Tippoo Tib, the Story of His Career in Central Africa Narrated from His Own Accounts (Classic Reprint)

The name of Tippoo Tib is familiar to all who took an interest in the affairs of East Africa or the Congo fifteen or twenty years ago. He was the most remarkable of the band of Arab traders and explorers who, starting from the East Coast, penetrated to the Congo, and were the rulers of whatever country they happened to be in, though they established no states and did not even claim the right of conquest on behalf of their Sovereign, the Sultan of Zanzibar. It is curious to notice how much and how little they effected. They traversed enormous distances, and demonstrated the practicability of many routes through savage kingdoms which were commonly considered pathless wildernesses; but they made no attempt to attach these regions to Zanzibar, or even to convert them to Mohammedanism. The whole history of the A rabs in East Africa shows the same characteristics. They founded their cities on the coast, but made little effort to move inland, and in the rare cases where they did so, as at Tabora and Ujiji, the reason was simply that their slave-raids had depopulated the region near the sea, and they were forced to move on to districts where the game was not so shy. But their territorial and political instincts were feeble. The effective power of the Sultan rarely extended more than ten miles inland from the shore of the mainland.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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