Sisi wasukuma hatujui hilo jina victoria tunaita nyanza, hilo ni la vitabuni na waswahili, katika lugha ya kisukuma tunaita nyanza.
The lake was renamed Lake Victoria after
Queen Victoria by the explorer
John Hanning Speke, in his reports—the first
Briton to document it. (It has since been recognized that the native guides used the name Lake Nyanza to describe it to him.) Speke accomplished this in 1858, while on an expedition with
Richard Francis Burton to locate the
source of the Nile River.
[7][8] This expedition was financially sponsored by the
Royal Geographic Society.
With a surface area of approximately 59,947 square kilometres (23,146 sq mi),
[9][10] Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake by area, the world's largest
tropical lake,
[11] and the world's second largest
fresh water lake by surface area after
Lake Superior in North America.
[12] In terms of volume, Lake Victoria is the world's
ninth largest continental lake, containing about 2,424 cubic kilometres (1.965×109 acre⋅ft) of water.
[10][13]
Lake Victoria occupies a shallow
depression in Africa. The lake has a maximum depth of between 80 and 84 metres (262 and 276 ft)
[10][13] and an average depth of 40 metres (130 ft).
[14] Its
catchment area covers 169,858 square kilometres (65,583 sq mi).
[15]The lake has a shoreline of 7,142 kilometres (4,438 mi) when digitized at the 1:25,000 level,
[16] with islands constituting 3.7 percent of this length.
[17] The lake's area is divided among three countries:
Kenya (6 percent or 4,100 square kilometres or 1,600 square miles),
Uganda (45 percent or 31,000 square kilometres or 12,000 square miles), and
Tanzania (49 percent or 33,700 square kilometres or 13,000 square miles).
[18]