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In February 1871 he left Manyuema and came to Nyangwé on the bank of the Lualaba, one of the principal resorts of slave-dealers. The natives were hostile, believing that he was a slave-trader; and the slave-traders who knew him by sight hated him. He tried in vain to procure canoes for a voyage down the great river.
He visited Uganda, came again to Ujiji, where Livingstone's hut had long been razed to the ground, and sailed all round Lake Tanganyika. Two years after he started he was at Nyangwé on the Lualaba.
He perseveringly followed it down its course, and found it again making its exit from Lake Kamolondo, till it was joined by other large rivers, some coming from the south and others from the east, till he reached the village of Nyangwe, in latitude 4 degrees south.
From the Fish River to Kuka, and from Lagos to Zanzibar, the markets have become great centers of trade, the leading implement to civilization. Permanent markets are found in places like Ujiji and Nyangwe, where everything can be bought and sold from earthenware to wives; from the one to three thousand traders flocked here.
He there stated that the Arabs, "despite their slave-raiding propensities," had "converted the Manyema and Malela country into one of the most prosperous in Central Africa." He also confessed that during the fighting the two flourishing towns, Nyangwe and Kasongo, had been wholly swept away. In view of these statements the results of the campaign cannot be regarded with unmixed satisfaction.
He then continued his way across the continent and came out at Banguelo, after a journey which had occupied two years and eight months, Stanley, who, in 1874, made his famous journey from Bagamoro via Victoria Nyanza to Tanganyika and then followed the Congo from Nyangwe, on the Lualaba, to the sea, verified Cameron's conjecture.
Travellers had come to its outskirts from all sides, but none knew what the interior was like. It was not even known whither the Lualaba ran. Livingstone had vainly questioned the natives and Arabs about it, and vainly Stanley also tried to obtain information. At Nyangwé the Arab slave-traders held their most western market.
Only two years later Lieutenant Cameron succeeded in finding the outlet of Tanganyika, the Lukuga, which discharges into the Lualaba; and when he found that Nyangwé on the Lualaba lies 160 feet lower than the Nile where it flows out of the Albert Nyanza, he had proof that the Lualaba could not belong to the Nile, and that Livingstone's idea that the farthest sources of the Nile must be looked for at Lake Bangweolo was only an idle dream.
Thither corn, fruit, and vegetables were brought for sale; there were sold animals, fish, grass mats, brass-wire, bows, arrows, and spears; and thither were brought ivory and slaves from the interior. But though routes from all directions met at Nyangwé, the Arabs were as ignorant of the country as any one. The black continent, "Darkest Africa," lay before Stanley.
Accordingly, early on the morning of November 5, 1876, Stanley left Nyangwé in company with the rich and powerful Arab chief, Tippu Tib, and directed his way northwards towards the great forest. Tippu Tib's party consisted of 700 men, women, and children, while Stanley had 154 followers armed with rifles, revolvers, and axes.
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