cryptoleo

East Africa's most notorious slaver, Tippu Tip hated being told he looked more African than Arab. He believed Africans were sub human and he duly overcompensated. An 1887 report in The Times described him as contemptuous of Black Africans and said he referred to white men as his “European brothers.” Tip was actually a product of the Arab slave trade, as he a mixed Arab person in Zanzibar. Both his paternal and maternal grandmother's were enslaved African women from the interior who had been used as sex slaves. He was born in Zanzibar as Hamad ibn Muhammad. Some say he earned the nickname Tippu Tip, because that’s how the guns that he used sounded, while others believe it’s because of the prominent, involuntary nervous twitch in his eyes. While he was born at the peak of the the East African slave trade run by Omani Arabs, he took slave raiding and trading to a whole new level. He led caravans all the way to what is now DRC because by the 1860s, the Tanzanian coast was already depleted of people to enslave. One of his methods would be to burn down entire villages then kidnap women and children and use the captives to make the men lose the will to fight. He was a crafty man. When the European colonialist came, he adapted. In 1887, through Henry Morton Stanley, Tippu Tip became governor of the Stanley Falls district in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State. A major slave trader was given an official position in a colonial administration that claimed to oppose slavery. So when the British abolished slavery in their territories, he went on to supply King Leopold of Belgium with 'labour' for his mines and plantations. Tip knew the interior if Africa so well, He apparently helped European explorers like David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley to map out the interior of Africa. This was consequential during the Scramble for Africa, because then they had a map of Africa to use during the divison