10 Franc Verney L. Cameron

Cameron was a Royal Navy officer who in 1875 became the first European to cross equatorial Africa from east to west, departing from Zanzibar and emerging at Benguela on the Atlantic coast after nearly three years. His journey predated Stanley's more celebrated crossings and produced genuinely useful geographic data on the Congo River basin — including the first accurate survey of Lake Tanganyika's outlet. The DRC issued several collector pieces in this period under licensing arrangements common to small sovereign mints seeking hard currency revenue.