film at high speed to produce a slow-motion effect as he films the waterfall (10:46:11 - 10:48:20).

10:48:20 Sergeant Wernham walks along the path overlooking Thomson's Falls and pauses to take photographs of the location with his Zeiss Ikonta stills camera.

END 10:48:59

Rivers in Uganda and Kenya.

Notes

Summary: John Wernham recorded audio commentary over this film on 14 May 1992, DVD Reel 5 "Reel 20" from 18.00 to 25.00.

In the local Lusoga language, Jinja means 'the place of flat rocks'. The road/railway bridge linking the Uganda and Kenyan railway networks for the first time was built in 1930. This section of the Nile, including the bridge, has since been submerged by the Owen Falls hydro-electric dam, which was completed in 1954. The branch of the Nile seen here is known to geographers as the White Nile.

Remarks: This material, together with the rest of Wernham's film record of his time in East Africa, constitutes a valuable and possibly unique pictorial record at this time in the region's colonial history.