The Helios Biblios Hour: The NEGROPEAN part 4 go EAST

Tippu Tip, immaculately groomed, polite, speaker of perfect Arabic, and helpful to Europeans in distress, was also the most powerful of the Arab traders of slaves and ivory in east Africa during the last half of the 19th century. He and his minions—Arabs and Swahilis aided by thousands of central African men absorbed into the trade as slaves or freed slaves—stuck terror into the hearts of chiefs and villagers, compelling them to hand over tusks and slaves in exchange for their lives. Villages that resisted saw their crops destroyed, granaries raided, dwellings burned, and inhabitants kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Whole villages disappeared, whole regions were depopulated. David Livingstone spent his final years in Africa—1866 to 1873—searching for the source of the Nile, a quest that led him deep into Arab slave-and-ivory trading country, where Tippu Tip held sway. He set out believing that the Arab slavers were not as harsh as the Portuguese, whose depredations he had seen on previous journeys. He soon found out otherwise. The following quotations and are all from his last journals. Tippu Tip.In the 1770s and 1880s, the notorious slaver extended his power in central Africa, eventually claiming the entire eastern Congo for himself and the Sultan of Zanzibar. He also helped various English and German explorers find their way through the region; one of those was Henry Morton Stanley. Dr. Heinrich Brode, a German official who knew Tippu Tip in his later retirement and translated his autobiography from the Swahili (written in Arabic script) .wrote “. . . the paths traced out by his blood-stained hands have supplied the framework for all the subsequent cartography of German East Africa and the Congo Free State. Thus a life-work of destruction has served to aid the advance of civilization