William Grant Stairs - The Stairs Expedition To Katanga

The Stairs Expedition To Katanga

In 1891 on Stanley's recommendation, Stairs was appointed by King Léopold II of Belgium to command a mission to take Katanga also known as Garanganze with or without the consent of its powerful king, Msiri. Leopold had used Stanley's services before and agreed with his use of force and understood Stairs to be in the same mould, and he had a reputation for carrying out orders completely and without hesitation.

The Stairs Expedition was a military mission of 400 men under the Congo Free State flag, armed with 200 rifles modern for their time. (Msiri's men had muzzle-loading muskets). Stairs ran a well-organised expedition and won the loyalty of his officers and chiefs (Zanzibari supervisors). It was a smaller and lighter than his previous expedition, with only two other military officers. They were in a race against Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company expanding from the south, which had already sent two failed expeditions to Msiri. Stairs and Joseph Moloney, the expedition's British medical officer, were aware that they could potentially come into armed conflict with a British expedition, and agreed they would nevertheless discharge their duties to their employer, Leopold.

The Stairs Expedition became notorious for the fate of Msiri. After three days of negotiations without progress, Stairs gave Msiri an ultimatum to sign the treaty the next day, 20 December 1891. When Msiri did not appear, he sent his second-in-command, Captain Bodson to arrest Msiri, who stood his ground. Bodson shot him dead, and a fight broke out. The expedition took their wounded and Msiri's body back to their camp where Stairs was waiting, and there they cut off Msiri's head and hoisted it on a pole in plain view as a 'barbaric lesson' to his people. Some of the Garanganze were massacred by the expedition's askaris, and most of the rest fled into the bush.

Stairs handed over Msiri's body to his two brothers and an adopted son, Makanda Bantu, whom Stairs installed as chief to replace Msiri, and who signed the treaty acknowledging Leopold as sovereign. The two brothers refused to do so until Stairs sent Moloney to threaten them with the same fate as Msiri.

Oral histories of the Garanganze people say that the expedition kept Msiri's head – by some accounts in a can of kerosene – but it cursed and killed everyone who carried it and eventually, this included Stairs. He was ill with malaria throughout January 1892. After being relieved by another expedition, the Stairs Expedition set out on the long return journey to Zanzibar. Stairs was frequently sick but by May 1891 had recovered. On a steamer down the lower Zambezi he had another attack of malaria which killed him on 9 June 1892. He is buried in the European Cemetery in Chinde, Mozambique at the mouth of the Zambezi River.

Only 189 of the 400 men on the expedition made it back to Zanzibar, a year after they had left, most of the rest died and few deserted. Katanga became part of the Congo Free State, which was annexed by Belgium in 1908 after an international outcry over the killings, brutality and slavery by Leopold's regime. In the early 20th century as Katanga's mining industries developed, some British in Northern Rhodesia, representing the losers in the scramble for Katanga, thought of Stairs as a mercenary and traitor to the British Empire.