Joseph Moloney (1857 – 5 October 1896) was the Irish-born medical officer on the 1891–92 Stairs Expedition which seized Katanga in Central Africa for the Belgian King Leopold II, killing its ruler, Msiri, in the process.

Moloney took charge of the expedition for a few weeks when its military officers were dead or incapacitated by illness, and wrote a popular account of it, With Captain Stairs to Katanga: Slavery and Subjugation in the Congo 1891–92, published in 1893.

[1] Born Joseph Augustus Moloney in Newry, Ireland, in 1857, he studied at Trinity College Dublin and St Thomas's Hospital, London.

[2] On the strength of this, he was appointed by the Canadian mercenary Captain William Stairs as one of five Europeans on his well-armed mission with 336 African askaris and porters to take possession of Katanga for Leopold's Congo Free State, with or without Msiri's consent.

He also went against the conventional wisdom in the colonial service by noting the decency and humanity of many of the Arabs in East and Central Africa, opining that they had a much better relationship with the Bantu people than his colleagues would admit.

[1] On the other hand, in his writing Moloney was untroubled by any notion that the killing of Msiri might have been unjustified or that the seizing of Katanga for Leopold was theft of territory.

[10] On return to London, Moloney lectured and wrote papers on the geography of the expedition's route, and was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.