Tippu Tip's state

Tippu Tip's state was a domain built in the eastern Congo basin in the second half of the nineteenth century by Tippu Tip, the Zanzibari slave and ivory trader whose real name was Hamad bin Muhammad el Murjebi. Centred on the town of Kasongo in today's Maniema province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it rested on armed caravans, trading posts and tribute from local rulers. Its start is usually placed around 1860 and its end in 1893–1894, when the Congo Free State conquered it.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Arab and Swahili traders from the coast ruled by the Sultanate of Zanzibar were pushing deep into the interior in search of ivory and slaves, setting up stations at places such as Nyangwe and Kasongo on the Lualaba river. Their aim was trade with Zanzibar rather than religious conversion. Tippu Tip, born probably in the 1830s, led his first expeditions inland as a young man and won a reputation for violent and profitable campaigns in East and Central Africa, seizing ivory and taking captives as slaves. The proceeds bought clove plantations on Zanzibar worked by enslaved people.

Sometime in the years 1867 to 1874, Tippu Tip reached Utetera, a small kingdom between the Lualaba and Lomami rivers. Backing a deposed ruler, Pange Bondo, he displaced the reigning sultan, Kassongo Rushie, and became the real power in the country, according to his own account without a fight. Pange Bondo remained a loyal tributary, while Tippu Tip extended a web of tribute over neighbouring chiefs. From Kasongo his influence reached towards eastern Kasai and the Aruwimi basin. Kasongo grew into a substantial town, with about 20,000 residents in normal times by the early 1890s. Tippu Tip met European explorers including David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, and between 1884 and 1887 he claimed the eastern Congo for himself and for Sultan Barghash of Zanzibar.

The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 recognised the claims of Leopold II of Belgium to the territory that soon became the Congo Free State, whose authority in the east was then very weak. After fighting at Stanley Falls in 1886, Stanley proposed a deal, and on 24 February 1887 Tippu Tip accepted appointment as governor of the Stanley Falls district under the Free State. He also supplied men for Stanley's expedition to relieve Emin Pasha. In practice he acted more as a vassal than an official, and rival traders such as Rumaliza at Lake Tanganyika rejected the arrangement. In 1890 he went back to Zanzibar for good, leaving his son Sefu bin Hamid in charge at Kasongo.

In 1892 Sefu's forces attacked Free State agents and traders, beginning the Congo Arab war. A Free State force under Francis Dhanis gained the support of the Tetela leader Ngongo Lutete, who changed sides. Nyangwe fell in March 1893 and was largely burned; Kasongo fell on 22 April 1893 after a short fight. Sefu was killed on 20 October 1893, and the war ended in the Free State's favour in 1894. Deaths among fighters and civilians are estimated in the tens of thousands, possibly far more, though figures are uncertain.

The conquest ended Zanzibari power in the eastern Congo and brought the region under the Free State, later the Belgian Congo. Leopold presented the war as a campaign against the slave trade, although rivalry over ivory and other resources was a central cause. Tippu Tip died in Zanzibar in 1905, leaving an autobiography regarded as the first in the Swahili language.

Our 1878 and 1880 maps label the domain Sultanate of Utetera, after the kingdom at its core, set within the wider Scramble for Africa.