Malamine Camara

In Dakar, January 1880, he volunteered to join an expedition led by Franco-Italian explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza from the coast of Gabon to the Congo River.

In October 1880, Brazza assigned Camara to lead a 3-man detachment tasked with founding an outpost in Mfoa, which is the site of present-day Brazzaville on the right bank of the Congo River.

French historians have speculated that Stanley hoped this show of force would cause Camara and his men to abandon their post at Mfoa, thus letting Belgium usurp France's claim to the territory.

[5] Brazza, who had since returned to France, mounted another expedition to the Congo basin in 1883, and put Camara in charge of recruiting the mission's African personnel in Dakar.

His importance to the French mission was so great that, as Brazza's deputy Charles de Chavannes later claimed, the Belgians in Kinshasa put a bounty on his head.

While Camara's singular contributions to the establishment of France's Congo colony were generally unappreciated during his lifetime (indeed, he was never even able to collect the pay from his last mission), in the years following his death the French dedicated a bronze plaque in Brazzaville and christened a steamboat in his honor.

During an official visit to Brazzaville in April 2018, Senegalese President Macky Sall paid tribute to Camara and his role in Congo's colonial history.