His father and paternal grandfather were coastal Arabs of the Swahili Coast who had taken part in earlier slave-trading expeditions to the interior.

[4] At a relatively young age, Tippu Tip led a group of about 100 men into Central Africa seeking slaves and ivory.

[5] Tippu Tip built a slave-trading empire, and is considered the second wealthiest Muslim slave trader in history, using the proceeds to establish clove plantations on Zanzibar.

[6] He met and helped several Western explorers of the African continent, including David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley.[7]: Vol.

When, in August 1886, fighting broke out between the Swahili and the representatives of King Leopold II of Belgium at Stanley Falls, al-Murjabī went to the Belgian consul at Zanzibar to assure him of his "good intentions".

[8] At the same time, he agreed to man the expedition which Stanley had been commissioned to organize for the purpose of rescuing Emin Pasha (E. Schnitzer), the German governor of Equatoria (a region of Ottoman Egypt, today in South Sudan) who had been stranded in the Bahr el Ghazal area as a result of the Mahdi uprising in Sudan.

Both sides fought with armies consisting mostly of local African soldiers fighting under the command of either Arab or European leaders.

When Tippu Tip left the Congo, the authority of King Leopold's Free State was still very weak in the Eastern parts of the territory and the power lay largely with local Arabic or Swahili strongmen.