Tippu Tip, the slave trader European explorers relied on in Central Africa
Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone both depended on help from Tippu Tip, the most notorious ivory and slave trader in nineteenth-century Africa. In 1887 Stanley even arranged for him to become a governor in King Leopold's Congo Free State, a measure of how intertwined European exploration was with the Zanzibar slave economy.
Born Hamad ibn Muhammad al-Murjabi, probably in Zanzibar in the 1830s, he came from a family of Arab traders tied to the Swahili coast and the inland caravan routes. His mother's family came from Muscat. One writer translated his nickname as gatherer of wealth, but he himself said it echoed the tiptip sound of gunfire on his expeditions.
While still young he led around 100 men into Central Africa in search of slaves and ivory. Over the following decades his armed caravans pushed deep into the Congo Basin, founding trading posts and winning campaigns that yielded captives, copper and ivory. Historians rank him second only to one other among the richest Muslim slave traders ever. Much of the ivory reaching world markets passed through his hands, carried by enslaved Africans, and the profits paid for clove plantations on Zanzibar worked by the enslaved. By 1895 he held seven plantations and 10,000 slaves.
Serving a succession of Zanzibar sultans, he built his own domain across much of the eastern Congo, governed from the town of Kasongo. Between 1884 and 1887 he claimed the region for himself and Sultan Barghash, yet kept on good terms with the Europeans, sensing by 1886 that power was shifting. In February 1887 he accepted the governorship of the Stanley Falls District and agreed to supply men for Stanley's expedition to rescue Emin Pasha, whose rearguard was nearly wiped out.
After he left the Congo, the Free State's hold on the east remained weak and local strongmen filled the gap, among them his son Sefu bin Hamid. When Sefu attacked Belgian ivory traders in 1892, the resulting Congo Arab war ended with Sefu's death in 1893 and the collapse of Arab-Swahili power there. Tippu Tip himself died in June 1905.
Source: Tippu Tip
