Tippu Tib

Tippu Tib (born 1837—died June 14, 1905, Zanzibar [now in Tanzania]) was the most famous late 19th-century Arab trader in central and eastern Africa. His ambitious plans for state building inevitably clashed with those of the sultan of Zanzibar and the Belgian king Leopold II. The ivory trade, however, apparently remained his chief interest, with his state-building and political intrigues serving as means to that enterprise.

Tippu Tib’s first trading trip to the African interior was in the late 1850s or early 1860s, accompanied by only a few men. By the late 1860s he was leading expeditions of 4,000 men, and shortly thereafter he began to establish a rather loosely organized state in the eastern and central Congo River basin. Ruling over an increasingly large area in the 1870s, he either confirmed local chiefs or replaced them with loyal regents. His main interests, however, were commercial; he established a monopoly on elephant hunting, had roads built, and began to develop plantations around the main Arab settlements, including Kasongo on the upper Congo River, where he himself settled in 1875.

In 1876–77 he accompanied the British explorer Henry (later Sir Henry) Morton Stanley partway down the Congo River, and later he sent expeditions as far as the Aruwimi confluence, 110 miles (180 km) downriver of Stanleyville (now Kisangani, Congo [Kinshasa]). In the early 1880s he threw in his lot with Sultan Barghash of Zanzibar, who hoped to use him to extend Arab influence in the Congo region against the threat of Leopold’s International Association of the Congo (the king’s private development enterprise). Tippu Tib returned to Stanley Falls in 1883 to try to take over as much of the Congo basin as possible on behalf of Barghash. He remained in the Congo until 1886, when he again went to Zanzibar with more ivory.

By that time Leopold’s claim to the Congo basin had been recognized by other European nations, and Tippu Tib had apparently decided that an accommodation with the International Association was inevitable. In February 1887 he signed an agreement making him governor of the district of the Falls in the Congo Free State (now Congo [Kinshasa]). It proved to be an impossible position: the Europeans expected him to keep all the Arab traders in the area under control but would not allow him the necessary weapons, and many Arabs resented his alliance with the Europeans against them. In April 1890 he left the Falls for the last time and returned to Zanzibar.