Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza
Now we are starting to get into the realm of the heavyweights, and if the name ‘Brazzaville’, the capital of the old French, is familiar to anyone, then so is the field of exploration of this great man.
Brazza is another lifetime achiever, and his career in exploration began with events on the south bank of the Congo River, where Henry Morton Stanley, whom we will visit in a little while, was busy pegging out fresh territory on behalf of the Belgian King Leopold II. Fearing that Leopold was about to take over all of the Congo catchment, the French sent their man into the region to stake out French interests, beginning what would later come to be known as the Scramble for Africa.
Brazza was in fact an Italian, and like Mary Kingsley, he emerges as a man committed to a just and equitable European role in Africa. He did not act on behalf of, or support the arrogant, dominating cluster of powers that would eventually take over the continent, but an egalitarian partnership of equals. He was an idealist, ahead of his time, but he was also a great explorer.
Through his enrollment in the French naval academy in 1870, he became a French citizen, and through his naval deployments on the international anti-slaving squadrons, he made his first landfall in Africa in 1872. Once back in France, he presented a proposal to the French government to explore the hinterland of the future Gabon beyond the French coastal trading post, and this was authorized.
Pierre de Brazza was a very different kind of explorer. He was possessed on an easy going charm that easily won the affections of the tribes through whose lands he traveled. His entourage consisted to two Frenchmen, a doctor and a naturalist, and twelve Senegalese gendarme. Instead of a heavily militia, he traveled with a baggage train of trade goods and gifts, and instead of clubs and bullets, he practiced diplomacy.
His mission, however, was colonization and commerce, which had begun in that age to assume the dimensions of an imperial mission. Where once there had been illegitimate commerce, the philosophy ran, let there be legitimate commerce. Replace slaves as a commodity with cotton, and replace paganism with Christianity, that was the formula for civilization.