EMIN PASHA

EMIN PASHA (Eduard Schnitzer ; 1840–1892), Austrian traveler and explorer. Born of Jewish parents in Silesia, he was baptized as a child. He served as a quarantine doctor in Albania, and from 1870–74 as private physician to the governor of Albania. He adopted a Turkish name, Emin Effendi, and entered the services of General Gordon, who was then governor of the Equatorial Province of Egypt. When Gordon was made governor general of the Sudan in 1878, he appointed Emin to succeed him. They were both determined to stamp out the slave trade, and Emin traveled the length and breadth of his province continuously on the watch. When the Mahdi revolution broke out in 1881, Emin Pasha (as he now called himself) held his province although he was completely surrounded and isolated. The Germans and the British made various plans to relieve him but the British explorer H.M. Stanley was the first to reach him and with great difficulty persuaded him to leave the province. In 1880 Emin entered the service of the Germans and led an expedition along the coast of Lake Victoria to Lake Albert. The aim was to acquire certain lands for the German government but while he was traveling, the Anglo-German agreement was signed excluding these territories. He was ordered to return but quarreled with the Germans and refused. Disease now broke out among the men of his expedition and Emin went into the Congo, sending the able members to the coast while he stayed inland with the stricken. In 1892 Emin was murdered by slave traders against whom he had never stopped fighting. Emin was a good governor, a great linguist, and his contributions to the ornithology, ethnography, and meteorology of Central Africa were important. He published a number of treatises and diaries. Emin Pasha Gulf, the Southern Bay of Lake Victoria, was named after him.

bibliography:

F. Stuhlmann, Mit Emin Pascha ins Herz von Afrika (1894), contains bibliography p. 59–60; G. Schweinfurt et al. (eds.), Emin Pasha in Central Africa (1888); B. Schweitzer, Emin Pasha, his Life and Work (1898); A.F.A. Symons, Emin, Governor of Equatoria (1950). add. bibliography: C. Edel and J.P. Sicre, Vers les montagnes de la lune – Sur les traces d'Emin Pasha (1993); I.R. Smith, The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition 1886 – 1890 (1972); S. White, The Lost Empire on the Nile – H.M. Stanley, Emin Pasha and the Imperialists (1969).