Murchison Falls
Murchison Falls, also known as Kabalega Falls, is a waterfall between Lake Kyoga and Lake Albert on the Victoria Nile in Uganda. At the top of Murchison Falls, the Nile forces its way through a gap in the rocks, only wide, and tumbles, before flowing westward into Lake Albert. The outlet of Lake Victoria sends around 300 cubic meters per second of water over the falls, squeezed into a gorge less than wide.
Samuel Baker and Florence Baker were the first Europeans who sighted them. Baker named them after Roderick Murchison, the President of the Royal Geographical Society. The falls lend their name to the surrounding Murchison Falls National Park.
During the regime of Idi Amin in the 1970s, the name was changed to Kabalega Falls, after the Omukama Kabalega of Bunyoro, although this was never legally promulgated. The name reverted to Murchison Falls following the downfall of Idi Amin. It is still sometimes referred to as Kabalega Falls.
Ernest Hemingway crashed a plane just downriver from Murchison Falls in 1954. In August 2019, Uganda rejected a hydropower project by South Africa’s Bonang Power and Energy. The reason was that Murchison Falls is one of the country's lucrative tourism sites.Gallery
