Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 10:09:24 -0400
From: David Jefferess <jefferdm-AT-mcmaster.ca>
Subject: Re: On Arab Slave Traders


>From what i understand, the Arab slave trade (while quite different from
the Euro trade) existed for many many decades throughout eastern and
southeastern africa. while i was living in Nkhota-Kota Malawi, i
constantly heard from my students or read in textbooks how wonderful the
Scottish explorer David Livingston was, a man with rather ambivalent
intentions and who is remembered by many as "ending" the "Arab slave
trade". for many decades, the lakeside town of Nkhota-Kota was a central
market for the trade. the stories are horrific... people being marched in
chains carrying ivory from as far away as what is now western Zambia and
southern DRC to Nkhota-Kota, where they were held in the stockade
("Linga" an indigenous word for stockade continues to be another name for
the town) before being carried in dhows across the lake and then
continuing the journey to the markets of Zanzibar, either by land or
sea... the accounts are bloody... i don't have any statistics on hand,
but thousands perished on the way to various slave centres, and in the
centres. the survival rate for the journeys on the dhows across what is
now Lake Malawi or up the coast to Zanzibar are frigthening.  There is a
sign in a mission compound in Nkhota-Kota claiming that Livingston met
with the Arab slave trader Jumbe and various local "Chiefs" in 1863 or
1864 to end the slave trade through Nkhota-Kota, but I have found various
accounts that the trade continued (and people were sold and died in NKK)
up to the mid 1890s.  Something interesting there about the European
perception of the written word and the signed document....

Accounts of the trade in East and Southeast Africa are easily found in
histories of the various nations of the region and in more popular
sources such as travel books... i think it is lonely planet which has
some horrendous blather about present-day Nkhota-Kota still being a dark
and ominous place, and in a book called Livingston's Lake (there's a
title!! he "discovered" the lake in the 1860s... taken there by his local
guides!), a description of 1960s(?) Linga suggests that slavery hangs
over the town like some suffocating cloak, the red dirt hinting at all
the blood that was shed and ghosts lurking in the mango trees (it's
really quite a passage). of course, Nkhota-Kota is nothing like that, but
i do remember sitting on the edge of the gutter under the mango trees
with some students one afternoon, and a student looking over his shoulder
and musing about the fact that really not that long ago, Africans were
marched in chains to the lakeside, just yards away from where we were
sitting....

David


kdr7-AT-columbia.edu wrote:

> I was just reading through parts of "King Leopold's Ghost," by Adam
> Hochschild (Houton Mifflin: 1998), which is a history of the Anglo-
> Beligian genocide in the Congo in the late-19th and early-20th
> centuries. Given certain recent claims made on this list, and knowing
> little about the issue of Arab involvement in the African slave
> trade, I found the paragraphs below very informative... (p. 28):
>
> "Significantly, most British and French antislavery fervor in the
> 1860s was directed not at Spain and Portugal, which allowed slavery
> in their colonies, or at Brazil, with its millions of slaves.
> Instead, righteous denunciations poured down on a distant, weak, and
> safely nonwhite target: the so-called Arab slave-traders raiding
> Africa from the east. In the slave markets of Zanzibar, traders sold
> thier human booty to Arab plantation owners on the Island itself, and
> to other buyers in Persia, Madagascar, and the various sultanates and
> principalities of the Arabian peninsula. For Europeans, here was an
> ideal target for disapproval: one "uncivilized" race enslaving
> another.
>
> "Arab was a misnomer; Afro-Arab would have been more accurate.
> Althought their captives often ended up in the Arab world, the
> traders on the African mainland were largely Swahili-speaking
> Africans from territory that is today Kenya and Tanzania. Many of
> them adopted Arab dress and Islam, but only some were of even partly
> Arab descent. Nonetheless, from Edinburgh to Rome, indignant books
> and speeches and sermons denounced the vicious "Arab" slavers -- and
> with them, by implication, the idea that any part of Africa might be
> colonized by someone other than Europeans."
>
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