title: Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle Of Lake Tanganyika
author:  Giles Foden 
description: Giles Foden was born in Warwickshire in 1967. His family moved to Malawi in 1972 where he was brought up. His first novel, the acclaimed The Last King of Scotland (1998), is set during Idi Amin's rule of Uganda in the 1970s and won the Whitbread First Novel Award; his second novel, Ladysmith (1999), is set during the Anglo-Boer War in 1899; Zanzibar (2002), is set in East Africa and explores the events surrounding the bombings of American embassies in 1998. The Battle for Lake Tanganyika was published in 2004 and in 2007 he edited H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines for Penguin.
zlib_text: Title:
  
  **Mimi and Toutou Go Forth**  
   **The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika** ****
  
  Author:
  
  **Giles Foden**
  
  Year:
  
  **2004**
  
  Synopsis:
  
  At the start of World War One, German warships controlled Lake Tanganyika in
  Central Africa. The British had no naval craft at all upon ‘Tanganjikasee’, as
  the Germans called it. This mattered: it was the longest lake in the world and
  of great strategic advantage. In June 1915, a force of 28 men was despatched
  from Britain on a vast journey. Their orders were to take control of the lake.
  To reach it, they had to haul two motorboats with the unlikely names of Mimi
  and Toutou through the wilds of the Congo.
  
    
  
  The 28 were a strange bunch—one was addicted to Worcester sauce, another was a
  former racing driver—but the strangest of all of them was their skirt-wearing,
  tattoo-covered commander, Geoffrey Spicer-Simson. Whatever it took, even if it
  meant becoming the god of a local tribe, he was determined to cover himself in
  glory. But the Germans had