Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves by Gunja SenGupta;Awam Amkpa;

Author:Gunja SenGupta;Awam Amkpa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520389137
Publisher: University of California Press

IMAGINING MARIANAH’S PASSAGE TO INDIA: THE GAZE OF IMPERIAL ABOLITION

During 1842–43, Lieutenant W. Christopher, Commander of the HC Brig of War Tigris, was on a mission to accompany His Excellency Ally Bin Naseer (as his name is spelled in British colonial archives), envoy extraordinary for the Imam of Muscat to her Britannic majesty, from the Persian Gulf back to East Africa. The report Christopher wrote of his travels established a direct connection between slave-grown American cotton and Indian Ocean slavery on many levels. The first was through the workings of international trade. The Americans, he wrote, traded “with our Indian subjects nearly always, and their clothes return with the slave dealer into the heart of Africa.” Second, he remarked upon proslavery defenses among Arab slaveholding “paternalists” that appeared to bear an uncanny resemblance to the rationales of American slaveholders. Finally, he portrayed the Zanzibar slave market as a mirror image of Atlantic auction blocks.27

En route from Muscat to Zanzibar, Christopher sought to engage Naseer in a conversation about the merits of free versus slave labor. The Omani, who claimed to own sixty to seventy slaves to perform the work of his Zanzibar household, warned that “should [the Imam] put a stop to buying and selling servants, [he] would . . . infuriate his people.” He defended slavery with the argument that “We find them naked, hungry . . . We save their children, and bring them up as our children and true believers.” Christopher concluded that “These are the usual arguments used by Mahomedans, the great traffickers in human bodies to dispel their own scruples.”28

Upon reaching their destination, Christopher found the island to be “beautifully fertile,” especially compared with “sterile” Oman, suffering only from the drawback of harboring a one- to two-mile band of swamplands that surrounded the “filthy town of Zanzibar” on three sides and bred frightful fevers. Its ruler, the Imam, commanded twelve hundred slaves. Upon invitation, the British lieutenant visited the monarch’s clove plantations as well as his two palaces, which boasted “loop holed upper stories.” He wandered through halls paved with marble flags and passed niches ornamented with porcelain or glassware. Large mirrors hung in the rooms. The British officer’s tour guide was the twenty-two-year-old “very communicative” son of a “high functionary,” who was “dressed in rich Arab costume, and rode a bay palfrey of the 1st blood.” His late mother was a French woman who had spent her youth in the zenana of a “rich Mussalman” in Muscat. Christopher noted that “the plantations have a most pleasing appearance.” The Imam had constructed an aqueduct extending two thousand yards into the woods to convey water “as pure as crystal” through the palace to the beach. The clove trees, he reported, were planted “on the oldest soil or higher grounds of the island at about 14 feet apart, the intervals being kept well weeded . . ., the dead branches being cut off.” The oldest trees, “bushy and of circular form” grew as tall as forty feet. He estimated the output at one

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