Product Description

The late nineteenth century saw almost the entire continent of
Africa carved up and partitioned between a handful of European colonial
powers.

British and Belgian companies greedily eyed the mineral riches of the
Katanga region of central Africa. In 1891 a group of mercenaries led by a
British army officer, William Stairs, marched nearly 1,000 miles, through
once-fertile lands devastated by Arab and African slave traders, to
confront Msiri, the most powerful ruler in Katanga, and annex his kingdom.

This is the story of the Stairs Expedition, related by the group's medical
officer, Joseph Moloney. First published in 1893, Moloney's fascinating
narrative will transport you to a world of cannibals, missionaries and
slave traders; of a provocative military invasion and its bloody climax;
and of the mercenaries' nightmarish return march -- wracked by starvation
and fever -- to the coast of East Africa.

Containing a lively and detailed first-hand account of the `scramble for
Africa', this book is essential reading for anyone curious about the
motivation and processes of European conquest in Africa.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1296978 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 196 pages

E.G. Ravenstein, "The Geographical Journal", Vol. 3, No. 6 (June 1894)
The recent history and downfall of the empire [of Katanga]... may
profitably be studied in Mr. Moloney's popular account

About the Author
Joseph Augustus Moloney was born in Newry, Northern Ireland in
1857, the son of a junior army officer, an Irishman who settled in Kingston
in Surrey. Moloney studied medicine at the King and Queen's College of
Physicians, Dublin, and at St Thomas's Hospital in Waterloo, and practised
in South London, where family accounts suggest that he was held in high
esteem, especially by his less wealthy patients. The same family accounts
describe Moloney as"hard as nails" and a keen sportsman. He is believed to
have served in the 1881 Anglo-Boer War in South Africa; after the Stairs
Expedition he joined the Katanga Company's rival, the British South Africa
Company, and commanded an expedition to the Company's territories in the
Luangwa Valley in Zambia in 1895. He died the following year at home in
Surbiton, aged only 38; his obituary in the Geographical Journal suggesting
that his early death could be ascribed to the hardships he had suffered in
Africa.