CHAPTER 5, THE ROLES OF ARAB-SWAHILI MERCHANTS AND THE CONGO FREE STATE

Section: The Raids and Exploitations of Tippu Tip

The most successful of all the Swahilo-Arab merchants in the Congo was Hamad bin Muhammad el Murjebi (1832–1905), better known under his nickname Tippu Tip. His men intruded deeper into the Congo basin than those of his competitors, and from 1887 to 1892 he even served as a governor of the newly established Congo Free State. While Tippu Tip held considerable power for some time, his main goal, shared with the other Swahilo-Arabs, seems to have been the augmentation of his wealth through the acquisition and resale of slaves and ivory. One of his subordinates told the British adventurer and sculptor Herbert Ward that, from the first expedition he undertook for Tippu Tip, he had been instructed “to obtain as many slaves and tusks of ivory” as possible.26

In the early 1880s, the German explorer Hermann Wissmann (1853–1905) encountered a large Swahilo-Arab camp near the Lukushi River, a tributary of the Lualaba, the largest headstream of the Congo. In the camp, he estimates, were about five hundred Swahilo-Arab slave raiders, accompanied by an even larger number of local “cannibals” they had recruited as allies. They were led by a young man named Said who worked for Tippu Tip.27 After visiting the camp, several of Wissmann’s soldiers returned

> livid with fear and loathing, reporting that Said . . . had for a long time practised firing with a revolver, making a target of [a group of wounded] prisoners, until they had dropped down after many shots. He had then handed over his dead victims to his auxiliary troops, who had cut them in pieces and dragged them to the fire to serve as their supper.28

While Said’s cruelty might have been exceptional, dealings between Tippu Tip’s slavers and local cannibals were not. In 1887/88, Ward and his Scottish companion James Sligo Jameson (1856–1888) stayed for a year at Yambuya, a village situated on the Aruwimi River, a right-bank tributary in the eastern Congo basin. They belonged to the so-called Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, organized by the (already famous) explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) for the purpose of sending relief, or additional support, to Emin Pasha, the governor of Equatoria. Today the southern part of South Sudan, at that time Equatoria was an Egyptian province, but it had been cut off by an insurrection led by Muhammad Ahmad, a self-proclaimed “Mahdi” who had established an Islamist regime that would last for almost twenty years.

Since Stanley did not find enough porters to carry all the equipment and goods he had brought along, he left six Europeans and some of the porters he had already hired behind as a “rear guard.” They had to wait at Yambuya while Stanley went to Equatoria with an advance guard of about four hundred men. According to an agreement between Stanley and Tippu Tip, the latter was to provide the missing porters, but apparently he was not keen to keep his part of the bargain. Therefore Ward, Jameson, and their companions were stuck at Yambuya, surrounded by Tippu Tip’s fighters who repeatedly raided the neighboring peoples for slaves.29

During this time, Ward recorded a talk with the leader of Tippu Tip’s men: “Had a chat with Selim bin Mohammed this morning about cannibals. He told me he had frequently seen the natives he used to have with him in these parts . . . kill a slave, cut it [sic] up, and eat the flesh in front of him.”30

Selim added (apparently finding nothing wrong with these arrangements) that Tippu Tip commonly paid his native carriers by “divid[ing] the slaves they catch en route. Tippoo Tib takes one-half, and the carriers the other portion, whom they kill and eat.”31 One month later, Ward talked with two other Swahilo-Arab leaders who were equally frank:

> They told me that these friendly tribes who live around the Arabs’ camp generally accompany them upon their raiding excursions, and appropriate all the dead and wounded, who they cut up and divide, drying the greater portion for future use. They said they had seen heaps of human flesh three feet high, cut up into serviceable joints.32

Despite these frank admissions, the members of Stanley’s rear guard were on friendly terms with the Swahilo-Arabs. Neither were they deterred by the latter’s raids against nearby villages, which are repeatedly mentioned in the diaries of the two men.33 Once a porter came to Ward, “looking very scared” and explaining that “he had seen a lot of Selim’s Manyemas eating and cooking the flesh of the natives they had just killed.”34 Another time, Ward was invited by the Swahilo-Arabs to a “village of cannibals” with whom they were on friendly terms.

> On arriving there, almost the first man I saw was carrying four large lumps of human flesh, with the skin still clinging to it, on a stick; and, through Fida [a local woman serving as interpreter], I found that they had killed a man this morning, and had divided the flesh. Subsequently I came across a party of men squatting round a fire, before which this ghastly flesh, exposed on spits, was cooking.35

During one of his other journeys through the Congo basin, Ward complains in another book, “when camping for the night with a party of Arab raiders and their followers, we were compelled to change the position of our tent owing to the offensive smell of human flesh, which was being cooked on all sides of us.”36

He notes that a state of permanent warfare prevailed around the Aruwimi River. This situation, he suspects, was exacerbated, if not created by the Swahilo-Arabs’ frequent raids for slaves and ivory.37 The British journalist Edward Glave reflects that the Swahilo-Arab slavers accepted the cannibalism of their allies because it served their purpose, allowing them to “enlist . . . tribes in [their] behalf, paying them for their services as fighting men and guides by a share of the ‘meat’ obtained in the raids—being the human beings killed by these brutes.” He points out, however, that Westerners were likewise to blame, because they provided the Arabs and their followers with guns and because they often purchased the ivory acquired in their raids, ignoring all the “atrocities” committed to get it.38 Again it is clear that Congolese cannibalism was not a local phenomenon, but tied to the world market—and contemporary witnesses had noticed this.

Tippu Tip himself was not so stupid or careless as to openly admit that he or his subordinates rewarded their allies with human flesh. But in his dialogues with his biographer, the German author Heinrich Brode, he admits to cooperating with cannibals at least once—in his version, mainly for purposes of revenge. One of his expeditions (he told Brode) had ended in disaster—his uncle and sixty of his men had been killed and “devoured by the cannibal natives,” somewhere west of Kasongo, a town in the east-Congolese Maniema region. To get revenge, as well as more slaves, he organized a huge campaign, gaining a party of Maniema warriors as allies.39 What happened then is described by Brode:

> Killing and burning, as usual, they marched from place to place, and the cruelties elsewhere practised were enhanced by all the male prisoners being devoured, at which the victors developed a hearty appetite, two of them eating up a whole man. Tippoo Tib endeavoured to put a stop to these doings—less out of love for his neighbour than because the sickening smell of the slaughtered human flesh upset him. The Manjema, however, paid little heed to his representations. “If,” they replied, “we are not to eat men’s flesh, do you refrain from goat’s flesh.” In face of this reasonable argument things remained as they were.40