Brazza, Pierre Paul François Camille Savorgnan de

Brazza, Pierre Paul François Camille Savorgnan de (1852-1905), French explorer, who was responsible for the founding and early administration of French Congo, a former colonial possession of France in west-central Africa. Brazza’s treaties securing a French foothold in the Congo River region helped kindle the Scramble for Africa.

Brazza was born to Italian parents in Rome, Italy. His father had connections in France and was able to arrange for Brazza’s entry into the French naval academy. Duty on a French warship as a young officer took Brazza to French Gabon, a small coastal colony north of the Congo River, in 1874. From there, he made trips up the Gabon Estuary and the Ogooué River. Upon his return to France, Brazza became a naturalized French citizen and won support from the French government for an expedition to explore further inland and promote French interests in the area. Between 1875 and 1878 Brazza explored the river system of present-day Gabon. He discovered the source of the Ogooué before being forced to retreat after an attack by local Africans.

In 1879 Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley began to develop the lower Congo River region, staking claims and negotiating treaties in the name of Belgian king Leopold II. Brazza was ordered back to Africa to secure a French foothold in the area. In 1880 he assembled a team and headed back up the Ogooué. At its headwaters he built a station, and named it Franceville. He then marched south to the Congo River, beating Stanley to the strategic head of navigation on the middle Congo, Stanley Pool (now Pool Malebo). There, Brazza signed treaties with a local ruler and founded a settlement that became the city of Brazzaville. Brazza’s treaties provided the basis for France to assume control of a large area north and west of the Congo in the mid-1880s. The region, called French Congo, was declared a French protectorate in 1891 and became part of French Equatorial Africa in 1910. Today, the region is occupied by both the Republic of the Congo and Gabon.

In 1886 the French government named Brazza commissioner-general of French Congo. However, the skilled explorer proved less successful as an administrator. By 1898, when Leopold’s Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) on the other side of the river was making money from rubber exports and the French Congo was not, Brazza was replaced. However, after a report was issued in 1904 describing the systematic use of forced labour and brutality on African workers in the Congo Free State, the French government became alarmed about labour conditions in their own colony. In 1905 they sent Brazza back to the French Congo to investigate. Returning to the colony, Brazza found European rubber harvesters using similarly shocking practices there. Before he could return to France and report on his findings, however, he contracted dysentery and died in the French colony of Senegal. In 2006, Brazza’s remains were moved to Brazzaville with those of his wife and children, where they were interred in a mausoleum.