Slaves of One Master by Matthew S. Hopper

Author:Matthew S. Hopper
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300213928
Publisher: Yale University Press

The Persistence of the Slave Trade after 1873

The year 1873 is frequently given as the beginning of the end of the East African slave trade. As mentioned above, most published estimates of the East African slave trade assume a sharply declining curve following that date. In that year, Sir Bartle Frere made his acclaimed visits to the sultan of Zanzibar, Seyyid Bargash, and the sultan of Muscat, Turkī bin Sa‘id, and negotiated a treaty with the latter to prohibit the importation of slaves on the Arabian coast. Frere’s negotiations with Bargash were unsuccessful, but Sir John Kirk followed Frere’s visit with a more forceful approach. Bargash was told to sign a treaty prohibiting the slave trade or face a naval blockade around the island of Zanzibar. As Kirk explained to Bargash, he had “not come to discuss but to dictate” the new antislavery treaty. Under threat of blockade, the sultan acquiesced and signed a treaty on June 5, 1873, prohibiting the transport of slaves from anywhere on the coast of East Africa (even to the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba), authorizing the closure of the slave markets, and forbidding Indian subjects from owning slaves.47 The treaty between Kirk and Bargash was signed with much pomp and circumstance in the sultan’s palace, followed by salutes from the cannons of the naval vessels in the harbor. G. K. Gordon described the occasion as follows: “An Arab standing by the Sultan read the treaty in Arabic, and placed it in front of the Sultan, who signed it with his usual flourishing signature. Dr. Kirk added his signature, and instantly we heard the booming of the ship’s guns, firing a salute of 21 guns, to announce the great paper had been signed. There were no further ceremonies, and we left to return to the ship to shed our hot dress uniforms. The next day the sultan closed the slave market.”48 But in spite of the new treaty and a British naval presence in the western Indian Ocean, the slave trade persisted for another half century.

In the months immediately following the declaration of the new treaty, shipments of enslaved Africans by sea indeed ceased. But they were to resume shortly after, using modified methods and alternative routes. The most important of the new routes to emerge in the post–1873 period were inland routes from Kilwa to the north to the closest points on the coast to Pemba, the region around Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo, Pangani, and further north to Mombasa, Malindi, and Lamu. Kirk heard the first reports of the land route to Mombasa and Malindi when he arrived at Malindi in 1873 to manumit the slaves of Indian subjects.49 The following year, Rear Admiral Arthur Cumming reported hearing that Arab slave dealers were “grateful to the English” for imposing the latest antislavery treaty on the sultan, as the new land routes worked more efficiently for them.50 One British commander lamented that the new land routes were “negating the work on the sea.” While a

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