Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza
Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza (born January 26, 1852 in Rome , † September 14, 1905 in Dakar , Senegal ) was a French naval officer and Africa traveler of Italian origin.
Life
Brazza came from an old noble family in Italy; the Africa explorer Giacomo di Brazzà was his brother. Brazza was educated at the Jesuit College in Paris , where he was granted French citizenship at the age of 16 . After successfully completing his schooling, Brazza attended the military academy in Brest . In 1870 he joined the French Navy , and two years later he was appointed to the staff of Admiral Du Quilio as an orderly officer . Brazza held this post until 1874, during which time he served on the American coast and in the French colonies of Senegal and Gabon .
Brazza became famous through his first expedition to Guinea . Between 1876 and 1878 Brazza researched - partly together with the doctor Dr. Noel Ballay - the area around the upper reaches of the Ogooué . After many difficulties, at the end of 1877, Brazza managed to advance as far as the Ogooué is navigable. Until the beginning of the rainy season, Brazza and Ballay turned east and north, through the headwaters of the rivers Alima and Likona , which already flow into the Congo , to Okanga (12 ° 45 'east longitude).
At the instigation of the French government under Patrice de Mac-Mahon , Brazza received generous financial support (100,000 francs) for another research trip soon after his return to France. He was supposed to set up trading posts to manifest France's political claims and to open up the Congo River as a trade route.
At the end of December 1879, Brazza embarked anew, penetrated again to the upper reaches of the Ogooué, built the first station (Franceville) at Maschogo, at the influence of the Mpassa in the Ogowe (2 ° south latitude). September 1880 the Stanley Pool (Congo). He concluded a contract with the king (Makoko) of the Batéké and received an area on the north bank of the Stanley Pool for the construction of a second Brazzaville station, named after him , which he determined as the starting point for the French steamers on the Congo. He then went down the Congo and in December 1880 back to Gabon, from where a few weeks later he set off again for the Alima to establish a third station (Poste de l'Alima) .
He then took the shortest route to the coast in October 1881, cutting through an as yet unknown area between Ogowe and the lower Congo, and returned to France in spring 1882, where the government under Jules Grévy honored him with a state reception. In March 1883 Brazza, to whom the government has now granted support of 1,275,000 francs, set out again for West Africa and went to Pontanegra , south of the mouth of the Kuila, in order to connect it with the existing ones by building new stations.
Shortly before his death, Brazza was sent back to the French Congo to clarify whether allegations of atrocities committed against Africans by French soldiers and companies for the forced ('effective') extraction of rubber were true (similar to Roger Casement's investigation in Belgian Congo two years earlier ). He received clear indications of the most brutal practices and wrote them down. However, this report was kept secret at the request of the French government. In 2014 it was published in paperback with a foreword by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch.
On his way back, Brazza fell ill with a severe fever and died at the age of 53 on September 14, 1905 in Dakar (Senegal). His body was transferred to Paris and honored with a state funeral on the Père Lachaise .
Brazza is described as a rare or unique figure among the early colonialists in Africa who compiled his acquisitions without the use of force.
In 2006, the Congolese government built a mausoleum for Brazza in the city named after him. His ashes, which had been transferred to Algiers in 1908, were transferred there in October 2006.
literature
- Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza: Le Rapport Brazza. Mission d'enquete du Congo. Rapport et documents (1905-1907) , foreword by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Neuvy-en-Champagne 2014. ISBN 978-2-36935-006-4 .
- Maria Petringa: Brazzà, A Life for Africa. AuthorHouse, Bloomington IN 2006, ISBN 1-4259-1198-6 .
- Thomas Pakenham : The crouching lion. The colonization of Africa. 1876-1912. Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf et al. 1993, ISBN 3-430-17416-3 .
- Didier Neuville, Charles Bréard: Les voyages de Savorgnan de Brazza. Ogôoué et Congo (1875-1882). Berger-Levrault, Paris 1884.
- Patrick Deville : Equatoria. In the footsteps of Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. Novel. Translation by Holger Fock and Sabine Müller. Bilger, Zurich 2013, ISBN 978-3-03762-028-1 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in the catalog of the German National Library
- Newspaper article about Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
- David Wiley: Final return to Congo , BBC report on the transfer of Brazza's ashes to Congo, 23 September 2006
Individual evidence
- ↑ Le Rapport Brazza. Mission d'enquete du Congo. Rapport et documents (1905-1907) Le passager clandestin, accessed November 25, 2015.
- ↑ Mark Doyle, Africa explorer's remains exhumed , BBC News, September 30, 2006
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Brazza, Pierre Savorgna de |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French naval officer and traveler to Africa |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 26, 1852 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rome |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 14, 1905 |
| Place of death | Dakar |