POLITICAL HISTORY, PAGE 8
 The pieces were all in place as the Berlin West Africa Conference opened in November of 1884. After a few weeks of pleasantries and platitudes about free trade and civilization for Africa, the conference recessed while negotiators hammered out territorial claims in private. Reconvened in February of 1885, the delegates had only to ratify what had been agreed to during the recess and paper over a few nagging differences with a nebulous document of diplomatese. Another of Congo music's antecedents had been set into place. The two Congos had been officially created. France had secured Brazza's well-explored territory north and west of Stanley Pool, and Leopold's ambition had been fulfilled. Under the guise of philanthropy he had acquired Africa's vast center for his own personal plantation. It would be called the Congo Free State—free from taxes on trade but not from the tyranny of European occupation. What did the Africans think of all this? No one knew or cared. No African had been consulted. None had been invited to the proceedings. Few Africans had heard of Berlin, let alone the conference that would decide their future.
Just prior to the conference, Stanley had returned home to report to Leopold. He had built stations along the Congo River as far as Stanley Falls, the first cataracts he encountered on his journey up the Lualaba in 1877. But he also discovered, much to his dismay, that Arab slave traders, noting his success in penetrating the interior, had followed him down river beyond the falls, laying waste to an estimated 35,000 square miles. Biographer Richard Hall reports that Stanley, encountering slavers near the falls in 1884, "was taken around the compound where the slaves were being kept, in a series of long low huts. The Arabs told him there were 2,300 people in the compound, and that five other large slaving expeditions had already returned to Nyangwe. He estimated that in the raid more than 30,000 people had been killed, and more than a hundred villages destroyed."33
Saddened though he must have been, Stanley nevertheless was in the employee of Leopold. Although he bore much responsibility for their condition, it was to his employer that he owed allegiance, not the manacled "unwashed herds within this human kennel." Back in Belgium in the summer of 1884 he strode into Leopold's seaside vacation residence with over 400 treaties from chiefs along the Congo River who had been bribed, threatened, or otherwise persuaded to cede their rights of sovereignty by placing their marks on documents they could not read and likely did not understand. He had left behind a force of 120 whites and 600 Africans to operate a network of stations from Vivi, the capital on the lower river, to Stanley Falls more than a thousand miles away. Leopold and his agents would do the rest of the work leading up to Berlin.
Brazza was no less busy on his side of the river. With a contingent of Senegalese, his skillful Senegalese assistant Malamine, and a motley collection of some eighty whites, Brazza had begun his third African expedition in 1883. (Just as Stanley relied on Zanzibaris to staff his expeditions, Brazza favored Senegalese.) During two years of exploration, negotiation, and coercion, he had collected a stack of treaties to rival that of Stanley. Although he was essentially swindling them, Africans appeared to like and respect Brazza. They called him Rocamambo, a sort of prodigal son, a name that would win greater glory in the coming days of Congo music.
When Brazza again returned to the French Congo in 1887, this time as the colony's commissioner, territorial boundaries were fairly well established. As a result of the Berlin conference the Portuguese held onto Angola and their Cabinda enclave, France took the Atlantic coast north of Cabinda to the Spanish enclave of Rio Muni and east to the Congo River, and Leopold's Congo kept a corridor to the sea along the Congo River estuary. The validity of Leopold's claims to the interior, on the other hand, was still highly questionable. Fresh from his clever and rather stunning coup in Berlin, Leopold turned his attention to securing for himself as much as possible of "this magnificent African cake."
Leopold was surrounded by sharks. The British were striking northward from the Cape Colony and Bechuanaland. In the east it was the British again, and the Germans. The doctrine of "effective occupation" had arisen from the Berlin conference, and although it was originally meant to apply only to coastal territories, as time went on the competing powers used the doctrine to buttress claims to the interior. Leopold took no chances. He dispatched his agents, including Stanley, to explore and occupy what he claimed for himself before it could be snatched away.
One of Stanley's more novel ideas, to which Leopold agreed, was the appointment of Tippu Tib as governor of the eastern Congo. Such a move, he reasoned, would bolster Leopold's territorial claims and establish an entente with the Arabs who were too strong to be driven out at the moment. Leopold ordered him to see to it during his next expedition.
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