Chiengi boma was established during the race between Belgian King Leopold II's Congo Free State and the British South Africa Company (BSAC) of Cecil Rhodes to seize Katanga from its king, Msiri, in 1890-91.
It was the BSAC's failure to get Msiri to sign up Garanganza as a British Protectorate which lost the Congolese Copperbelt to Northern Rhodesia, and some in the BSAC complained that the British missionaries Frederick Arnot and Charles Swan could have done more to help, although their Plymouth Brethren mission had a policy of not being involved in politics.
After Msiri’s death the Luapula valley was divided in 1894 between Britain — the eastern shores of the Luapula and Lake Mweru became part of North-Eastern Rhodesia, administered by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) — and King Leopold II of Belgium’s misnamed Congo Free State (CFS), or rather its agent, the Compagnie du Katanga, which took over the western shores.
Maria de Fonseca was the great wife of Msiri, the powerful warrior-king of Katanga, at the time when the Stairs Expedition arrived in 1891 to take possession of the territory for the Belgian King Leopold II, with or without Msiri's consent.
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When treaty negotiations with Msiri reached stalemate, Christian de Bonchamps, third officer of the expedition, proposed capturing Msiri and holding him hostage.
Caught between them, and attempting to play one off against the other, was Msiri, the big chief of Garanganze or Katanga, a tribal land not yet claimed by a European power, and larger than many European countries in acreage.
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The Stairs Expedition to Katanga of 1891−1892 led by Captain William Stairs was the winner in a race between two imperial powers to claim Katanga, a vast mineral-rich territory in Central Africa for colonization, during which a local chief, (Mwenda Msiri) was killed.