Tippu Tib

East African trader

• Born: c. 1837
• Birthplace: Zanzibar, East Africa (now in Tanzania)
• Died: June 14, 1905
• Place of death: Zanzibar (now in Tanzania)

One of the leading slave and ivory traders of the nineteenth century, Tippu Tib built a commercial empire in East and Central Africa and unwittingly contributed to his own downfall by assisting European missionaries and explorers, whose work promoted the European imperial expansion that pushed him out of his own domains.

Early Life

Tippu Tib was born Hamid bin Muhammed. His father, Muhammed bin Juna, had 112 children by his three Arab wives and his harem of seventy African concubines, but Hamid was his first-born Arab son and for that reason was the most likely heir to his father’s vast financial enterprise. Due to a nervous twitch, Hamid was also destined to be known by his nickname Tippu Tib, from an Arab expression meaning “one who blinks.” Later, however, he preferred to say that his nickname came from the sound made by rifles fired by the armed retainers in his trading caravans.

Although Tippu Tib’s birthplace of Zanzibar was a tiny island, it was the center of the East African slave trade. Most of its population of Swahilis, Arabs, Indians, and African slaves were directly or indirectly involved in the slave trade. His father amassed considerable wealth trading in slaves and ivory operating from his mainland base of Tabora and moving his trade goods through Zanzibar.

Hamid spent his childhood attending Islamic school at a mosque, where he studied the Qur՚ān while developing basic literacy skills. He developed elegance in manners and refinement in speech. Most observers who later recorded firsthand meetings with Tippu Tip alluded to these characteristics as well as to his strong character and courage. He never drank or smoked, believing that those vices would interfere with his endless search for elephant tusks and slaves. Observers also noted Tippu Tip’s dark skin and African features were unusual for a child who originated from a pure Arab mother and an Arab father. However, Tippu Tip’s strong African features were the genetic legacy of a great-great-grandmother who had been an African.

The turning point in Tippu Tip’s education came at the age of twenty-two, when he accompanied his father on a one-thousand-mile journey to obtain ivory and slaves to be sold in Zanzibari markets. On that trip, he observed the constant battles among tribes for cattle and slaves and the tribute in ivory that his father received for not attacking villages and offering villages protection against other enemies. He also noted how easy it was for successful traders to get loans from Indian banking houses to outfit caravan expeditions. Although bankers earned as much as 2,000 to 3,000 percent on their investments, the organizers of the expeditions themselves made great profits. Although smallpox almost ended Tippu Tip’s life on his first trading journey, the lessons he learned on the trip would pay dividends after his father went into semiretirement in 1859, and he ventured forth on his first caravan expedition.

Life’s Work

In 1859, when Tippu Tib was about twenty-two, he undertook his first independent expedition. He was not content to follow his father’s conservative caravan route through territory traveled by other Arab traders. Instead, he pushed farther west, through present Tanzania into northern Katanga, in what is now the eastern Congo, in search of more profitable goods. That journey established the pattern that would lead to his eventual domination of trade over a region nearly half the area of Europe. His system was to attack the most powerful chief in a region and then force neighboring chiefs to trade with him on favorable terms to pay tribute to him in ivory and slaves. Tippu Tip also offered small communities protection against their enemies, in return for which they had to pay him taxes when he returned.

Tippu Tip’s first independent trading expedition lasted a full year and reaped enormous profits. In 1865, he mounted an even larger caravan and in 1867, one larger still. On his third expedition, which lasted two years, he met the famous Scottish missionary/explorer David Livingstone, who was camped southwest of Lake Tanganyika near the village of Ponda. A friendship developed between the two men that each described in his published diaries. Tippu Tip had some of his guards accompany Livingstone on his journey to Lake Mweru.

Livingstone was not the only European missionary or explorer whom Tippu Tip would assist. On another caravan journey in August, 1874, he met the English explorer Verney Lovett Cameron, who had been sent by the British Geological Society to assist Livingstone. Tippu Tib took Cameron to his base in Kasongo. In October, 1876, Tippu Tip met the British-American explorer Henry M. Stanley at the Lualaba River. Stanley paid Tippu Tib a large fee to permit his own caravan to accompany Tippu Tip’s caravan as it penetrated deep into the Congo. Stanley intended to reach the Congo River, carefully noting unknown territories along the way, and ultimately reached the Atlantic Ocean. That journey proved particularly profitable for Tippu Tib, who was pleased to encounter forest-dwelling peoples who hunted elephants for their meat and had little use for the animals’ tusks. Tippu Tib used more than two thousand porters to carry the tusks he collected back to the East Coast.

Tippu Tip and Stanley parted company on December 27, 1876, but Stanley did not forget the wealthy and powerful trader. In 1887, Stanley persuaded the Belgian king Leopold II to appoint Tippu Tip governor of the Stanley Falls district in the Congo Free State that he was creating. Before accepting the appointment, Tippu Tib accompanied Stanley on a steamship journey to Cape Town in South Africa. It was Tippu Tip’s first experience of seeing a European-controlled city; he could not have predicted that his native Zanzibar would soon become a European-dominated island. For the moment, the Congo governorship must have appeared to him to be a golden opportunity, as it enabled him to continue conducting his trading business from a secure position of power that allowed him to increase the volume of his trade.

Tippu Tip’s fall began in 1890, when the new sultan of Zanzibar, Khalifa, ordered him to return from Stanley Falls to face trial on charges that he had breached an agreement with Stanley to send troops and supplies during an expedition. Khalifa’s predecessor, Sultan Barghash, had maintained a degree of independence from British influence and had had good relations with Tippu Tip. However, Great Britain was controlling Zanzibar by 1890. Moreover, the Belgian administrators of King Leopold’s Congo Free State were eager to clear the Congo of Arab influences.

In clash with Belgian troops on the River Luama, to the west of Lake Tanganyika, in October, 1893, Tippu Tip’s forces were defeated, and he lost all his holdings in the Congo. He also lost his his oldest son, Sef, the heir apparent to his trading empire. However, he did not lose extensive holdings in Zanzibar and the mainland coast.

After being forced into retirement, Tippu Tip told his life story to the German professor Heinrich Brode, who published the story in 1903. Tippu Tip died in his Zanzibar mansion on June 14, 1905, at the age of about sixty-eight. At the time of his death, his native Zanzibar was a British protectorate, and what is now mainland Tanzania was a German colony called German East Africa colony (later renamed Tanganyika).

Significance

Tippu Tip was the most famous East African slave trader of the nineteenth century. He employed large and well-armed caravans to create a trading empire that stretched from the Luba River in the south to the great westward bend of the Upper Congo River. Many of the people within that region paid taxes to him in return for protection from rival tribes. Tippu Tib’s trade in ivory and slaves made him almost fantastically wealthy and contributed to Zanzibar’s notoriety as a major slave-trading center at a time when Western European nations were working to end the African slave trade.

Tippu Tib’s search for ever-greater profits drove him deeper and deeper into little-known areas of the Congo, and he made a major a contribution to negatively disrupting the traditional lives and culture of the societies that he encountered. His path crossed the paths of some of the greatest European explorers of the time, and his assistance helped some of them succeed in their quests. Ironically, the success of the explorers whom he assisted also contributed to his own downfall by helping to advance European influence in East and Central Africa and bring to bear greater world pressure to end the traffic in human beings on which his own wealth was largely based.

Bibliography

Farrant, Leda. Tippu Tip and the East African Slave Trade. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. Based on primary sources, this is still the major study of Tippu Tib’s life, work, and times. Includes a genealogy of Tippu Tib’s family.

Grant, Kevin. A Civilized Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884-1926. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 2004. A scholarly study, based on archival sources, of attempts by the British government and evangelical churches to end slavery and forced-labor practices.

Monahan, Merry P. The Sound of Guns: A Biography of Tippu Tip. San Francisco: San Francisco State College, 1972. An interesting biographical study of Tippu Tib and analysis of his role as a slave trader.

Tippu Tip. Tippu Tip: The Story of His Career in Zanzibar and Central Africa—Narrated from His Own Accounts by Heinrich Brode. Translated by H. Havelock. Old Castle, Ireland: Gallery Publications, 2000. New edition of book first published in German in 1903. Dictated by Tippu Tib during his retirement and filled with interesting detail, Tippu Tib’s life is explained and rationalized by the slave merchant himself.