POLITICAL HISTORY, PAGE 9
Stanley was to return to Africa in 1887 on a mission jointly sponsored by the Belgian king and some British businessmen, competing parties for a chunk of territory northwest of Lake Albert in the southern Sudan. The mission took on the outward purpose of saving the last British administrator in the region, a German masquerading as a Turk named Emin Hakim. Better known by his title, Emin Pasha, he was thought to be in danger from the Mahdists, Islamic Sudanese opposed to British rule, who had already killed another British administrator in the siege of Khartoum. But the expedition to save Emin would not take the easier and more obvious route from east Africa. After recruiting manpower and Tippu Tib at Zanzibar, Stanley was to sail around the cape to the Atlantic and travel again up the Congo River, checking his stations as he went. Near Stanley Falls he would move out on foot through the Ituri Forest to relieve Emin. If he could recruit the beleaguered administrator, and thus any territory he controlled, so much the better. But to whom would Stanley deliver the prize, the British businessmen or Leopold?
In the end it didn't matter. Sickness and starvation decimated Stanley's party, and the Africans along the way bore the bloody brunt of his fury and desperation. He succeeded with Tippu Tib, enlisting him in the King's service and enticing him to agree to abandon the slave trade. But Emin Pasha would just as soon not have been rescued. When they met on the shores of Lake Albert, Emin was in better shape than Stanley. They traveled together to Zanzibar where Emin promptly fell on his head from a second floor balcony. After Stanley left Zanzibar for the last time, Emin returned to the mainland where he was murdered. Despite the horror of it all, Leopold, through his alliance with Tippu Tib, could now claim to effectively occupy territory northeast to the Ubangi River and east to the Great Lakes. The expedition's businessmen co-sponsors got a few treaties for the British to use in support of claims in East Africa.
There was more to it than that of course. Leopold's thirst for territory was insatiable. He kept on scheming to gain ground north along the Nile, but all attempts were knocked down by the rival powers who had had enough of Leopold. The southern border with Portuguese Angola was pretty well defined. That left the southeast, an area known as Katanga, to be secured before the British gobbled it up.
Katanga was home to many nations including the Luba and Lunda, but the ruler to reckon with was a powerful, and reputedly ruthless, Yeke chief named Msiri. An expedition sponsored by British imperialist Cecil Rhodes was first to be rebuffed at Msiri's capital, Bunkeya, in 1890. That opened the door for an emissary from Leopold, one William Stairs, a veteran of Stanley's last expedition, to deal with the recalcitrant chief. Msiri's refusal to cooperate infuriated Stairs who defied the chief by ordering his men to raise the Congo State flag over Bunkeya. When the humiliated chief left town, Stairs sent a party of soldiers to arrest him. The episode got quickly out of hand, and amidst the ruckus someone shot Msiri to death. Following this unexpected turn, Msiri's kingdom was hastily disassembled and parceled out to his more docile relatives who pledged fealty to the Congo State. The slain chief gained a measure of posthumous revenge when Stairs and many of his party died of starvation and fever, but for Leopold the high cost was worth it. Very much alive and enjoying Christmas of 1891 in Brussels, he had secured another piece of his private African reserve.
Just prior to the Stairs expedition, Leopold had begun to grapple with two other distressing problems. First of all his self-financed Congo Free State was losing the kind of money that even a wealthy European monarch could ill afford. The free in the Free State meant that other nations could do business in the Congo free from the burdens of taxation. Whatever money flowed to Leopold came from his own agents' ivory trade. Secondly, despite the temporary employment of Tippu Tib in the cause of the Free State, slave trading thrived in the east along the Lualaba and Great Lakes. Europe's anti-slavery societies were howling for action.
Few but the shrewd Belgian king could fathom a relationship between these seemingly unrelated issues. In November of 1889, at the urging of the British, he convened an anti-slavery conference in Brussels. He assured the conferees that slave dealing troubled the royal conscience as much as anyone's. If only the articles agreed to at Berlin could be revised to allow collection of taxes from foreign merchants in the Congo, he would then have the means to finance destruction of the slave trade. Nearly eight months later among the declarations approved by the Brussels gathering appeared one granting the Congo Free State authority to level a ten percent duty on imports. Once again the world's leaders had done the king's bidding.
But Leopold wasn't so keen to take on the Arab slavers. He wanted to turn a profit soon, and his obsession with gaining more territory along the Nile had not abated. It fell inadvertently to the Free State's representative at Lusambo, north of the Katanga region, to take on the Arabs. Commandant Francis Dhanis had few men and little encouragement, but for nearly two years, 1892-1893, he mounted a campaign that smashed the slave trade. Aroused by the murders of several European ivory traders and the predicament of two Belgian officers held hostage by the Arabs, Dhanis marched east from Lusambo, forging alliances, commandeering troops, even buying slaves to bolster his forces. In a series of bloody battles Dhanis's men with their modern repeating rifles scattered the Arabs and their allies who could only reply with spears and muzzle-loaders. By the middle of 1893 the key Arab strongholds of Nyangwe and Kasongo (where Stanley first met Tippu Tib in 1876) fell to the soldiers of the Free State. Victory came too late to save the Belgian hostages, but it marked the end of Arab domination in eastern Congo. |
