East Africa’s other major slaver and trader. Rumaliza. While not as infamous as Tippu Tip, He was especially known for his brutality. His specialisation was ordering the castration of captured men and boys so they could be sold as eunuchs. If you have watched Game of Thrones, his parallel are the Masters of Astapor. They are the ones who castrated people like Greyworm and the other Unsullied Oral and written accounts from the Uele, Aruwimi, Tshuapa, Maniema and Kisangani regions ( places far apart) repeatedly linked him and his parties to cutting off men’s genitals, amputating limbs, piercing noses and ears, burning villages, and killings. The practice of castrating some male captives for the Indian Ocean eunuch market (harem guards and palace servants) was part of the wider East African slave trade; survival rates after the operation were often low. His real name was Muhammad bin Khalfan bin Khamis al-Barwani. He was born around 1850–55 in Lindi on the Tanzanian coast, he was an Omani-Swahili trader of the Barwani family. He learned the business under Tippu Tip and, with Tippu Tip’s backing, rose to dominate the trade at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika by the early 1880s. From there he controlled routes into the eastern Congo, launched raids up the Ruzizi valley toward Lake Kivu, and maintained armed posts along the northeastern shore of the lake. His nickname, Rumaliza, loosely means “the finisher” or “the terminator” in Swahili. Like Tippu Tip, he mixed commerce with force, using Magwangwara auxiliaries and other followers to secure ivory and captives. When Belgian forces under Francis Dhanis pushed east during the Congo-Arab War, Rumaliza was defeated in January 1894 and fled. He later pursued property claims in German East Africa related to Tippu Tip’s estate. Unlike Tippu Tip, who ended up as a governor under Leopold II and retired wealthy in Zanzibar, Rumaliza’s power collapsed more abruptly under direct colonial pressure.

East Africa's most notorious slaver, Tippu Tip hated being told he looked more African than Arab. He believed Africans were sub human and he duly overcompensated. An 1887 report in The Times described him as contemptuous of Black Africans and said he referred to white men as his “European brothers.” Tip was actually a product of the Arab slave trade, as he a mixed Arab person in Zanzibar. Both his paternal and maternal grandmother's were enslaved African women from the interior who had been used as sex slaves. He was born in Zanzibar as Hamad ibn Muhammad. Some say he earned the nickname Tippu Tip, because that’s how the guns that he used sounded, while others believe it’s because of the prominent, involuntary nervous twitch in his eyes. While he was born at the peak of the the East African slave trade run by Omani Arabs, he took slave raiding and trading to a whole new level. He led caravans all the way to what is now DRC because by the 1860s, the Tanzanian coast was already depleted of people to enslave. One of his methods would be to burn down entire villages then kidnap women and children and use the captives to make the men lose the will to fight. He was a crafty man. When the European colonialist came, he adapted. In 1887, through Henry Morton Stanley, Tippu Tip became governor of the Stanley Falls district in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State. A major slave trader was given an official position in a colonial administration that claimed to oppose slavery. So when the British abolished slavery in their territories, he went on to supply King Leopold of Belgium with 'labour' for his mines and plantations. Tip knew the interior if Africa so well, He apparently helped European explorers like David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley to map out the interior of Africa. This was consequential during the Scramble for Africa, because then they had a map of Africa to use during the divison