Mehmed Emin Pasha

Mehmed Emin Pasha (1840-1892), German explorer and administrator in Sudan, in northeast Africa, who made important contributions to the study of the geography, natural history, and ethnography of northeastern Africa. Originally named Eduard Schnitzer, he was born in Opole, in what is now Poland, to German parents and studied medicine at the University of Berlin. From 1865 to 1875 he served as quarantine medical officer for the Ottoman Empire in Montenegro and Albania, and adopted the Turkish name Mehmed Emin. In 1875 he journeyed to Cairo, Egypt, where he was appointed medical officer in the Egyptian army under the British general Charles George Gordon. In this period he became known as Emin Effendi. In 1878 Gordon named him governor of Equatoria province in southern Sudan, with the title of bey. In that capacity Emin explored widely in southern Sudan and the surrounding regions, studying plant and animal life as well as the cultural characteristics of the African peoples he encountered.

In 1883 a popular revolt broke out in Sudan under the Islamic leader Muhammad Ahmad, known as the Mahdi. Emin, who had been promoted to pasha (viceroy), eventually found himself isolated by the Mahdi’s forces north of Lake Albert, in what is now northern Uganda. In April 1888 he was rescued and resupplied by an expedition led by the Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Emin reluctantly agreed to evacuate the region with Stanley in 1889, and together they trekked southeast to Bagamoyo on the Indian Ocean coast. The next year he was commissioned by the German East Africa Company to lead an expedition into central Africa. He was killed by Arab slave traders in 1892 near Stanley Falls, in what is now northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.