African Slave Trade Scholarly Article

7/30/2019 African Slave Trade Scholarly Article

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African and Asian Studies, volume 5, nos. 3-4 also available online

2006 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden see www.brill.nl

* Department of History, University of California at Santa Barbara, California 93106,USA. E-mail: [email protected].

The African Slave Trade to Asiaand the Indian Ocean Islands

ROBERT O. COLLINS*

ABSTRACT

Unlike the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade the transportation ofslaves from Africa to Asia and the Mediterranean was of greatantiquity, but the intense historical interest in the Trans-Atlantic Trade for the past two hundred years has over-shadowed the study of the Asian slave trade which, until thispast decade, has been largely ignored despite the fact thatthe total number of Africans exported to Asia was spread outover thousand years (between 800 AD and 1900 AD) but hasbeen estimated at approximately the same as the number ofAfricans sent to the Americas in four and a half centuries i.e.12,580,000. This paper describes the African slave trade to

Asia across the Sahara Desert, over the Red Sea, and fromthe coast of East Africa, and how this trade was conductedin each of these regions. History is not a social science, buta member of the humanities family. It is the search of everyavailable source using any discipline to narrate a story andnot bound by any rigid theoretical or methodological con-cepts. In the compilation of this essay, I have employed thelatest information and interpretations on the African slavetrade to Asia to write the history of that institution as to whathappened, where, when, how and why.

Introduction

Unlike the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade the transportation of slaves fromAfrica to Asia and the Mediterranean was of great antiquity. The first

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326 Robert O. Collins

evidence was carved in stone in 2900 B.C.E. at the second cataractdepicting a boat on the Nile packed with Nubian captives for enslavementin Egypt. Thereafter throughout the next five thousand years Africanslaves captured in war, raids, or purchased in the market were marcheddown the Nile, across the Sahara to the Mediterranean, or transportedover the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to Asia. The dynastic Egyptiansalso took slaves from the Red Sea region and the Horn of Africa knownto them as Punt. Phoenician settlements along the North African littoralpossessed African slaves from the immediate hinterland or slaves fromsouth of the Sahara forced along the established trans-Saharan trade

routes to the Mediterranean markets. The Greeks and the Romans con-tinued the ancient Egyptian raids into Nubia and sent military expedi-tions from their cities along the southern Mediterranean shore thatreturned with slaves from the Fezzan and the highlands of the Sahara.African slaves, like those from Europe, were used in the households,fields, mines, and armies of Mediterranean and Asian empires. However,it should be noted that Africans formed only a modest portion of theRoman slave community as the abundant supply from Asia Minor andEurope became more than adequate for the economic and military needsof the empire. Not surprisingly, African slaves were more numerous inthe Roman cities of the Mediterranean littoral.

There can be no reasonable estimate of the number of slaves exportedfrom Africa to the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and the IndianOcean before the arrival of the Arabs in Africa during the seventh cen-tury of the Christian Era. Between 800 and 1600 the evidence for theestimated volume of slaves is more intuitive than empirical but betterthan none at all. One can only surmise that during the previous fourthousand years when slaves were a common and accepted institution inmost African societies those slaves marched across the Sahara or trans-ported over the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Asia during these eighthundred years must have been a considerable number. Until the sev-enteenth century the evidence is derived mostly from literary sourceswhereby maximum and minimum numbers can at best be extrapolated

given the paucity of direct data. There is a considerable amount of indi-rect evidence from accounts of the trade, population, and the demandfor black slaves for military service from which general but not unrea-sonable estimates of the Asian slave trade can be proposed.

When European states directly entered the world of international tradein the seventeenth century, the estimates of the number of slaves becomeincreasingly reliable. There is a striking similarity between the total esti-mated number of slaves exported across the Atlantic and those sent toAsia. The trans-Atlantic trade carried an estimated 11,313,000 millionslaves from 1450 to 1900. The Asian trade numbered an estimated total

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The African Slave Trade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands 327

of 12,580,000 slaves from 800 to 1900. The important difference betweenthe Trans-Atlantic and the Asia slave trade, however, is the time spanin which the exportation of slaves took place. The eleven million slavesof the Trans-Antlantic trade were exported to the Americas in only fourhundred years, an intensity that had dramatic effects on the African soci-eties engaged in the trade. The twelve and a half million slaves exportedto Asia during eleven centuries obviously did not have the same traumaticimpact experienced on the western African coast in just four centuriesof the Trans-Antlantic trade. During three hundred years, 1600-1900 forwhich there is more credible evidence, the volume of the Asian trade is

estimated at 5,510,000 slaves, half that of the Trans-Antlantic. At theend of the Napoleonic wars during the first half of the nineteenth cen-tury an extensive plantation economy was developed on the East Africancoast and the islands of Zanzibar, Pemba, and the Mascarenes in theIndian Ocean that required greater numbers of slaves from the interior.In a brief spasm offifty years until the impact of the European aboli-tionists after 1860 dramatically restrained and then ended the trade toAsia, the eastern African slave trade was more reminiscent of the WestAfrican experience than in any of the preceding centuries.

Until the arrival of the Portuguese on the coasts of sub-Saharan Africain the fifteenth century, Islam was the only ideology to introduce a more

systematic regulation of slavery in Africa. By the tenth century the Arabs,who had conquered North Africa, the Middle East, and Persia, hadabsorbed the historic institution of slavery, but as Muslims they shapedthe ancient traditions of slavery to conform to the religious laws andpractices of Islam. Their legal definitions and treatment of slaves, however,was more a modification in the status and function of a slave than anyfundamental change in the practice of involuntary servitude. The slaveremained property to be used as the master wished as an agriculturallaborer, soldier, domestic, concubine, or even a high official, a wazir.Thousands of slaves were taken in the holy wars,jihad, during the expan-sion of the Islamic world, for their enslavement was legally and morally

justified because they were not Muslims but unbelievers (kafirin) who were

expected to abandon their traditional religions and embrace in slaverythe true faith. Islam recognized that Christians, Jews, and Zoroastriansrequired a special status. They were People of the Book, the Bible, theTalmud, and the Avesta (Pure Instruction) who acknowledged one supremedeity, God, Allah, or Ahura Mazda. Consequently, they were regardedas protected minorities (dhimmis) who were not to be enslaved, their prop-erty safeguarded, and permitted to practice their religion freely so longas they paid a special tax (jizya). In reality, Christian, Jew, and Zoroastrianall were regularly enslaved in the tumult of war, raids, or piracy wherelegal distinctions disappeared before passion, bigotry, and avarice.

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Table 1

Estimates of African slave exports from Africa, across the Sahara, Red Sea, and EastAfrica and the Indian Ocean, 800-1900 and 1600-1900.

Trans-Saharan African Slave Exports:

Period

800-1600 4,670,000

1601-1800 1,400,000

1801-1900 1,200,000

800-1900 Total 7,270,000

African Slave exports across the Red Sea:

Period

800-1600 1,600,000

1601-1800 300,000

1801-1900 492,000

800-1900 Total 2,392,000

African slave exports across East Africa and the Indian Ocean:

Period

800-1600 800,000

1601-1800 500,000

1801-1900 1,618,000

800-1900 Total 2,918,000

African Slave exports across the Sahara, Red Sea, East Africa and theIndian Ocean (800-1900)

Total 12,580,000

Slave Exports across the Sahara, Red Sea, and East Africa and the IndianOcean (1600-1900)

Total 5,510,000

Source: Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, Tables 2.1, 2.2, 3.7, 7.1, 7.7.

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As the Islamic empire expanded slaves came increasingly from conquestsof non-Muslim Africans on the frontiers of Islam for slave markets inthe Arab Middle East where women and children were more pliableand therefore more likely to accept Islam. Young women became domesticsor concubines for the harem; young men were trained for military oradministrative service. Except for the constant demand of the Moroccansultans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for young men as slavesoldiers, mature males and women were preferred to perform the menial tasksoffield and household under harsh conditions and a short life and hadto be continuously replaced by newly acquired slaves, preferably females.

Since the young were absorbed into Muslim society and the old per-ished, the need for constant replenishment of slaves was not impededby race or color. The only criteria for the Muslim was that the slavebe pagan, and since African traditional religions were unacceptable, sub-Saharan Africa became the most important source of slaves for theMuslim merchants who established elaborate commercial networks totransport them out of Africa across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and theIndian Ocean. In order to justify slavery Europeans frequently arguedthat conversion to Christianity, the religion of the plantation owners,would by example bring civilization and salvation to slaves otherwisecondemned to eternal damnation. Islam, however, imposed upon the

Muslim master an obligation to convert non-Muslim slaves in order forthem to become members of the greater Islamic society in which thebeneficence of the afterlife was assumed. Indeed, the daily observanceof the well-defined Islamic religious rituals was the symbolic and out-ward manifestation of the inward conversion without which emancipa-tion was impossible. Unlike Christianity and African religions the act ofemancipation was explicitly defined in Islamic legal tradition that enabledthe slave to become immediately free rather than the lengthy Africangenerational process of acceptance by social assimilation. Conversion alsoenabled slaves to perform different functions unknown in the slavery ofthe New World. The Arab conquests had produced a far-flung empireof many ethnicities whose common denominator was Islam administered

by a vast bureaucracy that required slave officials and slave soldiers loyalto the state, for their status was dependent upon their master and hisreligion. These slave officials were frequently empowered to have author-ity over free members of the state. Often Muslim slaves became highlyspecialized in commerce and industry through the acquisition of skills inthe more advanced technology of the Islamic world than in Africa oreven on the sugar plantations of the Americas.

Women also occupied a different status in Islam than in African orAtlantic slavery. Islamic law limited the number of legal wives to four,

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the sexual appetite of men being satisfied by the number of concubinesthey could afford. Slave women were given as concubines to other slaves,to freed slaves, or to the masters sons. The relationship between themale master and the female slave, however, was clearly defined in the-ory by the legal Islamic sanctions that applied to emancipation. A con-cubine became legally free upon the death of her owner. If she borehim children, she could not be sold and her children were free, but inpractice they had a lower status than children of free wives.

Trans-Saharan Slave Trade

Although the numbers of the slave trade to North Africa and Asia aremore a benchmark from which extrapolations can be disputed, there isno doubt that there was a constant demand for slaves in the Islamicworld. Until the fifteenth century, the export of slaves across the Sahara,the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean was believed to be relatively con-stant, numbering between 5,000 and 10,000 per year throughout thesemany centuries whose modest numbers mitigated the impact of the lossamong African societies. The estimate of the number of slaves, 4,670,000,exported across the Sahara between 800 and 1600 can only be but areasonable guess based on diffuse direct and indirect evidence accept-

able for lack of a better figure. Whether more or less, there was a demon-strable demand for slaves from sub-Saharan Africa that resulted incontinuous contact between the Muslim merchants, who organized thetrans-Saharan slave trade, and the rulers of the Sudanic states, who sup-plied them. The presence of Muslim traders had a profound influenceat the courts of African kings. They not only conducted commerce butalso introduced literacy and Islamic law as it pertained to their transactions,principally slaves. Although theBilad al-Sudan stretched from the AtlanticOcean to the Red Sea, there were only six established vertical routesacross the Sahara that resulted in well-defined markets at their termi-nals in the Sudan and North Africa. There was the Walata Road fromancient Ghana to Sijilmasa in Morocco; the Taghaza Trail from Timbuktuat the great bend of the Niger north to Taghaza and Sijilmasa or toTuwat and Tunis; the Ghadames Road from Gao on the lower Nigerto Agades, Ghat, Ghadames, and Tripoli; the Bilma Trail or theGaramantian Road that left the Hausa states at Kano and Lake Chadnorth to Bilma, Murzuk in the Fezzan, and on to Tripoli; the FortyDays Road or the Darb al-aArbain from El-Fasher in Darfur north tothe Nile at Asuyt; and the route furthest east that began at Suakin onthe Red Sea, swung southwest to Sennar on the Blue Nile, and thencefollowed the Nile to Egypt. There was also a vigorous and often ignored

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lateral east-west trade which connected the great market towns of theSahel overland and on the Niger River along which slaves were movedlaterally for sale locally by dyula traders or to the larger markets in oneof the Sudanic termini of the trans-Saharan trade.

Like the Atlantic trade, the largest number of slaves did not comefrom the same region throughout the millennium of the trans-Saharantrade, and although a very important source of revenue, the savannastates of the western and central Sudan were not dependent upon theslave trade for their rise, expansion, and decline. They were importantsuppliers of slaves but not at the expense of their political and cultural

independence. Slaves associated with the gold and salt trade and theGhana wars had long been taken from the headwaters of the Senegaland Niger rivers up the Walata Road to Sijilmasa in Morocco. Duringthe three hundred years (1235-1492) of the Keita dynasty and the expan-sion of the Empire of Mali slaves were captured south of the Niger andfrom its headwaters to Gao where they were exported from Timbuktuup the Taghaza Trail or less frequently from Gao up the GhadamesRoad. The Songhai Empire (1492-1599) succeeded that of Mali whenSunni Ali of the Songhai established his authority over the whole of themiddle Niger River valley. His wars and those of his successors produceda substantial increase in the number of slaves exported across the Sahara

in the sixteenth century partially to offset the loss of revenue from thedeclining gold trade. When the Moroccan army crossed the Sahara toconquer Songhai in 1591, the large number of Songhai captured producedan ample supply of slaves in the markets of North Africa before returningto the historic pattern of the past. Further east in the central Sudanwest of Lake Chad during the same century the Kingdom of Bornuacquired an excessive number of slaves during its wars of expansionunder Idris Alawma (c.1571-1603) who were exported up the Bilma Trailto Tripoli. The mai (kings) of Bornu utilized this historic route that hadbeen established many centuries before by the Saifawa dynasty in Kanem.In the nineteenth century the largest number of slaves to cross the Saharahad shifted from the western and central Sudan to the two routes for

the Nilotic slave trade, the Forty Days Road (Dar al-aArbain) from Darfurand the route from Sennar to Nubia and Egypt. The estimated 1,200,000slaves exported across the Sahara in the nineteenth century, comparedto 700,000 in the eighteenth, can only be explained by the increasetaken from the Upper Nile basin, for the numbers exported from thestates of the western and central Sudan had steadily declined.1

1 Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, second edition, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 24-29.

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During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (1601-1800) the trans-Saharan trade steadily increased to some 700,000 in each century orsixty-seven percent of the total exported across the Sahara in the pre-

ceding eight hundred years. This estimated average of 7,000 per yearfor these two centuries, based on limited evidence, may be greater thanthe real numbers, but the indirect evidence reasonably concludes thatthere was a considerable supply of slaves from the savanna and Sahelbecause of drought and warfare. When the rains did not come, the fieldswere barren and the free cultivators vulnerable to slavers when wan-dering the countryside in search of food. In order to survive they oftenenslaved themselves voluntarily to those with something to eat. Thesetwo centuries also experienced the dissolution of the old Sudanic empiresinto petty states whose warlords carried on interminable warfare withlocal rivals that produced an abundance of captives who became slaves.The extent of suffering from drought or war was painfully measured by

the increase in the number of slaves during these two centuries.Between 1639 and 1643 a serious drought spread from the Senegambia

to the great bend of the Niger. After a period of adequate rainfall thesevere dry years returned during the last quarter of the seventeenth cen-tury. Desiccation in theBilad al-Sudan proved worse in the next century.A major drought brought famine to the middle Niger valley from 1711to 1716 and again during the early 1720s, but the great drought of theeighteenth century on the Niger and in Senegambia lasted from 1738 to1756. Bornu in the central Sudan suffered correspondingly in the 1740s

The Trans-Saharan Routes

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and 1750s. Thereafter sporadic and localized years of little or no rain-fall were recorded from 1770-1771 at Timbuktu, 1786 in the Gambia,and during the 1790s in the central Sudan.

The wars that followed the fragmentation of the old empires werecharacterized by Muslims against non-Muslims, Muslims who claimedto be Muslims but did not practice orthodox Islam, and Islamic jihadsled by holy men against infidels and those they regarded as renegadeMuslims. The historic goal of Muslims was to convert unbelievers toIslam and the enslavement of them for conversion was both legally andmorally correct. These reasons, however, were often a euphemistic ration-

ale for the warlord to resolve the problem of replacing the natural lossof slaves by exploiting new sources or whose sale would provide rev-enue for him and the state. The organized razzia became commonplacewith a variety of official names,ghazwaor salatiyain Darfur and Sennarfor instance, to be carried out more often than not by slave soldiers.Some of the enslaved were retained, women as concubines, men as sol-diers or agricultural laborers, but a far greater number were sold, andfor most warlords slaves, after direct taxes, were the greatest source ofhis revenue. During the innumerable petty wars among the Hausa city-states Muslim prisoners were illegally sold for the trans-Saharan tradealong with non-Muslims to the dismay and condemnation of Islamic

jurists. Further west on the middle and upper Niger and the plateau ofthe Senegambia the distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim wasmore well-defined, but this did not inhibit the Muslim reformers fromleading their followers, talibes, in holy wars against apostate Muslims whowere enslaved when they refused to accept Islam as practiced by dog-matic Muslim clerics or the political authority of the theocratic Islamiststates they founded.

Those who supplied slaves for the trans-Saharan trade were not alwaysMuslims. The powerful Bambara pagan state of Segu established on theNiger southwest of Timbuktu was a major supplier for the trans-Saharantrade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The hunting associationsof young Bambara men were easily transformed into mercenaries to loot

for petty warlords or organized bands to raid for panache and profit.Slave soldiers were the largest contingent in the armies of the Bambaraand in the states of the Senegambia where they collected taxes, heldadministrative offices, and were often the powerbrokers at the royal court.

The reduction in the number of slaves crossing the desert that accom-panied the steady decline of the established trans-Saharan trade in thenineteenth century was offset by the astonishing growth of the Niloticslave trade. In 1820 the army of the able and dynamic ruler of Egypt,Muhammad Ali, invaded the Sudan. Although nominally the viceroy of

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2 Muhammad aAli to sar-I aaskar [Commander-in-Chief] of the Sudan and Kordofan

[Muhammad Bey Khusraw, Saftardar], 23 September 1823 in Hill Egypt in the Sudan

1821-1881, p. 13.

the Ottoman sultan, Muhammad Ali was in fact an independent ruler

whose armies had conquered the Hijaz and its holy cities, Mecca and

Medina, and advanced through Palestine to the frontiers of Syria at

great human and material expense to his army and government. He

therefore invaded the Sudan to exploit its gold to replenish his treasury

and to enslave the pagan Sudanese to rebuild his army and succinctly

summed up his purpose to his commander in the Sudan. You are aware

that the end of all our effort and expense is to procure Negroes. Please

show zeal in carrying out our wishes in this capital matter.2

Hitherto the Funj Kingdom of Sennar had exported some 1,500 slaves

per year to Egypt. Muhammad Ali wanted 20,000. A military trainingcamp was constructed at Isna and a special depot to receive slaves from

the Sudan at Aswan. From the administrative capital at Khartoum the

Egyptian governor-general organized military expeditions up the Blue

and White Niles to enslave the Nilotes. By 1838, despite heavy losses

from disease and hardship on the march down the Nile and across the

Nubian Desert 10,000 to 12,000 slaves reached Egypt every year. Under

pressure from the British government the Ottoman sultan and the khe-

dive of Egypt officially declared the slave trade illegal in the Commercial

Convention of 1838, but on the Nile the trade shifted from the Egyptian

government to an elaborate private commercial network constructed by

Muslim merchants to continue and expand the trade throughout theupper Nile basin. By the 1870s tens of thousands of slaves were exported

to Egypt and to Arabia from ports on the Red Sea, and although the

numbers dramatically declined during the years of the Mahdist State in

the Sudan (1881-1898), the Red Sea trade only came to an end after

the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of the Sudan in 1898.

Table 2

Estimated slave exports across the Sahara 1600-1900 and its percentage of the total

Asian trade 1600-1900.

Period Period Period

1600-1700 % 1701-1800 % 1801-1900 % Total & PercentageTrans-Saharan:

700,000 12.7 700,000 12.7 1,200,000 21.7 2,600,000 47.1

Source: Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, Tables 3.1, 7.l.

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The Red Sea Slave Trade

The Red Sea slave trade was ironically older than the trans-Saharan.The dynastic Egyptians regularly sent expeditions to the Land of Punt, thecoasts of the Red Sea and northern Somalia, to return with ivory, per-fumes, and slaves. Slaves were undoubtedly among the commoditiesexported from Africa to Arabia across the Red Sea and the Gulf ofArabia during the centuries of Greek and Roman rule in Egypt. Between800 and 1600, the direct evidence remains scanty, but the numbers ofslaves transported to Arabia were not large and localized rather than

organized. An estimated guess has been 1,600,000 slaves were exportedduring this period or an annual average of 2,000 slaves per year. Thesources of slaves for the Red Sea trade were limited to Nubia, the Nilenorth of its confluence at the modern capital of Khartoum, and Ethiopiabut the total Red Sea trade amounted to only thirty-four percent of thetrans-Saharan trade during these same eight hundred years. The portswere few, Aidhab in Egypt until destroyed by the Ottoman Turks in1416, Suakin in the Sudan, and Adulis (Massawa) in Ethiopia.

During the seventeenth century the Red Sea export trade appears tohave been a steady but modest number of 1,000 slaves per year. Theestimated number of slaves increased in the eighteenth century to some2,000 slaves annually from Ethiopia and the Nile valley that was, how-

ever, only a symbolically small portion of the increasing world wideexport of African slaves that continued into the nineteenth century.Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Darfur inthe Nile basin sent several thousand slaves per year to Egypt but alsoto the Red Sea through Sennar on the Blue Nile and thence east alongthe established trade route to Suakin. The Funj Kingdom of Sennaritself exported some 1,500 slaves per year until conquered by the forcesof Muhammad Ali in 1821. Thereafter, Egyptian government razziasand later in the century powerful merchant-adventurers organized theNilotic trade for Egypt, but they also sent a substantial number ofSudanese slaves to Arabia through the Red Sea ports which the Egyptian

government controlled. Slaves in the upper Nile basin were captured bythe private armies (bazinqir) of these merchants that raided as far as DarFertit in the west and southwest into the kingdoms of the Azande andBagirmi deep in equatorial Africa.

These same centuries also experienced an increase in the slave tradefrom the Ethiopian highlands. Slavery in Ethiopia had been an acceptedinstitution in the long history of that Christian kingdom, and slaves hadregularly been sent to the Yemen and Arabia from the ancient port ofAdulis that later became Massawa. Although there had been constant

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conflicts throughout the centuries between Christian Ethiopians in thefertile highlands and the Muslim Somalis on the arid plains below, itwas not until the sixteenth century that the famous Imam of Harar,Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known as Grn, the left-handed, and his Somali war-riors ravaged Ethiopia, destroying churches, monasteries, and enslavinglarge numbers of Ethiopian Christians until he was killed in 1543 byPortuguese musketeers who had arrived to defend the emperor and hisChristian kingdom. Thereafter Muslim control of the Red Sea contin-ued to insure a dependable supply of Ethiopian slaves through Massawaduring the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the centralized

authority of imperial Ethiopia collapsed. Known as the Masafant, theperiod of judges, Ethiopia dissolved into anarchy for two hundred yearsduring which the rival warlords of the nobility obtained many slaves intheir petty wars and razzias. They retained some slaves for agricultureand domestic chores selling the surplus captives to Muslim merchants.In the nineteenth century strong emperors returned internal stability toEthiopia, but they waged continuous warfare on their frontiers againstthe Egyptian government, whose armies raided the border hill country,while the Muslim Galla (Oromo) pillaged southwestern Ethiopia for thou-sands of slaves who were exported across the Gulf of Arabia from theSomali ports of Berbera and Zeila. Children, girls, and young women

were particularly prized in the Ethiopian trade outnumbering males twoto one and commanding three times the price in the marketplace. Duringthe first half of the nineteenth century the Ethiopian Red Sea tradepeaked at 6,000 to 7,000 slaves each year numbering an estimated175,000 exported in the second quarter of that century.

Table 3

Estimated slave exports from Red Sea, 1600-1900, with the percentage of the totalasian trade 1600-1900.

Period Period Period Period

1600-1700 % 1701-1800 % 1801-1900 % 1600-1900 Total Percentage

Red Sea: 100,000 1.8 200,000 3.6 492,000 8.9 792,000 14.4

Source: Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, Tables 3.1, 7.1.

East African and the Indian Ocean Slave Trade

During the centuries of the early Christian Era Greek traders had beenmaking their way down the coast of East Africa where they conducteda profitable trade that included slaves. The Greek mercantile presencein the Indian Ocean did not survive the dominance of Rome in the

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3 Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, pp. 61-62.

Mediterranean, but trade on the East African coast was continued as inthe past by merchants from Arabia, Persia, India, and China who pliedthe waters of the Indian Ocean on the monsoon winds of the SabaeanLane. The Arabs brought goods from Asia cloth, porcelains, glassware,and hardware and after the seventh century Islam. They returned toAsia with ivory, gold, rhino horn, spices, and always slaves, called Zanj(Blacks), for fields, mines, armies, and households. The Arabs were fol-lowed by the Persians and the Chinese who traded on the East Africancoast during the Sung (1127-1279) and the Ming (1368-1644) dynastiesfor ivory, rhino horn, and tortoise shells that were highly valued in the

Orient and a few slaves mostly as concubines.Although there is Arabic, Persian, and Chinese documentation and

the writings of Arab geographers and travelers about East Africa andits trade, there is little direct evidence as to the number of slaves exportedto Asia until the nineteenth century. By extrapolation with the slave tradein the Red Sea an estimate of 1,000 per year throughout the centuriesuntil the eighteenth does not appear unreasonable. At the end of theeighteenth century there are records of the number of slaves (2,500 per

year) from the mainland that passed through Kilwa to the French sugarand coffee plantations on the Mascarene Islands and slaves exportedfrom Mozambique to Cape Town and Brazil to add another 4,000 to

5,000 per year from the historic ports of the East African coast.3

Thiswas a dramatic increase from the last three decades of the eighteenthcentury but only the harbinger of the massive numbers exported duringthe first half of the nineteenth century.

Table 4

Estimated slave exports from East Africa 1600-1900 with the percentage of the totalAsian Trade 1600-1900.

Region Period Period Period Period

1600-1700 % 1701-1800 % 1801-1900 % 1600-1900 %

East Africa: 100,000 1.8 400,000 7.3 1,618,000 29.4 2,118,000 38.4

Source: Lovejoy, Transformations in African Slavery, Tables 3.7, 7.3.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century 80,000 slaves are estimatedto have been brought from the interior of East Africa. Over a third(30,000) were retained on the coast; the other 50,000 were shipped to

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Obbia

MogadishuMerca

Brava

Mombasa

Malindi

BerberaZeila

Muscat

Bombay

Goa

Malab

ar

Banbhore

Aksum

Adulis

Basra

Suakin

Aydhab

Cairo

Harar

Aden

SanaS A B E A

Mecca

Sirat

Shiraz

CambayMedina

Jiddah

Mocha

Amirante Is.

Maldive Is.

Laccadive Is.

Seychelles

MAFIA

ZANZIBAR

PEMBA

SOCOTRA

A R A B I A

I R A N

I N D I A

O M A N

SUMMER EQUATOR IAL CURRENT

SW

SUMMER

MONSOON

NW

WINTER

MONSOON

Arabian Sea

Hormuz I.

RedSea

Gulf ofCambay

Arabian GulfCap

eGuar

dafui

I n d i a n O c e a n

Webe

Juba

R.

the Asian mainland (Arabia, Persia, and India), the Mascarene Islands,and the Americas. During the next four decades the decline in theMascarene trade was offset by a regular increase in the number of slavessent to the Americas, mainly Brazil that reached a high of 100,000 perdecade during the 1830s and 1840s thereafter to experience a drasticdecrease to a trickle by mid-century. During this same first half-centurythe export trade from the East African coast to the Asian mainlandexperienced a modest but firm increase to a high of 65,000 per decadein the 1850s and 1860s until 1873 when the Sultan of Zanzibar wasforced by the British government and its navy to ban all trade in slavesby sea. Despite the British intervention at Zanzibar the retention of

The Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and the Sabaean Lane

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4 Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, pp. 155-156.

slaves to work the growing number of plantations on the East Africanmainland coast rose an average twenty percent per decade from 35,000slaves in the first decade of the century to a high of 188,000 for the1870s at a time when the Indian Ocean trade was first restricted andthen suppressed. When confronted by the influence of British abolitionistsand the power of the Royal Navy, the slaver traders brought fewer slavesout of Africa, yet from 1890 to 1896 as many as 16,000 reached thecoast, a good number of whom were smuggled across the Indian Ocean.4

This spectacular increase in the nineteenth century East African slavetrade was caused by the development of plantations that required large

numbers of unskilled labor on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba whereArab immigrants from the Hadhramaut and Oman and Swahili entre-preneurs from the mainland had planted extensive plantations of cloves,coconuts, and grain. The Swahili traffic in slaves from the mainland tothe offshore islands dates from the late sixteenth century when patricianSwahili families, the Nabhany of Pate and the Mazrui from Mombasa,acquired estates on Pemba and Zanzibar at the end of the sixteenthcentury. The fertile soils and timely rainfall of Pemba, in particular, pro-duced sufficient rice and cereals to become the granary for the wholeof the Swahili coast throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Under the leadership of Sultan Sayyid Saa id, who arrived in Zanzibar

from Oman in the 1820s, cloves were being exported by 1827, andthereafter the island became the principal supplier to the internationalmarket. The clove, like cotton, is a labor-intensive crop, that requiredan ever-increasing supply of slaves, and it is no coincidence that thedemand for slaves was greatest during the peak of clove production inthe 1860s and 1870s. Ironically, the needs of the nineteenth centuryplantation economy of East Africa for slaves were similar to those in theAmericas that produced the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave tradein the eighteenth century.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries slaves for the EastAfrican coast and Asia came mainly from the hinterland of the Zambezivalley controlled by the Portuguese. By the nineteenth century the sources

of supply had shifted north where African traders, the Nyamwezi andthe Yao, brought slaves to the coast from the interior of Lakes Tanganyikaand Nyasa (Malawi). Kilwa, which had been reduced by the Portugueseto a commercial backwater, now became the principal slave entrept forthe Zanzibar clove plantations supplying nearly ninety-five percent by

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5 Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa, pp. 115-130.

1866. After the prohibition against exporting slaves across the IndianOcean in 1873, Kilwa continued to supply slaves for the mainland plan-tations by marching them up the coast.5

During the early decades of the nineteenth century Arab and Swahilitraders from the East African coast developed a second route for slavesand ivory using the historic road into the interior that led them to theAfricans living in the vicinity of the great equatorial lakes of Tanganyikaand Victoria. Their success brought them into competition with theNyamwezi and Yao traders and precipitated hostility with the Africansof the lakes who at first supplied slaves only to be taken as slaves them-

selves by the heavily armed agents of the coastal merchants. The inte-rior of eastern Africa erupted in raiding and petty wars from which theAfrican victims became slaves in these local struggles between rival war-lords, traders, and warrior bands known as the ruga-ruga. The ruga-rugahad fled north in the 1840s and 1850s from the intense warfare of theZulu in southern Africa in the 1830s, the years of destruction known astheMfecane, to plunder, loot, and add to the insecurity of the East Africaninterior that made slaves readily available south of the Lake Plateau ofEast Africa.

Table 5

Estimated slave exports from East Africa 1800-1900 and the percentage of the totalAsian trade 1800-1900.

Regions Volume East African Trade Asian Trade(percentage) (percentage)

Arabia, Persia, India 347,000 21.4 10.5South-east Africa 407,000 25.1 12.3Mascarene Islands 95,000 5.9 2.9East African Coast 769,000 47.5 24.6

Total 1,618,000

Source: Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, Table 7.7.

Summary and ConclusionsThe history of slavery in Africa and the slave trade cannot be measuredonly in terms of numbers or statistics of the slave trade which obscurethe complexities of the system and the enormity of the misery that accom-panied the institution. Yet numbers do serve their purpose for they quan-tify to give a means, no matter how sterile, to understand this otherwise

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Ungwana

Kismayu

Brava

Merca

Mogadishu

Bajun Is.

Bur Gao(Shungwaya)

Malindi

I n d i a nO c e a n

Mombasa

Tanga

Kizimkazi

Kisimani Mafia

Kilwa

Cape Delgado

Pemba

Zanzabar

MAFIA

GediNW

Win

ter

Mon

soon

Summer

Equat

o

r

a

l

Cu

rrent

SW

Summer

Monso

on

TanaR.

Juba

R.

Sheb

eleR

.

GalanaR.

RufijiR.

Rovu

maR.

0 300km

selim0020

The World of the Swahili

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incomprehensible human tragedy of mankind. There are pitfalls to avoidin reading the numbers. There was, of course, no trade with the Americasuntil they were discovered at the end of the fifteenth century, yet slaveshad been taken out of Africa across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and EastAfrica for many centuries before Columbus. Their numbers can only beestimated, precariously, from indirect evidence and extrapolation after thecoming of the Arabs from 800 to the great surge in the Trans-Antlanticslave trade in the seventeenth century at some seven million or less than9,000 per year This figure is not very helpful, for the number of slavestaken to the Mediterranean and Asia varied dramatically in time and

place. Not until the seventeenth century did evidence, direct and indi-rect, permit greater certainty as to the estimated numbers of slaves takenout of Africa. From 1600 to 1900 the Trans-Atlantic and the Asian slavetrades together systematically exported 16,414,000 slaves from Africa ofwhich 10,904,000 slaves were taken to the Americas, and 5,510,00 slaveswere taken to the Indian Ocean islands and Asia. This represents a totalannual average of 54,715 slaves per year or over 36,347 exported every

year across the Atlantic and another 14,000 yearly to Asia.In Africa there are no statistics but many accounts and oral traditions

confirm that the slave trade and slavery were very much a part of Africanlife until the 1930s. Thereafter numerous incidents of slavery have been

reported to the present day and involuntary servitude remains undernew names, but after 5,000 years the institution of slavery as a systemhas come to an end to leave behind myths and truths. The historicobsession with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americashas often obscured the trade to Asia and slavery within Africa. Slaverywas as indigenous to Africa as to Europe and Asia. Slavery was an insti-tution in most African societies, and its abolition came later than in theAmericas. The international system of slavery tied the Americas, Africa,and Asia together, and the task of emancipation was not complete untilslaves were as free in Africa as in the Americas.

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