10,000,000 francs, Belgian interests being secured by the allotment to the Société générale, the nominee of the Comité, of 107,000 shares out of 200,000. There only remained to be accomplished the construction of the necessary railway communication with Rhodesia, an undertaking which was not carried into effect until the State had definitely passed into the hands of Belgium.1

In the meantime the Comité had spared no effort to carry out effectively its administrative functions. By 1904 twenty posts had replaced the eight which existed in 1901; a police force of 1,440 men was created; roads took the place of native paths; navigation on Tanganyika, Moero, the Upper Lualaba, the Lufira, and the Luvua was facilitated; communication was opened up between the Sankuru and Moero, and the mining centres were placed in connexion with Kambove and Kasembe. Encouragement was given to the development of the rubber industry, and to the cultivation around the posts of the food necessary for the support of the stations, while the keeping of oxen both for slaughter and for use in traction was encouraged. The total result, indeed, was comparatively limited, so potent were difficulties of distance and transport, but the preparation was made for the growth of the country which was to be the immediate fruit of the completion of railway communication.

1 The difficulties of raising money for this aim are graphically described by Mr. Williams, loc. cit.; cf., however, Baron E. B. d'Erlanger's comments, pp. 461, 462, where stress is laid on the aid given by the South Africa Co. and the Beit Trustees.

CHAPTER VII

THE FALL OF THE SLAVE-TRADERS AND THE MILITARY REVOLTS

WHILE the Katanga was being brought under the control of the State with little bloodshed, the State was engaged in a desperate struggle with the slave-traders of Manyema, whose power had become a definite menace to the future of the State. Stanley had won inestimable advantages for the early growth of the State by postponing the conflict until the State should be in a position to meet its adversaries on approximately even terms. But it was obviously impossible to contemplate the indefinite maintenance of the artificial equilibrium which his agreement of 1887 with Tipu-Tipu had created. It is indeed possible that, had that Sultan been the only factor in the case, the experiment of leaving the eastern part of the State under his control on the understanding that he would suppress slave-raiding might have proved successful, but, though his authority was paramount at the Falls and at Kasongo, his own capital, in the rest of Manyema his influence greatly varied in strength. It was not until 1890 that Mohara became through his aid master of Nyangwe, his rival, Said ben Abedi, retiring to Kilonga, and while Nserera, a vassal of Mohara, held Riba-Riba, Kirundu was under the independent rule of Kibongé, Kabambaré was under Moini-Hamis, and the country beyond Kabambaré was under Rumaliza, who had formerly been a vassal of Tipu-Tipu but had asserted his independent personality and fixed his capital at Ujiji on the German side of Tanganyika. To establish his own rule over the

1 Stanley claims in his Autobiography (pp. 413, 457) to have urged in April, 1890, the King to overthrow the slave-traders.

whole area was beyond the powers of the Sultan, and the careful inquiries of M. Janssen in 1889-90 revealed the fact that, while in the vicinity of the posts the Arabs showed themselves peaceful and friendly, in the interior of the country the old slave raids were in active operation. The State prepared itself gradually for a contest which was obviously unavoidable, and between 1888-90 a series of posts was drawn from the Uele to the Sankuru to keep the Arabs within the boundaries of the. Aruwimi and the Lomami which had been assigned to them, though with some inconsistency Tipu-Tipu had been given as part of the price of his support the right to trade in ivory in any part whatever of the State territory. The last chance of the continuance of the peace disappeared in January, 1890, when, on the succession of the Sultan Said Kalifat to Said Bargash, TipuTipu was recalled to Zanzibar by the new Sultan, whose suzerainty he had never repudiated, whatever hopes he may have entertained of at some time founding an independent kingdom. En route he appealed at Nyangwe to the chiefs to respect the State flag and to live at peace with the State, and he secured the recognition by the State of his nephew Rachid as his successor in his obligations to the State, protesting to the Resident at Kasongo his devotion to the King. His motive in this withdrawal has been variously interpreted, but the probability is certainly that, foreseeing the inevitable outbreak of hostilities, he preferred to remove himself from any participation in them.1

The Arabs, however, were far too lacking in unity to take up at once the challenge of the action of the State in its preparations for war, and their supineness resulted in the acquisition by the State of an invaluable ally. The territory between the Lomami and Sankuru had been conquered by the Arabs, but they had contented themselves with assigning it to Pania Mutembé and Lupungu, two native chiefs who had adopted their cause and outdid them in atrocity. These chiefs displayed a tendency to make their peace with the growing power of the State, and in August, 1890, Gongo 1 Cf. Masoin, Histoire, ii. 127.

Lutété, formerly a slave of Tipu-Tipu and now commandant of his advance guard at Gandu on the Lomami, advanced to recall the chiefs to their allegiance. Descamps, then in charge of Lusambo, warned Gongo not to persist in his course of action, pointing out that he had already done wrong in crossing the Lomami, and, when Gongo declined to obey him, attacked his camp with such energy as to win a brilliant victory. This was followed up in the following year by further steps to overawe the resistance of the tribes, and Kichimbi, a vassal of Gongo's, was won over. In 1892 Gongo himself reappeared to check the forces of the State; Dhanis, who had taken over charge of the Lualaba district, advanced against him, and defeated him in three desperate engagements from April 23 to May 9. This experience induced Gongo to throw in his lot with the State; the Arabs, despising him on the score of his origin, had given him no help in his campaign, and Dhanis by a visit to Gandu in September succeeded in obtaining from him an undertaking of loyalty to the State in exchange for the recognition of his control over Gandu and its adjoining territory. The value of this agreement was shortly to receive the most remarkable proof.

As was inevitable with chiefs so poorly organized as the Arabs, the actual outbreak of the war was unpremeditated, and was provoked by circumstances more or less accidental on the very day of the third and conclusive victory of Dhanis over Gongo Lutété. The Arabs had learned as early as 1889 of the anti-slave-trade campaign of Cardinal Lavigerie, and their disquiet had been increased by the German pressure from the east, which became marked in 1888. Thence resulted a steady concentration of the slavetrade power in Manyema, the traders removing their captives thence from the eastern shore of. Tanganyika. As a counterblow the Belgian Anti-Slave-Trade Society, after its activities had been brought into harmony with those of the State by the Brussels Conference, decided to secure the establishment of posts on the State side of the Lake, and the expedition of Jacques in 1891 resulted in December in the founding of

Albertville on Tanganyika, a result rendered possible only by the aid given by Germany, which had, in furtherance of its own campaign against the Arabs, facilitated in every way the advance of Jacques from the eastern coast. To this menace was added the decision of the State to interfere in the ivory trade, whence the Arabs had derived hitherto so much profit. Jacques received instructions, which he could not carry out, to tax caravans passing south of Tanganyika, and Van Kerckhoven in January, 1892, took no less than 1,200 tusks of ivory from the followers of Rachid and of Sefu, son of Tipu-Tipu, who were operating in the north under the authority formerly conceded by the State to TipuTipu. Rachid and Sefu, indeed, were too much under the influence of the power of the State to head rebellion, but the case was different both at Nyangwe and Riba-Riba, where the power of the Belgians was only faintly realized.

At this moment occurred the ill-fated expedition of Hodister, sent by the Syndicat commercial du Katanga to obtain ivory and to establish stations for trade at Nyangwe, Riba-Riba, Kasongo, and in the Katanga. Hodister's mission, which reached Isangi at the confluence of the Lomami and Congo on March 11, 1892, then split up into two, Hodister following the Lomami, and his subordinate Jouret proceeding up the river. Friction at once arose with the representative of the State at the Falls, Tobback, who forbade the expedition to trade in ivory and warned them of the danger of irritating the Arabs by efforts to deflect the ivory trade to the Congo route in lieu of that by the east coast, while himself taking steps to create at Riba-Riba a State post under Michiels, in opposition to the commercial factory entrusted by Jouret to Noblesse. The combination of events appears to have worn out the patience of the Arabs: on May 9 both Michiels and Noblesse were murdered at Riba-Riba, Hodister met the same fate on May 16, and by the end of June, of seventeen members of the two expeditions ten had fallen, and every post occupied had been abandoned. The whites at the Falls were, however, preserved from destruction by the loyalty of Rachid and Sefu, who still