n treasure-trove. For twenty years they blighted the
country, carrying off tens of thousands of men, women and children and
slaughtering thousands in addition. This region was a cannibal
stronghold and one bait that lured local allies was the promise of the
bodies of all natives slain, for consumption. Belgian pioneers in the
Congo who co-operated with the late Baron Dhanis who finally put down
the slave trade, have told me that it was no infrequent sight to behold
native women going off to their villages with baskets of human flesh.
They were part of the spoils of this hideous warfare.

Tippo Tib was lord of this slave-trading domain. This astounding rascal
had a distinct personality. He was a master trader and drove the hardest
bargain in all Africa. Livingstone, Cameron, Stanley, and Wissmann all
did business with him, for he had a monopoly on porters and no one could
proceed without his help. He invariably waited until the white man
reached the limit of his resources and then exacted the highest price,
in true Shylockian fashion.

According to Herbert Ward, the well-known African artist and explorer,
who accompanied Stanley on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Tippo Tib
was something of a philosopher. On one occasion Ward spent the evening
with the old Arab. He occupied a wretched house. Rain dripped in through
the roof, rats scuttled across the floor, and wind shook the walls. When
the Englishman expressed his astonishment that so rich and powerful a
chief should dwell in such a mean abode Tippo Tib said:

"It is better that I should live in a house like this because it makes
me remember that I am only an ordinary man like others. If I lived in a
fine house with comforts I should perhaps end by thinking too much of
myself."

Ward also relates another typical story about this blood-thirsty bandit.
A missionary once called him to account for the frightful barbarities he
had perpetrated, whereupon he received the following reply:

"Ah, yes! You see I was then a young man. Now my hair is turning gray. I
am an old man and shall have more consideration."

Until his death in 1907 at Zanzibar, Tippo Tib and reformation were
absolute strangers. He embodied that combination of cruelty and
religious fanaticism so often found in the Arab. He served his God and
the devil with the same relentless devotion. He incarnated a type that
happily has vanished from the map of Africa.

The region around Stanleyville is rich with h