Biashara wa watumwa

I heard on the World service yesterday of the disruption in Westminster Abbey at the service to celebrate - is that the right word? - the second century of the abolition of the slave trade. In the last week I had had to think of a similar trade which was abolished many years later, but because it had virtually no direct impact on the people who live in the UK, is unknown. The Swahili trading empire stretched to all points East as far as China - operating on a far longer timescale than that of West Africa to the Americas, and probably involving many more people over the full timescale than that trade. One academic estimate is that one and a half million people were sold into slavery on the East Coast of Africa in the nineteenth century alone: nearly a million of those were into the Sultan of Oman's clove and spice plantations in the Zanzibari islands of Unguja( which is the actual name of the island called Zanzibar by outsiders) and Pemba. Throughout the nineteenth century there were a number of largely ineffectual attempts to restrict the slave trade, but it was only in 1873(the same year that ardent opponent of slavery, David Livingstone, died) that Sultan Bargash of Oman, operating from the Zanzibar as his capital, reluctantly agreed to close the Zanzibar slave market and stop all further slave trading.
Years ago I'd "done" the slave tour, but passing by the Anglican cathedral and adjoining backpacker's hostel, Jamila showed curiousity, so we paid our entry fee. I was totally insensitive, and completely unprepared for the emotional impact that seeing the slave cellars below the hostel would have on Jamila. In an unlit space that barely could hold 5 people comfortably, 75 women and children would be packed in for 3 days awaiting the slave auction, and where human waste was twice daily sluiced out through a central channel by the incoming tide. Some days later in the Arab fort in Bagamoyo, I saw a similar room which held up to 100 male slaves waiting transhipment to Zanzibar. I was told that when the Germans took over, they reduced the holding capacity to 50 rebel Africans, and when the British ousted the Germans they further reduced the capacity to 20 prisoners. After independence Tanzanians continued to use it as a prison, ( capacity unspecified)until "human rights activists" managed to convince the local authority to build a proper prison.
In Zanzibar the cathedral is built on the site of the slave market
In the marble floor just below the High Altar there is a decal marking the spot of the slave whipping post. Male slaves would be whipped before sale - the longer they held out the more valuable they would be as field hands. These were people who had already come along one of the several trade routes from Nyasland Central and Eastern Africa; the main one that ended in Bagamoyo (for shipment to Zanzibar by dhow) was a 1200 km, 6 month trek from Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika through Tabora, Jamila's home town.
Outside the Cathedral is something new and very powerful since I was last there - in a pit a Swedish sculptress has created a family group linked by a genuine slave neck chain from Bagamoyo.

The White Fathers first came up with the idea in Africa of buying slaves - based on the biblical injunction to ransom captives. This was taken up by the Holy Ghost Fathers, initially in Zanzibar itself, where I get the impression that they were rather overwhelmed, and then from 1868 in Bagamoyo. Their records show that they raised funds which enabled them to purchase over 1200 slaves between then and abolition in 1873. Because they were at that time a German group of priests, the British consul in Zanzibar was hugely suspicious of their actions, as his reports to London show. The one thing he never suspected was that the purpose of purchasing the slaves was to liberate them. With slaves they had already liberated in Zanzibar, the mission set up a Freedom Village, the inhabitants of which were added to everytime there was a local crisis, be it a Cholera epidemic or a German or British colonial spat - the mission always flew a flag of neutrality, which the European powers involved always ignored. The mission says that the people in the Freedom Village mixed with the locals, and that effectively there wasn't a Freedom village any longer from sometime early in the 20th century. On the other hand I was told there were 3 distinct areas where the descendants of ransomed slaves still live, and use inland tribal dialects as opposed to those used by tribes on the coast.

The slave trade went underground after 1873, but still continued. In 1890, the Germans rescued from a slave caravan a Congolese baby, and took her to the mission. When Mama Maria Ernestina died in December 1974 she was the last slave ever to have been traded as part of the East African trade. But as with the USA, abolition of the slave trade was not the same as emancipation; in East Africa, the last slave was emancipated in 1922.
But what has impressed me over the last three weeks is the continual reporting in the local media of an ongoing 21st century slave trade - the continuing difficulty of returning Sudanese slaves captured in the two decade long war, to their homes: 2 years in negotiation to replace the word slave with abductee; the boys on the Ivory coast who think they are going to football fame in Europe to find themselves sold into servitude in Mali; the lorries opened to find children and babies concealed being driven from one part of Nigeria to another; the young girls from inner rural Tanzania who live in virtual imprisonment as drudges and sexual objects in the main towns of the mainland.