Tippu Tip

Sayyid Majid bin Said Al-Busaid’s marriage has produced only one daughter, Sayyida Khanfora bint Majid (who will marry her cousin, the seventh Sultan).

As a consequence, Majid is succeeded as Sultan of Zanzibar in 1870 by his brother Barghash bin Said.

Majid bin Said had become Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman on the death of his father, Sayyid Said bin Sultan, but his accession had been contested.

Following the struggle over the accession to the position of Sultan of Oman, Zanzibar and Oman had been divided into two separate principalities, with Majid ruling Zanzibar and his older brother Thuwaini ruling Oman.

The sultans have developed an economy of trade and cash crops in the Zanzibar Archipelago with a ruling Arab elite.

Ivory is a major trade good.

The archipelago, also known as the Spice Islands, is famous worldwide for its cloves and other spices, and plantations are developed to grow them.

The archipelago's commerce gradually falls into the hands of traders from the Indian subcontinent, whom Said bin Sultan had encouraged to settle on the islands.

During his fourteen-year reign as sultan, Majid has consolidated his power around the East African slave trade.

Malindi in Zanzibar City is East Africa's main port for the slave market between Africa and Asia (including the Middle East), and in the mid-nineteenth century as many as fifty thousand slaves have passed annually through the port.

Many are captives of Tippu Tib, a notorious Arab slave trader and ivory merchant.

Tib leads huge expeditions, some four thousand strong, into the African interior, where chiefs sell him their villagers for next to nothing.

These Tib uses to caravan ivory back to Zanzibar, then sells them in the slave market for large profits.

Tib has become one of the wealthiest men in Zanzibar, the owner of multiple plantations and ten thousand slaves. (Swahili Coast: East Africa's Ancient Crossroads", in a "Did You Know?" sidebar authored by Christy Ullrich, National Geographic)

Barghash bin Said claims to have helped abolish the slave trade in Zanzibar, signing an agreement with Britain in 1873, prohibiting slave trade in his kingdom, and closing the great slave market in Mkunazini.

The Stanley expedition reaches the Lualaba after fory-three days and three hundred and fofry miles (five hundred and fifty kilometers), on October 17, 1876.

Overland they reach Nyangwe, where Tippu Tip has his slave trading center.

Tippu Tip is warlord and master of the area, where tribes are ferociously fighting any intruder, for fear of enslavement or for a meal: cannibalism thrives in this area.

Livingstone had not succeeded getting through (neither had Vernon Cameron in 1874, as Stanley had heard in Ujiji), so they both had turned south into lesser relevant researches, but Stanley convinces Tippu Tip, and hires from him a force to guard him for the next hundred or so miles (one hundred and fifty kilometers).

The deal is to have protection for ninety days, for four hours each day.

One of Stanley’s missions is to solve a last great mystery of African exploration by tracing the course of the Congo River to the sea.

The difficulty of this expedition is hard to overstate.

His first encounter with local tribes is with the Wenya, who are cannibals.

In total, Stanley will report thirty-two unfriendly meetings on the river, sometimes including shootings and killings.

He prefers trading and negotiating a peaceful thoroughfare, but the tribes are wary of slave traders.

The fact that he has not come to steal people, but is just traveling the river, is difficult to explain.

Also, trading and dealing for peace and food would take several days, and would cost him trading goods, so speeding along, with the flow, is preferable.

It takes the Stanley expedition until February 7 to reach the end of the Falls.

Stanley has reached the Congo river, and thereby proven that the Lualala does not feed the Nile.

He is now crossing the land of the Bemberi people, leaving cannibals behind.

Also, starting here the tribes have firearms, apparently the furthest reach of western (Portuguese) influence from the sea.

He also discovers that his trade goods, valuable in eastern Africa, are worth next to nothing here.

Only some four weeks later, Stanley reaches Stanley Pool (now Pool Malebo), where now stand the present capitals cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville.

Further downstream begins the Livingstone Falls (though Livingstone had never been on the Congo River): a series of falls and rapids with a difference of nine hundred feet (two hundred and seventy meters) over two hundred and twenty miles (three hundred and fifty kilometers).

They had traveled the wide bend, twelve hundred miles (n ioneteen hundred kilometers), in about four weeks.

On March 15, they start the descent of the falls, thirty-two separate falls altogether (though they do not know that yet).

Emin Pasha, a German doctor and naturalist who had been appointed Governor of Equatoria, is able to send and receive letters via Buganda and Zanzibar and had been informed in February 1886 that the Egyptian government would abandon the extreme southern province Equatoria.

When the Mahdists captured Khartoum in 1885, Egyptian administration of the Sudan had collapsed, and Equatoria, located on the upper reaches of the Nile near Lake Albert, had been nearly cut off from the outside world.

In July, encouraged by the missionary Alexander Mackay, he had invited the British government to annex Equatoria itself.

Although the government is not interested in such a doubtful venture, the British public have come to see Emin as a second General Gordon in mortal danger from the Mahdists.

By November, Scottish businessman and philanthropist William Mackinnon, who had been involved in various colonial ventures, had approached Henry Morton Stanley about leading a relief expedition.

Stanley had declared himself ready "at a moment's notice" to go.

Mackinnon then approached J. F. Hutton, a business acquaintance also involved in colonial activities, and together they had organized the "Emin Pasha Relief Committee", mostly consisting of Mackinnon's friends, whose first meeting was on December 19, 1886.

The Committee had raised a total of about £32,000.

Stanley is officially still in the employment of Léopold II of Belgium, by whom he had been employed in carving out Léopold's 'Congo Free State'.

As a compromise for letting Stanley go, it had been arranged in a meeting in Brussels between Stanley and the king, that the expedition would take a longer route up the Congo River, contrary to plans for a shorter route inland from the eastern African coast.

In return, Léopold would provide his Free State steamers for the transportation of the expedition up the river, from Stanley Pool (now Pool Malebo) as far as the mouth of the Aruwimi River.

By January 1, 1887, Stanley was back in London preparing the expedition, to widespread public acclaim.

The plan of the expedition was to go to Cairo, then to Zanzibar to hire porters, then south of Africa, around the Cape, to the mouth of the Congo, up the Congo by Leopold's steamers, branching off at the Aruwimi River.

Stanley intends to establish a camp on the Aruwimi, then go east overland through unknown territory to reach Lake Albert and Equatoria.

He then expected that Emin will send the families of his Egyptian employees back along the just-pioneered route, along with a large store of ivory accumulated in Equatoria, while Stanley, Emin, and Emin's soldiers would proceed eastward to Zanzibar.

Coincidentally, public doubts over the plan center around whether it can be achieved; the possibility that Emin might not want to leave seems not to have been considered.

The expedition is the largest and best-equipped to go to Africa; a twenty-eight-foot steel boat named the Advance is designed to be divided into twelve sections for carrying over land, and Hiram Maxim has presented the expedition with one of his recently invented Maxim guns, which is the first to be brought to Africa.

Merely 'exhibiting' the gun is thought to be a scare that would spare the expedition problems with troublesome natives.

The Relief Committee had received four hundred applications by hopeful participants.

From these, Stanley had chosen the officers who were to accompany him to Africa:.

Stanley had departed London on January 21 and arrived in Cairo on the 27th.

Egyptian objections to the Congo route had been overridden by a telegram from Lord Salisbury, and the expedition is permitted to march under the Egyptian flag.

Stanley had also met with Mason Bey, Schweinfurth, and Junker, who had more up-to-date information about Equatoria.

Stanley had left Cairo on February 3, joined up with expedition members during stops in Suez and Aden, and arrives in Zanzibar on February 22.

The next three days had been spent packing for the expedition, loading the Madura, and negotiating; Stanley had acted as a representative of Mackinnon in convincing the Sultan of Zanzibar to grant a concession for what will later become the Imperial British East Africa Company (I.B.E.A.C.), and had made two agreements with Tippu Tib.

The first included appointing him as Governor of Stanley Falls, an arrangement much criticized in Europe as a deal with a slave-trader, and the second agreement regarding the provisions of carriers for the expedition.

In addition to transporting stores, the carriers are now also expected to bring out some seventy-five tons of ivory stored in Equatoria.

Stanley had posted letters to Emin predicting his arrival on Lake Albert around August.

Henry Morton Stanley’s Emin Pasha Relief Expedition had left Zanzibar on February 25 and arrives at Banana at the mouth of the Congo on March 18, somewhat unexpectedly because a telegraph cable had broken, and local officials had received no instructions.

Chartered steamers bring the Stanley expedition to Matadi, where the carriers take over, ...

...bringing some eight hundred loads of stores and ammunition to Leopoldville on the Stanley Pool.

Progress is slow, since the rainy season is at its height, and food is short—a problem that is to be persistent throughout the expedition (as a subsistence economy, the area along the route rarely has spare food for one thousand hardworking men).

The expedition arrives at Leopoldville on April 21.

Although King Leopold had promised a flotilla of river steamers, only one (the Stanley) works; Stanley requisitions two (Peace and Henry Reed) from missionaries of the Baptist Mission and the Livingstone Inland Mission, whose protests are overridden, and the Florida, which is still under construction and so used as a barge.

Even these are insufficient, so many of the stores are left at Leopoldville and more at Bolobo.

At this point Stanley also announces the division of the expedition into a "Rear Column" and an "Advance Column", the former to encamp at Yambuya on the Aruwimi, while the Advance Column presses on to Equatoria.