Britain and Slavery in East Africa [1 ed.] 0914478117, 9780914478119

Table of contents :
Preface • vii
Map • ix
I. Slavery and Slaving in East Africa Before the Nineteenth Century • 1
II. The Suppression of the Christian European Slave Trade • 11
III. The Limitation of the Muslim Arab Slave Trade • 41
IV. The Economics of Limiting the Arab Slave Trade • 77
V. Abolition of the Arab Slave Trade • 125
VI. The "Problem" of Emancipation • 169
Bibliography • 205
Index • 211

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BRITAIN

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BRITAIN AND SLAVERY IN EAST AFRICA

By Moses D. E. Nwulia

Three Continents Press

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The University Libra ry University of California Santa C~

First Edition ©

Moses D. E. Nwulia 1975

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Nwulia, Moses D E 1932Britain and slavery in East Africa. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Slavery in Africa, East. 2. Slave-trade-Africa, East. 3. Slavery in Great Britain-An ti-slavery movements. I. Title. HT1326.N9 301.44'93'0967 75-25756 ISBN 0-914478-11-7 ISBN 0-914478-12-5 pbk.

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Front cover art by H. S. Clapp

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Preface One of the controversial issues in recent African history is the question of European imperialism . Works on the subject differ on such points as the motives underlying Europe a n activities in Africa , the timing of the "Scramble ," and the process of extending imperial frontiers . A related aspect of the problem is the role of philanthropy in the interplay of forces that imposed European rule on Africa . W ith respect to Britain , it is argued , particularly by some British writers, that her interests in tropical Africa during the first eight decades of the nineteenth century were dictated mainly by moral imperatives. In Afri ca and the Victorians, for example, Robinson and Gallagher sta te that "the chief African questions for the Victorians were ones of atonement and duty. The chains had to be struck from the African's neck. He must be converted. He would be civili.zed. He should be traded with. But for all their enthusiasm, the earlier Victorians refused to rule . .. h1m.

The concept of atonement and duty accords very well with the views of its great exponent, Sir Reginald Coupland. With Coupland and his school of thought, the humanitarian theme amounts almost to an obsession. Solid contradictions are taken as only exceptions to the rule and not as indicators of a need to modify the rule; humanitarianism is treated as if it yielded at best on ly secondary or even tertiary benefits to its dispen sers . "Of all the sea-going peoples of Europe ," he wrote in East Afri ca and Its Invaders, "if the British people became in the course of the eighteenth century the greatest culprit in the matter of the Slave Trade, they were also the first to recognize their guilt and mend their ways." At first, only a few humanitarian stalwarts like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce led the fight for the recognition of guilt and the mending of ways; soon, however, "the mass of the British people" were swep t into the anti-slavery crusade by "the great current of humanitarianism." The great current eventually resulted in the ending of the African slave trade, thereby earning for Britain one of the "noblest" records in her imperial history. This book concerns slavery and slave trading on th e seaboard and interior of eastern Africa and in the numerous islands close by. It examines and assesses Britain ' s role in the extinction of those inhuman institutions, and how she grappled with the pr oblem of slavery in her own territorial possessions. This author's working principle is that "actions speak louder than word s." It is one thing to profess and proclaim humanitarianism; but it is another thing to feel it and manifest it. Working with this principle , he is of the opinion that th e concept of an unalloyed and persistent humanit a rianism , energizing and sustaining Britain's interests and activities in pre-partition East Africa , is a gross exaggeration. There is sufficient evidence to show that her humanitarianism , as exemplified in British official attitudes and policies t owa rds slavery and the slave trade in East Africa , was more the humanitarianism of self-i nterest than of anything else. Howard Univer sity Washington, D.C . Spring, 1974

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A number of institutions and individuals have assisted me in one way or the other in my research and preparation of this book. Mo st of the materials in the book were drawn from sources located at the following libraries: The Library of Congress, the Moorland-Spingarn Rese arch Centre at Howa rd University, and the National Archives, all in Washington, D.C.; and the Public Record Office, the Church Missionary Society Library, and the Library of the Society of Friends in London. I want to thank the staffs of these institutions for the facilities they provided for research and for their friendly assistance . The Friends deserve a special mention for the warm , personal atmosphere they provide for researchers. Without the grants for faculty research awarded to me by the Department of History, Howard Univers ity, it would not have been possible for me to make two study trips to London in 1972 and 1973. To my colleagues in the department and to its chairman, Professor Lorraine A. Williams, who contributed much to the attraction of the Ford Foundation Grant that made the research awards possible, I say thanks. The final draft of the manuscript was typed with the partial support from the Faculty Research Programme in the Social Sciences, Humanities and Education at Howard University . Above all. I want to express my gratitude to my wife (Mrs. Josephine 0 . Nwulia), Professor Harold 0. Lewis (Director of the Graduate Programme of the Department of History at Howard University). and Mr·s. Florence Patt erson (Secretary, Dean' s Office, College of Fine Arts, Howard University) for their steady encou ragement. My wife and Dr . Lewis constantly urged me to speed up my research and writing , while Mrs. Patters on performed many typing chores. I owe special thanks to all of them.

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CONTENTS vii

Preface Map Chapter

ix

I. Slavery and Slaving in East Africa Before the Nineteenth Century II . The Suppression of the Christian European Slave Trade I. House-Mending in Mauritius 12 2. Tinkering with Portuguese Slavery 19 3. T he French Free Labour Scheme 30

11

111. The Limitation of the Muslim Arab Slave Trade I. The Moresby Treaty

41

41 54

2. T he Hamerton T reaty 3. The Struggle for Zanzibar's Independence

IV. The Economics of Limiting the Arab Slave Trade I. Anxiety over Zanzibar's Economic Health 2. Failure of the Policy of Limitation 96 3. The Disposal and Care of Liberated Slaves

68 77 77 111

V. Abolition of the Arab Slave Trade

I. 2. 3. 4.

1

125

The Frere Mission 125 Abolition of the Slave T rade on Land and Sea 136 Care of Liberated Slaves 150 Further Measures Against the Slave Trade and Height of British Humanitarianism 160

VI. The "Problem" of Emancipation 169 I. Emancipation of Fugitive Slaves 169 2. Steps Leading to the Abolition of the "Legal Status'' of Slavery in 1897 775 3. The Abolition Decree and Its Operation 189 4. Abolition of Slavery 201 Bibliograph y

205

Index

211

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Chapter I SLAVERY AND SLAVING IN EAST AFRICA BEFORE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The origins of slavery are lost in the mists of history. No one knows precisely when man first converted his fellow man into an object of natu re, to be owned and exploited for his own use, but it seems that slavery has been one of the enduring institutions of man. In very ancient times , slaves taken from Africa, Asia and possibly Europe contributed to the wealth and power of Dynastic Egypt. T he "glories" of ancient empires in Asia, Europe and the Americas rested in no small measure on the ownership and exploitation of men by their fellow men. In mediaeval and early modern Europe, Europeans bought and sold one ano ther as slaves, besides engaging in the ubiquitous prac tice of serfdom. In Ottoman Turkey and the Maghreb, slavery became a refined institution. Rulers and political leaders in the former developed special talents in transforming slaves, recru ited from diverse quarters, into daredevil soldiers and efficien t administrators. I n the latter, dealing in European captives by Arabized Berbers and Berberized Arabs became a specialized, profitable business until relatively recent tim es. It is not clear yet whether the practice of slavery in the world is dead . While the universality of slavery is not in serious doubt, and it is clear that some peoples in contiguous continents engaged in inter-continental slave trade, it seems that only Africa has been the victim of such massive, enforced migration of peoples as the trans-At lantic African slave trade and the East African slave trade to Asia and the Americas. Until the eighteenth century, British and Irish slaves , sometimes disguised as "indentured servants," were transported to the West Indies and the American mainland.' Such practices, however, involved people recruited from "internal" sources. In the transoceanic transportation of African slaves to Europe, the Americas and Asia, there occurred , perhaps for the first time, a large-sca le, "long-distance" demographic exploitation of one continent by the other continents. What is even more interesting is the fact that the principal agents for the transcontinental distribution of African slaves were white and caucasianized peoples. The trans -oceanic demographic rape of Africa has given riseto interesting academic debates. Some writers compare the "mild" forms of African "domestic" slavery or "unfreedom" to the "rapacious" and more "inhuman" exploitation of African slaves in tlie mines and on the plantations of European-colonized Americas . Others counte r with the arguments that the Europeans initiated the African slave trade across the Atlantic, but that the institution of slave ry itself was already an established custom in West Africa. The views of two historians may be taken to illustrate an aspect of the debates. In an article , "Slavery and Slave Trade in the Context of West African History," published in one of the 1969 issues of the Jou rnal of Af rican History, J. D. Fage pointed out that as early as about 1500 A. O. "the Portuguese were selling slaves on the Gold Coast, which of course ,

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presupposes a society knowing of the value of slaves and having a demand for them." The slaves sold by the Portuguese were war captives ·bought in Benin. He was careful to point out that the eltistence of slavery and slave trading as established institutions in some parts of West Africa , such as the major states and empires of the Western Sudan, did not mean that the institutions were "natural features" of West African society. But he insisted that, while the European demand for slaves for use in the New World might have been responsible for the development and growth of slavery in Upper Guinea, "elsewhere, e.g. in Lower Guinea, all the coming of the European slave-buyers meant in principle was that African kings and merchants were increasingly presented with a new element of choice- fundamentally, it would seem, an economic choice: whether it was more advantageous to them to keep their slave labourers at home . as farmers , artisans, porters, retainers, soldiers, etc., or to exchange them or some of them for other forms of wealth (or of power, e.g. guns and powder)." 2 Advancing an opposite point of view, Walter Rodney said: "It has often been claimed that slaves formed part of African society and that, consequently, it was easy for African chiefs to begin by selling their own slaves. No convincing evidence has been brought forward to support this view; on the contrary, it appears that the sale of human beings was a new featu re in most African societies, which came about as a direct reaction to the presence and activities of Europeans."' A controversy similar to the above has arisen with respect to the origin and duration of the East African slave trade. Sir Reginald Coupland ascribed the inauguration of the export of slaves from East Africa to Asians, particularly the Arabs. According to him, the Arab slave trade began before the Christian era and continued with strength into the nineteenth centurya period of some two thousand years. From the "inexhaustible reservoir" of slaves. the midland zone of Africa between the Sahara and the Zainbezi, "the stream of Negro slaves began to flow northwards as soon as contact was established by way of the Nile between the southern Sudan and Egypt or by the caravan-routes across the Sahara between the Niger and the Congo country and the Greek, Phoenician and Roman cities on the Mediterranean coast." A third line of export from the "great resevoir" of black slaves ran eastwards to the towns and cities that developed on the East African shores of the Indian Ocean. In the course of time, Arabs controlled the three main lines of slave export. In the meantime , however, they maintained such a steady flow of African slaves to Asia that, for example, by the fifteenth century A.D. "there were thousands of African slaves in the Moslem Kingdom of Bengal." As Arab commercial enterprise propelled the Arabs beyond the Indian Ocean, African slaves were carried as far east as China. "Thus, year after year and century after century, the depopulation of Africa by Asia went on." While the output of the Arab slave trade in any single year "can never have reached the highest figures of the European trade," there was no doubt in Coupland's mind that the cumulative effect of the elttraction of a "steady stream" of Negro slaves over a period of two thousand years was responsible for the small population of East Africa relative to its size.'

2

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Critics of Coupland's thesis feel that his views were perh