Joseph Moloney

Joseph Moloney (1857-5 October 1896) was the Irish-born British medical officer on the 1891-92 Stairs Expedition which seized Katanga in Central Africa for the Belgian King Leopold II, killing its ruler, Msiri, in the process. Dr Moloney took charge of the expedition for a few weeks when its military officers were dead or incapacitated by illness, and wrote a popular account of it, With Captain Stairs to Katanga: Slavery and Subjugation in the Congo 1891-92, published in 1893.

Born Joseph Augustus Moloney in Newry, Ireland, in 1857, he studied at Trinity College Dublin and St Thomas's Hospital, London. He practised medicine in South London, and was a sportsman and yachtsman, with a taste for adventure, and was said to be 'hard as nails'. He served as a military doctor in the First Boer War in South Africa, and as medical officer on an expedition to Morocco, returning in 1890. On the strength of this, he was appointed by Canadian-born British army officer Captain William Stairs as one of five Europeans on his well-armed mission with 336 African askaris and porters to take possession of Katanga for Leopold's Congo Free State, with or without Msiri's consent.

The expedition took a year for the round trip from their base in Zanzibar to Msiri's capital at Bunkeya, where they stayed nearly two months. They suffered disease, starvation for a while, and numerous hardships. A quarter of the Africans and two out of the five Europeans died, including Captain Stairs, but Moloney was spared any severe illness. In Bunkeya, Msiri refused to sign a treaty accepting Leopold's sovereignty and the CFS flag, and was killed by second officer Omer Bodson who had recklessly confronted Msiri in a situation which he, Bodson, could not control. Msiri's people and his successor as chief, seeing the expedition's greater firepower, bowed to the inevitable and signed the treaty. Katanga became part of Leopold's Congo Free State, which achieved later notoriety as a colonial slave state.

...
Wikipedia