Tippoo Tib TRAILBLAZER FOR THE GREAT EXPLORERS OF AFRICA (1837-1905)LINK
MARCUS GARVEY.COM
VOLUMES HAVE BEEN WRITTEN about the exploration of Africa by the European; little if anything of the black man's part in it. Yet the greatest of all the African trailblazers was a Negro--Hamid ibn Mohammed, better known as Tippoo Tib.
We are familiar with the adventures of Stanley, Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Cameron; nevertheless, those of Tippoo Tib were much more exciting. In the path that he blazed Stanley followed, did Livingstone and others. " It is thanks to his support," says La Grande Encyclopédie, "that Cameron, in 1874, and Stanley in 1876, and Wissman in 1882, could cross Africa.
Starting from the island of Zanzibar, his birthplace, Tippoo Tib crossed Africa by way of Lake Tanganyika, up through the vast stretch of what is now the Republic of the Congo. The journey took him eleven years, during which he traversed territory no one from the outer world had ever penetrated before. He fought his way through the primeval forest, forced himself into the lands of the tribes, and defeated chief after chief until he was master of a territory as large as Western Europe. He was by far the greatest of those who dominated in Central Africa just before the seizure of that region by the white man. Europeans who came into Africa were forced to reckon with him, among them King Leopold of Belgium, who was glad to come to terms with him. As to wealth, he was one of the richest men in the world of his time.
Tippoo Tib was born in 1837 and was three parts Negro and one part Arab. (And an Arab can often be a Negro, but because he has the slightest trace of Arab ancestry he is considered an Arab.) His father was the son of an Arab merchant from Muscat; his mother and grandmother were both full-blooded Negro women. His father had been a trader in ivory, gold, gum, cattle, and slaves, chiefly the last. But neither he nor any of the Arab merchants had ever penetrated deeply into the African interior. As a boy Tippoo Tib listened to his father's tales of the wealth that was waiting to be gathered there until he was seized by the desire to go himself...