Daily Inspiration Quote by John H. Speke

Speke delivers the line like a casual field note, and that’s the unsettling trick: it compresses joy and infanticide into one smooth sentence, as if both are equally legible “customs” on a travel itinerary. The first clause borrows the language of Victorian respectability - “hailed with delight,” “power of the family” - a tidy, almost domestic calculus where fertility reads as political capital. Then the pivot, “though,” drops like a trapdoor. “In some instances they are put to death” lands with bureaucratic chill, passive voice doing moral work: no agent, no grief, no outrage, just an outcome.

That rhetorical coolness points to Speke’s intent and his era’s habits. As a nineteenth-century British explorer writing for an imperial audience hungry for ethnographic spectacle, he’s recording difference in a way that feels empirical while quietly reinforcing hierarchy. The subtext is comparative: “they” (the observed) operate by strange, contradictory logics; “we” (the readers) are presumed stable, rational, humane. Even the justification is framed through power: whether twins are celebrated or killed is narrated as a policy choice about lineage and resource strain, not as a moral crisis.

Context matters: Speke moved through East Africa at a moment when exploration, missionary agendas, and imperial expansion braided together. The line reads like evidence for a worldview that treats cultures as specimens. Its effectiveness comes from that tonal dissonance - the calm voice that makes brutality sound ordinary - forcing the reader to confront not only the practice described, but the colonial gaze doing the describing.