Arab Slave Traders, African Slaves
Arab slave trader Tippu Tip made himself very wealthy in the internal slave trade and ivory trading business by specializing in traveling to the interior of Africa buying and capturing slaves.
Arab Tippu Tip Notorious African Slave Trader
Explore and Understand Africa Through Her Food and Culture
12-1-2011
Rev. Dr. David Livingstone was a reverend, doctor, Scottish explorer and Victorian missionary for Britain who was the first European to cross the width of southern Africa. Livingstone opposed the slave trade after witnessing its horrors firsthand in Africa. Tippu Tip and Livingstone paths crossed while Livingstone was searching for the source of the Nile River.
Arab slave trade is a fact of history
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| Tippu Tip |
Hamid bin Mahamed bin Juma Borajib best known as Tippu Tip was the most notorious Arab slave trader. In the 1840 Tippu Tip was born in Zanzibar and at a very young age he became involved in the internal slave trade and ivory trading business. Most of the thousands of slaves taken by Tippu Tip were used to carry ivory to the coast and supplies back to the interior.
For centuries, Swahili were merchants between the interior of Africa to the coast, dealing mainly in ivory, and slaves from Africa and in textiles and beads from Asia. Swahili identity is unique.
The Swahili see themselves as either African or Asian, but as having their own unique civilization. The Arab traveler and trader Tippu Tip made himself very wealthy in the internal slave trade and ivory trading business by specializing in traveling to the interior of Africa buying and capturing slaves until his slave trade industry was closed down in 1873 by the British.
Rev. Dr. David Livingstone was a reverend, doctor, Scottish explorer and Victorian missionary for Britain who was the first European to cross the width of southern Africa. Livingstone opposed the slave trade after witnessing its horrors firsthand in Africa.
In 1841, Livingstone was posted to the edge of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa as a doctor and missionary. Between 1849 and 1851, Livingstone traveled across the Kalahari, filling huge gaps in western knowledge of the interior of central and southern Africa. In 1855, Livingstone discovered a spectacular waterfall which he named Victoria Falls. Livingstone spent his final years in Africa from 1866 to 1873 searching for the source of the Nile, a journey that led him into the slave and ivory trading stronghold of Tippu Tip.
Livingstone was ill and destitute; Tippu Tip helped Livingstone with supplies and directions. Livingstone wrote this passage in his journal: 29th July, 1867.-Went 2½ hours west to village of Ponda, where a head Arab, called by the natives Tipo Tipo, lives; his name is Hamid bin Mahamed bin Juma Borajib.
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| Stanley meets Livingstone |
After the massacre of the Manyuema women at Nyangwe Livingstone wrote: “To overdraw its evils,” he wrote, “is a simple impossibility. The sights I have seen, though common incidents of the traffic, are so nauseous that I always strive to drive them from memory.”
The massacre of Nyangwe deeply affected Livingstone, he fell ill and returned to Ujiji, the oldest town in western Tanzania, where Henry Morton Stanley found him in 1871.
Upon finding Livingstone, Stanley uttered his famous words “Dr. Livingstone I presume”. In 1874, Livingstone was buried in Westminster Abbey.
The inscription on his tomb bears a reminder of his lifelong crusade against slavery: All I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven’s rich blessing come down on every one, American, English, or Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world. Tippu Tip became very wealthy from the ivory and slave trade and by 1895; he owned seven plantations on Zanzibar and 10,000 slaves. Tippu Tip died in 1905.Follow my blog with Bloglovin
