Msiri
[1] Msiri was a Nyamwezi from Tabora in modern-day Tanzania and a trader, like his father Kalasa, involved in the copper, ivory and East African slave trade controlled by the Sultan of Zanzibar and his Arab and Swahili agents.
[3][4] He depended on the east coast trade for his guns and gunpowder, which passed through the territory of his rivals, making supplies expensive and unreliable.
His control of the trade routes between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans took ruthlessness and arms (and over his neighbours, Msiri had what would be called in the west ‘superior military technology’).
[6] In 1884, wishing to gain some advice on how to deal with the approaching European colonial powers, he invited a Scottish missionary, Frederick Stanley Arnot, who he had heard was in Angola, to come to his capital at Bunkeya, 180 km west of the Luapula River.
[9][10] Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company (BSAC) and Belgian King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (CFS) both wanted to sign treaties with Msiri to fulfil their colonial ambitions and competed to do so.
Some of Msiri's subordinate chiefs and trading competitors took the opportunity of the arrival of new powers in the region to start rebellions against his authority.
The explorer Joseph Thomson was sent by the BSAC to meet up with and reinforce Sharpe's mission in Bunkeya, but its route was blocked by a smallpox epidemic and it could not continue.
For this the missionaries were later the subject of resentment and anger on behalf of the BSAC,[8] because when the treaty's real contents were revealed to Msiri, enraged, he sent Sharpe away empty-handed.
The next day, 20 December 1891, Stairs sent his second-in-command, Belgian Lieutenant Omer Bodson with de Bonchamps and 100 askaris to arrest Msiri.
[17] In an article published in Paris in 1892, de Bonchamps revealed that having carried Msiri's body back to their camp, the expedition cut off his head and hoisted it on a pole as a 'barbaric lesson' to the Garanganze.
Dan Crawford was at a Belgian outpost 40 km away and, relying on a Garanganze report, he wrote that after shooting Msiri, 'Bodson' cut off his head and shouted "I have killed a tiger!
One account says that it cursed and killed everyone who carried it[19] and eventually, this included Stairs himself, who died of malaria six months later on the return journey, and it was alleged he had with him Msiri's head in a can of kerosene.
Ironically the Stairs expedition meted out the same treatment to Msiri himself[16] (and Leopold's regime in the Congo Free State hung heads and bodies of villagers on fences as a warning to others of what happened to those who did not fulfil their rubber quota).
For instance, David Livingstone reported twenty years earlier that Mwata Kazembe VII Chinkonkole Kafuti so tyrannised his people that many had moved away, and he could muster scarcely 1000 men.
He is sharp and severe in his government, though I see or hear of nothing in the way of torture or cruelty ... executions are common, but death is inflicted at once ... [the cases] have been those of actual crime....[4]A political quotations website offers these as the last words of Omer Bodson: I don't mind dying now that I've killed Msiri.
[24] Influenced by the writings of men such as Livingstone, public opinion in Britain began to clamor for reforms which benefited the indigenous subjects of the British Empire.
[26] King Leopold had to legitimise his Congo Free State's claim to Katanga under the Berlin Conference's Principle of Effectivity, so a justification for the killing of Msiri was required.
The Stairs Expedition's reports were used in Europe to emphasise self-defence as the reason for his death, coupled with the claim he was a bloodthirsty tyrant.
The question remains as to whether Msiri was being described as a bloodthirsty tyrant to the same extent before he was killed, when his signature to a treaty was being assiduously courted by the imperial powers.
