Richard Kandt

Richard Kandt (1867 to 1918), born Richard Kantorowicz in Posen, was a German physician and explorer of Africa. He began his medical career as a psychiatrist in Bayreuth and Munich before turning to exploration. Between 1897 and 1904 he explored the north-west of German East Africa. In 1898 he identified a source of the Nile in the Nyungwe Forest of Rwanda, which he considered the essential Nile source, and the same year the source of the Kagera River, and between 1899 and 1901 he explored Lake Kivu. He described his journeys in the book Caput Nili, published in 1904. In 1907 he was appointed Resident of Rwanda and established Kigali as its administrative capital; his former house there is now a natural history museum. He suffered gas poisoning on the eastern front in 1917, contracted miliary tuberculosis and died in a military hospital in Nuremberg in 1918.