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Two

The Transformation of the Slave Sector

The process of integration of East Africa into the world capitalist system from the last third of the eighteenth century onwards distinguishes the modern history of East Africa from the preceding eras. It is this specificity that tends to be ignored in colonial and neo-colonial histories, especially when dealing with the so-called Arab slave trade. The British imperial historian, Sir Reginald Coupland, for example, argued that the slave trade runs ‘like a scarlet thread’ through nearly two millennia of East African history, without paying any attention to the historical specificity of the different phases of that trade, the different modes of production to which they were linked, and the specific nature of the slave sector at different times. He went on to conclude that although the annual volume of the East African slave trade never rivalled the numbers involved in the West African slave trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the total number of Africans exported from East Africa during the two millennia ‘must have been prodigious’. ‘Asia, not Europe’, cries Coupland, ‘bears the chief responsibility for the damage done by the slave trade to East Africa’ – a neat apology for the capitalist role in that trade at its height in the nineteenth century. It was the Arab slave trade, he asserts, that ‘intensified . . . barbarism’ in Africa, and ‘closed the door to all external aids they [Africans] needed to stimulate their progress’ – a justification, to cap it all, for European colonialism.¹

Although writing forty years later, Ralph A. Austen prefers to stick to the well-trodden path blazed by Coupland. He tries to quantify Coupland’s assertions as is the modern vogue. Although he admits that all the sources before the last quarter of the eighteenth century ‘tell us virtually nothing about the absolute quantity of slaves’, he nevertheless proceeds to assign ‘relative indices’ to different periods on the basis of the more precise figures for the nineteenth century. We are thus presented with a formidable table of the slave trade from East Africa since the rise of Islam, translating Coupland’s softer prose into apparently more solid statistics. The only virtue of this exercise in the ‘numbers game’ is to conjure up a figure for the ‘Islamic slave trade’ from East Africa over the thirteen centuries that totals over four million. When added to the estimates of ‘the Islamic slave trade’ from West and North-east Africa, Austen has the satisfaction of arriving at a grand hotel of 17 million over a period of thirteen centuries as compared with 12.5 million taken by the Europeans from West Africa during two centuries.²

Although Austen adds contours to Coupland’s ‘scarlet thread’, they are based on flimsy empirical evidence for the period before the eighteenth century, and they take little account of the different modes of production articulating with the East African coast at different times. By laying emphasis on the ‘continuity’ of the so-called Islamic slave trade, both have failed to recognise the fundamental transformation of the slave sector from the last third of the eighteenth century, and its vital link with the rise of capitalism in the North Atlantic region.

A more promising reappraisal of the East African slave trade was undertaken by L. Sakkarai within a more explicit theoretical framework. Unfortunately his analysis for the period preceding the nineteenth century is marred by a conception of merchant capitalism which is both theoretically unsound and empirically unsupported. Merchant capital has undoubtedly operated on the East African coast throughout the past two millennia. However, Sakkarai’s attempt to associate this throughout the period predominantly with the operation of the slave trade – a specific form of merchant capitalism – is incorrect. He argues that the slave mode was the earliest mode of production and that slaves were the first form of commodity, that throughout the period the principal reliance of merchant capital was on the slave trade, and that it was only in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution, that other commodities began to displace slaves as the principal commodity.³ All these assertions are quite obviously contrary to all the available empirical evidence for the East African coast.

Sakkarai, however, is not oblivious to the connection between the slave trade and the rise of capitalism and he makes his most positive contribution to the understanding of that relationship in East Africa during the nineteenth century. He shows how slave and ‘legitimate’ trade were so intertwined that the former could not be abolished without jeopardising the latter; hence British prevarication about the suppression of the slave trade in East Africa during the nineteenth century.⁴

The period from the last third of the eighteenth century onwards was one during which the slave trade did play an important, though not necessarily a dominant role in the economic history of East Africa. In analysing the slave phenomenon during this period we have to bear in mind two important considerations. The first is the assimilation of the East African economy, including the slave sector, into the expanding world capitalist system. The second is the fundamental transformation of the slave sector as a result of the restrictions placed on the export of slaves; this had the effect of internalising that sector, transforming it from one that was primarily based on the export of slaves to one based predominantly on production by slave labour within East Africa of commodities for export, to self-righteous England as well as to other parts of the world. This transformation was accompanied by a shift in the character of the Omani commercial bourgeoisie which, though it persisted in commerce and even found new outlets for it, was nevertheless gradually being converted into primarily a landowning class. Few of its members, however, realised that the plantation economy they were establishing, though lucrative at the time, was a treacherous trap which would result in their impoverishment and indebtedness within a few decades.

The northern slave trade

To the colonial and neo-colonial historians, as to the British abolitionists, Arabia was a convenient bottomless pit that allegedly consumed any number of slaves that their lively imagination cared to conjure up. The abolitionists, of course, were trying to sustain the anti-slavery campaign to clear the decks for the maturation of capitalism, and to mobilise their people, benumbed by the vast dimensions of the West African slave trade, to support their crusade. A series of wild estimates of the export of slaves to Arabia thus grew up in the fertile minds of the crusaders where they seemed to flourish more wonderfully than in the deserts of Arabia.⁵ No serious examination was attempted to see where such numbers could have been absorbed, and what economic conditions would have permitted the absorption of such large numbers in the sparsely populated areas of Arabia and the Gulf. A British naval surgeon, J. Prior, who visited Kilwa in 1812, commented that ‘at present the demand is confined to the Arabs, who do not take many’, and a report in 1826 asserted that ‘the present export of slaves from the . . . possessions of the Imaum is very trifling’.⁶

To determine the dimensions of the northern demand for slaves, it is necessary to understand the uses to which slaves were put. The social transformation of Oman into a mercantile state and the expansion of slave-based date production from c. 1700 had created a demand for agricultural slaves. It is extremely difficult to arrive at an estimate of the annual demand for such slaves in Oman. The only clue is the statement in the Omani chronicle that Imam Saif b. Sultan (1692–1711) owned 1,700 slaves and one-third of all the date palms in Oman.⁷ As the biggest landowner and perhaps the individual most involved in commerce, the Imam probably had a higher proportion of slaves to date palms than the smaller peasants and interior tribesmen. He may also have had a proportionately larger number of domestic slaves, who were presumably included in the total number of slaves owned by him. Assuming, nevertheless, the ratio of 1:3, the slave population of Oman at the beginning of the eighteenth century would have been about 5,000. Assuming further an attrition rate of about 10 per cent⁸, the annual demand for slaves in Oman would have been about 500. There are no precise quantitative data for the trade except a reference to between two and four large Omani ships which bought slaves from East Africa apparently on royal account, apart from about ‘300 blacks’ exported on ships locally built in East Africa.⁹ The numbers may have grown during the eighteenth century as the social revolution was consummated. Whatever may have been the absolute figure for the eighteenth century, however, there seems to be little evidence for any significant increase in the demand during the nineteenth century when Oman appears to have been economically stagnant or declining, particularly with the migration of many well-to-do merchants and landowners and the transfer of the capital to Zanzibar.

Map 2.1 The East African slave trade

African slaves were apparently not used in agricultural production in Iran, although they were widely used in maritime activities in the Persian Gulf. Africans were ubiquitous among dhow crews of the western Indian Ocean during the nineteenth century, but there is little quantitative evidence for the number of slaves absorbed in seafaring and in the docks to service Indian Ocean commerce. Africans also constituted a sizeable proportion of pearl divers in the Gulf who were estimated to number between 27,000 and 30,000 in the mid-nineteenth century. An early twentieth-century survey suggests that about one-third of the divers were Africans.¹⁰

Slaves were also used in the army. Although warfare in Oman appears to have been based primarily on tribal levies, the secularisation of the Omani state and the weakening of religious and tribal loyalties did suggest the need for a loyal standing army under the Busaidi. Thus Ahmed b. Said purchased 1,000 East African slaves at one time in the 1740s. However, the standing army appears to have been small, and the more prominent component, especially during the nineteenth century, appears to have been Baluchi mercenaries. In 1802 it consisted of 300 slaves and 1,700 Baluchis, Sindhis and Arabs, and in 1809 there were 2,000 mercenaries, but there is no mention of slaves at this time.¹¹

A larger number of unproductive slaves were absorbed in the domestic sector to perform menial domestic chores or as concubines. The demand was for young slaves to be groomed in the household. In 1831 their ages ranged between 10 and 14, and evidence from slave captures suggests a fair balance between the sexes.¹² We have no estimates of the size of this population. During the eighteenth century it may have been growing as Omani society was being transformed with the emergence of a wealthy merchant class. The migration of part of this class to Zanzibar after the commercial crash in Oman at the end of the Napoleonic war may have led to stagnation or decline in the annual demand for such slaves.

The rough estimates for each of the uses of slaves are intended to provide only an idea of the magnitude of the demand for slaves against which the scattered numerical estimates by contemporary observers may be judged. We are fortunate in possessing some very precise quantitative data about the slave trade at the receiving end collected by British officials who cannot be accused of trying to minimise the Arab slave trade. According to these officials Muscat and Sur were ‘the principal, if not only primary ports to which all slaves . . . were brought, and whence they are carried into Turkey [i.e. Turkish-controlled Iraq], Persia, Scinde, the Arabian states’, and even India.¹³ The British Resident in the Gulf reported in 1831 that normally 1,400 to 1,700 slaves were imported into Muscat, although during the preceding season only 1,150 to 1,200 were imported, including 250 to 300 who were smuggled. Of these slaves three-quarters were imported from ‘Sowahel or the coast of [East] Africa’, the remainder being Ethiopians. In 1830 over half of the slaves, i.e. about 500 East African slaves, were re-exported to the Gulf, while the remaining 400 were absorbed within Oman.¹⁴

In 1841 the British kept a register at the strategic island of Kharg of all the slave dhows passing to the northern end of the Gulf. Although the Gulf slave traffic normally started from around the beginning of July, the register itself began on the nineteenth of the month. By the end of the slave season 118 boats had passed, carrying a total of 1,217 slaves of whom 640 were females and 577 males. Most of these slaves were re-exports from Muscat and Sur or via third ports, and only one boat with twelve slaves apparently came directly from ‘Sowahel’.¹⁵ The register does not make a distinction between East African and Ethiopian slaves, but assuming the proportion given in 1831, and after making allowance for the first eighteen days of July, we get about 1,000 East African slaves reaching the northern end of the Gulf.

A most unfortunate gap remains in the data for the trade of Sur, the other, but smaller, port importing slaves directly from East Africa. However, its re-export to Kharg Island in 1841 was roughly in the proportion of 7:10 compared with Muscat. Assuming that such a proportion held true for the total slave trade, it would appear that the total number of East African slaves imported into Muscat and Sur in 1830 was about 1,500, or ‘normally’ between 1,800 and 2,200. Since these were the ‘only primary ports’ for the slave trade from East Africa to Oman and the Gulf, the dimensions of the Omani slave trade were much more modest than hitherto assumed by colonial and modern historians.

East African slaves were also imported into the Red Sea region. Some were later re-exported to the East. For example, in 1835 three Mahra dhows were intercepted at the Gujarat port of Porbandar carrying seventy-nine slaves.¹⁶ Some, however, were locally absorbed, and they formed pockets of African population in southern Arabia. The former headquarters of the National Liberation Front of South Yemen was at a place called Zinjibar which, as the name suggests, was formerly populated by black people. However, the number of slaves imported from East Africa was probably small, partly because the region was closer to Ethiopia, another major source of slaves. In 1840 the French Consul at Jeddah reported 500 East African slaves entering the Red Sea.¹⁷

Table 2.1 The northern slave trade, 1831 and 1841

Sources: Wilson to Norris, 28 January 1831, MA, 1/1830–31; Robertson to Willoughby, 4 March 1842, MA, 78/1841–2, pp. 346–62.

The demand for slaves in the more densely populated India, which had its own fairly large poor population, was probably very small. In 1838 only twenty-six slaves were imported into the main Kutch port of Mandvi which, before being superseded by Bombay, was the Indian port with the largest trade with East Africa. They were for the most part domestic slaves brought by returning Indian merchants from East Africa.¹⁸ In 1809 Henry Salt had witnessed the export of 500 slaves from Mozambique to the three Portuguese colonies in India, and in 1841 it was reported that ‘in former years the number of slaves imported into the three Portuguese settlements . . . averaged from 250 to 300 per annum’. But this trade appears to have suffered a decline, so that by the late 1830s the annual import amounted to only thirty-five slaves. The small dimensions of the East African slave trade to India are confirmed by the size of the African population in Indian territories with closest contact with the East African coast. In 1837 the total African population in the province of Kathiawar was only 550, and the Portuguese port of Diu had an African population of between 200 and 225 in 1841. Various censuses and other reports for the whole Presidency of Bombay between 1848 and 1881 give an African (‘Sidi’) population of only 700 to 1,200.¹⁹

If we allow for an annual total of about 1,000 slaves from East Africa for the Red Sea and the Indian markets, we shall arrive at an aggregate of about 3,000 slaves being annually exported north from East Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. This estimate comes fairly close to that of E. B. Martin and T.C.I. Ryan, based on slightly different data. They estimate an average of 2,500 for the period 1770–1829, and they suggest an increase to 3,500 for the 1830s. Austen’s estimate is also fairly modest for this period, giving an average of 2,250 per annum for the period 1700–1815.²⁰

What is contentious, however, is the rising trend of the export of slaves to the north during the nineteenth century which both Martin and Ryan as well as Austen attempt to project. The former suggest a rise to an annual export of 4,000 during the 1840s, and to 6,500 during 1850–73. Austen, on the other hand, suggests an annual average of about 6,625 for the whole period 1815–75.²¹ I find little evidence for any increase in the prosperity of the importing region, and a lot suggesting stagnation and even decline in mercantile prosperity especially in Oman after the Napoleonic Wars. On the other hand, there is quite substantial warming up of British anti-slavery sentiments under Palmerston from the 1840s onwards, and with it the bloating of slave trade estimates. For example, the actual figure of 1,217 slaves who passed through Kharg Island in 1840–1 is successively blown up to 4,000 to 5,000. Martin and Ryan quote the British Consul in Zanzibar, C.P. Rigby, writing in 1861, giving his estimate of 4,500 for the 1840–1 period. Both Austen, and Martin and Ryan indiscriminately use all these figures in their statistical exercises.²² The use of more numerous bloated estimates, compared with the single actual count, naturally has the effect of shifting the average towards the inflated figures. Curiously, neither Martin and Ryan nor Austen take account of the evidence presented by slave captures during the fairly comprehensive anti-slavery campaign launched by the British navy in the late 1860s (see Table 6.1). What is remarkable is that the number of slaves liberated annually during three consecutive years remained fairly constant at about a thousand. These figures suggest, if anything, a declining curve for the northern slave trade compared with the early part of the nineteenth century.²³

The northern slave trade, therefore, appears to have reached its plateau during the eighteenth century when the demand for slaves in the productive sector was at its peak. In the unproductive domestic and military sectors, the demand may have peaked during the commercial boom that the Omani merchant class experienced during the Napoleonic Wars at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. With the bursting of that bubble by 1810, and the migration of a considerable section of the Omani merchant class to Zanzibar, conditions were hardly auspicious for the northern slave trade to thrive.²⁴

The French slave trade and the re-subjugation of Kilwa, 1770–1822

The northern slave trade which had developed within the pre-capitalist modes of production in south-western Asia had a fairly limited potential for expansion beyond the dimensions attained during the eighteenth century. Communities of people of African origin are scattered along the non-African parts of the littoral of the western Indian Ocean, but they do not constitute substantial national minorities in any of the countries of this coast as they so conspicuously do in the Americas.

On the other hand, from the 1770s eastern Africa was drawn into the vortex of the genesis of capitalism, and experienced what Marx has described as ‘the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production’.²⁵ The development of sugar plantations in the French Mascarene islands of Ile de France (Mauritius) and Bourbon (Réunion) was an extension of similar developments in the West Indies which fed into the infamous Atlantic triangular trade. These developments sapped the vitality of East Africa’s trade with the north, initially sharpening the contradiction between the northern and the French slave trade. The northern slave trade could not ultimately withstand the tide of nascent capitalism, and the Arab merchant class therefore had to accept the new compradorial role being assigned to them in the new global capitalist system.

French demand for slaves was modest in the first decades after the 1730s and was largely met by Madagascar, and intermittently by Mozambique and the East African coast. It was not until the 1770s that the supply from the African coast reached significant proportions. However, with the decreasing profitability of the West African slave trade a tremendous demand for slaves was added in the 1770s and 1780s for the American market as well. That market became even more attractive as the small Mascarene islands became ‘so well stocked with blacks’ by the mid-1770s. An annual average of about 3,000 slaves was then being traded by the French from Mozambique.²⁶

The rapidly rising French demand for slaves began to cause a major dislocation of the Arab trade along the East African coast. Previously, during the middle of the eighteenth century, Omani demand for slaves had been responsible for the penetration of Swahili traders of Mombasa and Pate into the ports of southern Tanzania, and they even encroached on the Portuguese sphere along the northern coast of Mozambique. By the mid-1770s this northward flow of slaves had been partly reversed. It was stated that Swahili traders were taking slaves to the south ‘when they do not have to sell to the Arabs’.²⁷

The French also began to encroach directly into the Omani sphere north of Cape Delgado. Mongalo, or Mgao Mwanya along the southern coast of Tanzania, was located close to the Makonde plateau where, it was alleged, the Makua, Makonde, Ndonde and Yao were ‘continually at war, solely to make each other prisoners, whom they sell’. By the 1750s it had become a regular port of call for Swahili traders in search of ivory and slaves.²⁸ To secure their supply of slaves, the Omanis had imposed their suzerainty over Mongalo in 1776, although they had no permanent political representative there, and no tribute was exacted. The Omanis were more interested in economic control over the trade which was channelled through Kilwa. They were seasonal traders who deposited their merchandise with the local ruler who collected slaves and ivory for them while they continued their voyage to Mozambique or Zanzibar according to season. The French sought to encroach upon this Omani sphere through various schemes to establish a factory there by forming an alliance with the local ruler. In 1786 an agreement was concluded with local authorities to supply slaves at 25 piastres each, a price far below that prevailing elsewhere along the coast. But in view of the acute demand, this low price could not be maintained, and the following year the price was reported to be equal to that at Kilwa, though the tax was kept to 3 piastres to attract French traders there. However, Mongalo had a fairly restricted hinterland, able to supply a smaller number of slaves than Kilwa. Most of the French schemes, however, failed to attract French governmental support and appear to have all fizzled out.²⁹

A more serious encroachment was attempted at Kilwa which was ‘the entrepôt of the slave trade for all the coast of Zanzibar.’ The French slave trader, Morice, had made two voyages to Zanzibar in 1775, taking off 1,625 slaves, most of whom probably came from Kilwa. The following year he shifted his trade to the source, buying 700 slaves, and negotiating a 100-year treaty with the Sultan of Kilwa to buy 1,000 slaves a year at a fixed price of 22 piastres each, including tax, and regardless of sex.³⁰

This was not merely a commercial transaction but also a conscious entry into the local politico-economic struggle along the East African coast between the various Swahili polities attempting to maintain their independence, and the expanding Omani hegemony. Previously the Omanis had exercised a rather loose control over the Swahili ruler of Kilwa. But they were seasonal traders – apparently including the Omani governor – who visited Zanzibar from January to March to buy merchandise from the monsoon dhows. Taking advantage of the temporary absence of the Omanis in 1771, the local ruling class informed them that they would no longer be tolerated as rulers, though they quickly added that they would always be welcomed as traders.³¹ Their eager invitation to the Omanis to continue to trade at Kilwa pointed to its economic dependence on the Omanis and their rising entrepôt at Zanzibar.

Kilwa is located towards the periphery of reliable monsoons, and the consequent lengthening of the voyage and the shortening of the trading season at Kilwa led to a preference for Zanzibar as an entrepôt by the monsoon dhows. As Morice explained:

It is to them [Arabs] and to their centres in Zanzibar that the ships from India go in preference to unload their cargoes for distribution all along the coast. When the ships from India arrive in December, January or February, all the Moors from Kilwa, Mafia, Mombasa, Pate, etc., go to Zanzibar to buy cargoes and distribute them subsequently in their districts in exchange for ivory tusks, provisions and slaves. In March and April all the Moors and Arabs come to the Kingdom of Kilwa to trade these for slaves.³²

Kilwa’s dependence on the Omanis was also partly explained in terms of lack of deep-sea shipping, capital and commercial know-how, while the Omanis, according to Morice, ‘being richer, more business-like, and more commerical’, were able to attract the trade to Zanzibar. Whatever the merits of these arguments, Kilwa’s economic dependence was a stark reality. As Morice commented, ‘the well-to-do today cannot do without all the materials that the Moors have been bringing them for 300 years’. Consequently, he said, though the people of Kilwa were capable of driving the Omanis back to Muscat, ‘they will never do it so long as some European nation [does not bring] them Surat goods which they need and can take in exchange for their slaves and ivory’.³³

The northern circuit of trade on which Kilwa remained dependent, even while expanding the slave trade with the French, thus consisted of the export of ivory, primarily to India and China, and slaves. The imports included Indian textiles and beads of great variety; particularly coarse but durable handwoven textiles, such as bleached basto or bafta, dark indigo-dyed kaniki that was popular in the interior, and dhoties which originated from the Gujarati port of Surat. In addition, striped loincloths were imported from Muscat and the Portuguese Indian port of Diu. Morice was quite eloquent on the role of Indian textiles and beads which sustained the whole trade of the East African coast at this time.³⁴

It was precisely this economic dependence of Kilwa on the Omanis at Zanzibar that Morice sought to break in his schemes. He proposed to provide Indian goods directly, thereby eliminating the Omani middleman and making Kilwa dependent on the French instead. Under his plan of operations he envisaged sending a cargo of French merchandise to Surat to buy there goods suitable for the Kilwa market. In exchange he expected to buy slaves for the Mascarenes and the Americas, and ivory which could be sold at a good profit in India, China or even France. The project called for a capital outlay for the first year of over 170,000 piastres, and Morice also felt he needed the sanction of the French government; neither the capital nor this assistance apparently materialised. The project was therefore abandoned.³⁵

Morice was a monopolist who sought to exclude all European rivals, but not yet the Omanis whom he did not wish to alienate before his project materialised. His monopoly and the freezing of the price of slaves at Kilwa in the agreement may have dampened the growth of trade. With his death in c. 1781 the agreement apparently lapsed, and Kilwa now witnessed intense competition between the French traders. In 1784 one slaving captain, Joseph Crassons de Medeuil, bitterly complained about the lack of planning for the trade as a result of which ‘three or four ships find themselves in the same place and crowd each other out.’ He listed eight vessels which, over a period of 28 months, made a total of 14 voyages and carried off 4,193 slaves, apart from others which may have escaped his attention. This would give an annual average of nearly 2,000 slaves. The Swahili traders were fully aware of this high demand and could therefore dictate the terms, forcing the French to take away slaves without selection. Moreover, the price doubled to 40 piastres and the duty increased threefold to 6 piastres, and even to 10 piastres.³⁶

The consequent commercial prosperity at Kilwa is recorded in the Swahili chronicle of Kilwa. ‘The people and their sovereign enjoyed great profit’, and the period ‘was one of great prosperity for the country.’ A tangible monument to this is the Makutani palace which was enlarged during this period by the addition of a second storey and the enclosure of a large courtyard to the east.³⁷ Kilwa’s prosperity must have appeared to the Omanis as a multiple insult. The shift of the French slave trade to Kilwa from Zanzibar not only deprived the Omanis of part of their middleman’s share, but also buttressed a rebel city-state that threatened to nip in the bud the nascent Omani hegemony. Moreover, the intense competition for slaves in the first half of the 1780s had sent prices skyrocketing not only for the French but also for the Omanis. This underlay an attempt by the Omanis to prevent the Europeans from buying slaves at Zanzibar that led to M. Clonard’s ‘petite guerre’ and to the difficulties that Dutch ships from Cape Town had in obtaining slaves there in 1776 and 1777.³⁸ European competition threatened to deny the Omani date-growers their labour supply. The Omanis were apparently not yet prepared to make the transition, as had the Swahili merchant class, to a more purely mercantile existence from which they might have derived considerable commercial profit by the expansion of the French slave trade. Therefore they had to act.

The French had excited fissiparous tendencies along the coast but, by failing to provide their favourite with adequate protection, they left Kilwa powerless to resist the inevitable retribution. The Omanis may have exploited both the territorial and political weaknesses of Kilwa to subdue it. Since the expulsion of the Omani governor from Kilwa in 1771 Kilwa had been ruled by a diarchy of a Swahili sultan and a family of ‘amirs’ of Malindi origin who represented the interests of the increasingly powerful mercantile class. The latter had successfully resisted the imposition of a tax on them by the ruler in c. 1774, while the agricultural section of the population had to pay the dues on grains and other products. The Omanis may also have taken advantage of the territorial and political fragmentation that was so endemic on the Swahili coast. It seems that many of the Swahili city-states along the southern coast of Tanzania asserted their independence from Oman when Kilwa overthrew Omani rule in 1771, but they were unable to unite against an external invader. By 1784, Mafia, Kilwa’s ‘foster-mother’, on which it had depended for cattle and provisions, had begun to assert its independence from Kilwa, perhaps with Omani encouragement. In desperation Kilwa turned to the pretender to the Omani throne, Saif b. Ahmed, who was seeking a share of his patrimony in East Africa, and together they probed the possibility of French aid, but to no avail. A similar drama was to be enacted at Mombasa four decades later. Kilwa, however, fell under a ‘swift and fierce’ Omani onslaught.³⁹

The Swahili ruler of Kilwa was left with his title and dominion over the mainland section of the kingdom, while the Omanis appropriated half the revenue from the slave trade. The Swahili merchant class had thus once more been subjugated to the demands and control of its Omani counterpart. It was accommodated within the structure of the emerging commercial empire, with both the ruler and the Malindi ‘amir’ being given an annual present of cloth by the Omani ruler. The Omanis, moreover, sought to remove any advantage Kilwa may have had as a source of slaves by charging a slightly lower duty at Zanzibar. The French thus began to shift their trade to Zanzibar though Kilwa was only gradually abandoned by them. Kilwa and the Swahili merchant class there were thus gradually impoverished. In 1804 the customs of Kilwa were farmed out to an Arab merchant for only 6,000 piastres. It had thus become merely an outport of Zanzibar. By 1812 Kilwa Kisiwani (Kilwa on the Island) was described as a ‘petty village’, and was surpassed during the second quarter of the nineteenth century by Kilwa Kivinje, the mainland terminus of longdistance trade routes from the interior.⁴⁰

Having tasted the nectar of commercial profit, the Omanis were by no means united in their resolve to strangle the French slave trade. The Omani date-growers may have been interested in removing French competition to lower the price of slaves, but the commercial section was apparently too strong to allow the diminution of its profits. The French were therefore permitted to trade ‘in complete safety’, and the duty was increased initially by only half a piastre to 6-1/2 piastres, though by 1804 it had risen to 12 piastres. The date-growers had to be content with a much lower duty on slaves going to the north from Zanzibar, amounting to 1 piastre in 1804.⁴¹

The Napoleonic Wars – almost continuous between 1793 and 1810 – were a catastrophe for the Omani and Swahili merchant classes in East Africa. They were not confined to the western Indian Ocean but were global, disrupting the previously lucrative slave trade to the West Indies. In 1804 it was reported that all trade except that between Madagascar and the African coast had been suspended. The French slave trade with Mozambique declined precipitously from an annual average of 9,000 in the late 1780s to just over 2,300 in 1794. For the coast north of Cape Delgado, only five vessels traded at Kilwa and Zanzibar in 1803–4 compared with at least eleven in 1788. French slave vessels, moreover, were subject to capture and were thus kept away from Zanzibar by the presence of British warships. To beat the British blockade around the Mascarenes the French had to devise a circuitous route via the Seychelles, or to encourage the Arabs to transport the slaves in their own dhows to the Seychelles or directly to Mauritius, under the neutral Omani flag. Portuguese entry into the conflict, and the consequent cessation of the French trade at Mozambique, may have given a fresh stimulus to the French slave trade with Zanzibar. The Omanis were able to buy many of the Portuguese and British prizes at low prices and use them to conduct their trade. However, the new opportunities could hardly have been fully exploited under conditions of war. The fall of Mauritius to the British in 1810 dealt a stunning blow to the trade. Although slaves continued to be smuggled into the Mascarenes in later years, the slave trade to the south was clearly a spent force.⁴²

The trans-Atlantic slave trade from Mozambique to Brazil revived after the shift of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1807-8, and especially in the 1820s when up to 16,000 slaves were exported in a single year. It is not unlikely that some of these slaves were obtained from the coast north of Cape Delgado either directly or by transhipment from coasting dhows from Kilwa. However, assertions of the British naval officer, Captain Fairfax Moresby, in the early 1820s that twenty-four slave ships had been fitted out from France to export slaves from East Africa, and that there were more than 20,000 slaves awaiting them at Zanzibar, were grossly exaggerated. Even if all these vessels had carried an average of 300 slaves, they could not have carried more than one-third of the alleged number of slaves. Moresby was a British anti-slavery crusader making a case for the prohibition of the slave trade to the south from East Africa. This was ultimately formalised in the Moresby Treaty of 1822 which prohibited the export of slaves to the east and south of a line drawn from Cape Delgado to Diu Head in western India.⁴³ Seyyid Said claimed that this concession cost him MT$50,000 in lost revenue. This figure may well have been exaggerated, and in later years he continued to inflate the figure to impress the British with the enormity of his sacrifice, in the hope of precluding further demands of that nature and to extract the maximum concession in return. However, even if these figures were accurate, they would represent, at the rate of MT$12 in duty, only about 4,000 slaves per annum.⁴⁴

The Omani and French demand for slaves during the eighteenth century had served the important function of expanding Zanzibar’s entrepôt role in the supply of the imports, and of developing a large hinterland behind Kilwa. By 1785 developments at Kilwa had reached the stage where they threatened to pull the economic centre of gravity towards Kilwa and revive its medieval glory, in this case based on the French slave trade. The Omanis effectively intervened to prevent the French from supplying Kilwa with an economic base independent of Zanzibar. They also set about converting Kilwa into Zanzibar’s outport, but by the end of the century Kilwa’s well-developed hinterland was still Zanzibar’s only limb, and the French market for slaves was still very important in the economy of Zanzibar. It had given rise to a powerful group of merchants at Zanzibar who had flourished by the slave trade and who were exerting a great deal of influence in the politics of Zanzibar. According to Captain Tomkinson, it had been ‘a lucrative trade for the Island and the people in office made a great deal by it’. Zanzibar was farmed to ‘black merchants connected with the French’, although they were, in fact, mostly Omanis. The strangulation of this branch of the slave trade, therefore, was not only disrupting the economy of Zanzibar but also eroding the economic base of the Omani mercantile class at Zanzibar. It is precisely members of this class who began actively to look for alternative markets for their slaves since the slave trade to the north could not be expanded.⁴⁵ Perhaps there could have been no better substitute than the agricultural exploitation of the East African littoral using slave labour, for the Omanis were soon to discover that the tender conscience of the British abolitionists was not yet troubled by the consumption of slave-grown spices. Thus the stage was set for the transformation of the slave sector from one that was merchantile, based on the export of slaves, to a productive one based on the use of slaves within East Africa to produce commodities for export.

The genesis of the slave system of production in Zanzibar, 1810–1840s

The collapse of the southern slave trade during the first quarter of the nineteenth century posed a grave crisis for the mercantile classes operating along the East African coast. Before the extension of the European slave trade to eastern Africa the Arab traders had enjoyed a monopoly over the slave trade in the Indian Ocean system, and prices remained low. By integrating the Indian Ocean system into the international commercial system dominated by the Atlantic slave trade, the European slave traders had subjected Indian Ocean consumers to the higher prices that were current in West Africa. As a result the price of slaves at Kilwa had doubled by the mid-1780s. The amputation of the link with the Atlantic slave trade system meant not only the loss of a market for about 2,000 slaves per annum, but also the removal of the higher floor prices. By 1822 the price of slaves had halved to MT$20.⁴⁶ This must have appeared calamitous to the Omani merchant class which had grown dependent on the trade, and which had every reason to look for an alternative. In a letter to his agent in Bombay in 1828 Seyyid Said put the case succinctly:

In consequence of the abolition of the slave trade the collections [revenue] of Zanzibar have been diminished; it has therefore been deemed necessary to make plantations of sugar cane in the islands.⁴⁷

And, he might have added, of cloves as well.

It was members of the Omani merchant class who were in a position to initiate the transformation of the slave sector of the economy of Zanzibar. From their acquaintance with the Mascarenes they realised that if slaves could not be exported, the product of their labour could. They witnessed in those islands the employment of slave labour for the, production not only of sugar but also of cloves, which had been introduced from the East Indies in 1770. The clove trade was particularly lucrative as a result of the Dutch monopoly over the spices. As late as 1834, when that monopoly had already begun to crumble, it was still yielding a profit of over 1,000 per cent on the original cost of production.⁴⁸

Contemporary French observers attribute the introduction of cloves to various Frenchmen, probably all slave traders. M. Guillain attributes it to a M. Sausse, a creole from the Mascarenes who is known to have been trading in slaves since 1785. Richard Burton says that Sausse was the first person to extract clove oil, subsequently a universal favourite with the Zanzibar public. F. Albrand credits M. Desplant with the initiative.⁴⁹ While the Frenchmen probably played a role, no evidence has come to light of French landholding on the island at this time. It is more likely that they did so in conjunction with members of the Omani merchant class.

Zanzibari tradition, current at least from the end of the nineteenth century, attributes the introduction of cloves to Saleh b. Haramil al Abray who appears to have been the doyen of the Omani merchant class. He is probably the same individual who is referred to by several early nineteenth-century accounts simply as Saleh. Born at Muscat in c. 1770, he left his native country young and visited the Seychelles, Ile de France and Bourbon. He is described by Albrand as ‘a perfect Frenchman’ who spoke ‘the creole of Mauritius passably’ and who appreciated ‘the superiority of our arts’, presumably including the use of slave labour in the production of sugar and cloves. He was a friend or a relative of, as well as an interpreter for, the governor of Zanzibar whom Albrand names as Said. As early as 1804 a Frenchman, Captain Dallons, mentions an unnamed interpreter, ‘a subtle and pliant man on whom all success depends’ in the conduct of the slave trade. In 1857 Burton refers to probably the same individual, whose share in a single venture in the southern slave trade was worth MT$218,000, and he credits the introduction of cloves to this same Arab. At the end of the nineteenth century W.W.A. Fitzgerald recorded what was then becoming a tradition; that Haramil b. Saleh (sic) accompanied a French officer from Zanzibar to Bourbon at the end of the eighteenth century and obtained permission to take back a small quantity of seeds and plants with him. These were planted on his plantation at Mtoni and, according to Guillain, at Kizimbani. The contemporary Albrand dates this introduction more precisely to c. 1812 and adds that by 1819, when he visited Zanzibar, they were already 15 feet high. This is confirmed by another French visitor in 1822 who found cloves growing on two plantations belonging, according to him, to the governor who ‘is almost the only person on the island who has on his lands these precious trees.’⁵⁰

Saleh was the leader of one of the factions at Zanzibar competing for power. He was opposed by the Harthi clan, long established at Zanzibar, who may have been more identified with the northern slave trade, though undoubtedly also profiting from the French slave trade. It was led by Abdullah b. Juma al Barwany, a very rich man who had been governor of Zanzibar, and controlled Kilwa at the time of Albrand’s visit. Saleh’s faction may have played a part in the removal from the governorship of Abdullah b. Juma whom Seyyid Said allegedly feared. Within three years Saleh’s relative was awarded the governorship. Saleh himself fell victim to this factional struggle, probably during Seyyid Said’s visit to Zanzibar in 1828. He had apparently continued to participate in the southern slave trade despite the Moresby Treaty of 1822. Seyyid Said imprisoned the governor and confiscated Saleh’s properties, profiting thereby ‘with all the appearance of justice’. Saleh apparently escaped to the mainland and, though he was eventually pardoned, he died a pauper.⁵¹

What was particularly interesting about Saleh’s properties was that they included Mtoni and Kizimbani. Seyyid Said also bought a plantation at Mkanyageni from the sons of Saleh, and inherited another at Bumbwini from his slave ‘Alkida Jengueni’. It was probably from these plantations, all planted with cloves before Seyyid Said’s first visit to Zanzibar in 1828, that the first crops came. Bombay trade figures show that between 1823–4 and 1832–3 small quantities of cloves were already being imported from East Africa.⁵²

While Seyyid Said can no longer be credited with introducing cloves to Zanzibar, as so many historians have maintained, he was a sovereign of Zanzibar and a merchant prince who felt the pinch even more acutely when the southern slave trade collapsed. He claimed that the Moresby Treaty of 1822 cost him MT$40,000 to MT$50,000 in lost revenue alone. Therefore, when he jumped onto the clove bandwagon, he gave it a most royal push. The American trader, Edmund Roberts commented in 1828 that the government of Zanzibar ‘for some time past have turned their attention to the cultivation of spices, the sugar cane, coffee, etc. all of which . . . will shortly be articles of export’. By 1830 an American vessel was able to buy 127 fraselas of cloves from the governor of Zanzibar, the first known cargo of Zanzibar cloves sent to the United States, at the still handsome price of MT$10 per frasela.⁵³ Seyyid Said took a direct lead in this expansion by extending the cultivation of cloves on the plantations he had confiscated or otherwise acquired which, by the time of his death, numbered forty-five. In 1834 W.S.W. Ruschenberger saw about 4,000 cloves trees at Kizimbani, ranging in height between 5 feet and 20 feet, the smaller ones having been planted since the confiscation. In 1840 production of cloves from Seyyid Said’s plantations alone amounted to between 5,000 and 6,000 fraselas, and, by the late 1840s, to between 20,000 and 30,000 fraselas. Each of his numerous children, concubines and eunuchs also had their plots, and one of his elder sons, Khalid, owned ‘the grand and superb plantation “Marseilles”’, so named because of his ‘predilection for France and everything French’. Seyyid Said’s kinsman and governor of Zanzibar, Suleiman b. Hamed al Busaidi, was one of the richest landowners, whose plantations at Kizimbani, Bububu, Chuwini and elsewhere, were furnishing 5,000 to 6,000 fraselas worth over MT$10,000 by the late 1840s.⁵⁴

The ruling Busaidi dynasty was at the head of what was developing as the landed aristocracy. Seyyid Said is said to have compelled his Omani subjects, under threat of confiscation of land, to plant a certain proportion of clove to coconut trees. By the mid-1830s it was reported that:

the easy profits which clove plantations yielded made all the inhabitants of Zanzibar turn their eyes towards the crop . . . almost everybody on the island is now clearing away the coconuts to make way for them.⁵⁵

A French naval officer, Captain Loarer, aptly described this as a clove ‘mania’, and it was still raging in the 1840s. Members of the second most powerful Omani clan, the Harthi, participated in this feverish expansion and its leader, Abdullah b. Salim, who traded extensively, possessed great wealth in land and 1,500 slaves. Hasan b. Ibrahim, who had been a captain in the Sultan’s navy and had been appointed in 1832 as the agent to transact business for foreign merchants at Zanzibar, also owned by 1839 a plantation with 12,000 clove trees at Bububu. It was named Salem after the American port that had initiated American trade with Zanzibar. Between 1841 and 1843 the United States Consul and commercial agent, R.P. Waters, made contracts with at least eight other Arab producers for the supply of cloves.⁵⁶

Though the Omani ruling class undoubtedly dominated landownership at this period, members of other ethnic groups began to join it fairly early on. As early as 1811 a British naval officer, Captain Smee, mentioned ‘some considerable Arab and Soowillee landholders’ possessing from 200 to 400 slaves.⁵⁷ Sadik b. Mbarak, described as a Swahili born at Merka, who had acted as an interpreter for the anthropologist C. Pickering and as a clerk for Waters, had a shamba (plantation) in Zanzibar, though it was probably small. On the other hand, Burton heard in 1857 of an unnamed Swahili who had purchased an estate for MT$14,000, which suggests that it must have been of considerable size. The most important among the Swahili landowners was probably the ruler of the indigenous Shirazi population, Mwinyi Mkuu Muhammad b. Ahmed al Alawi, who lived on the proceeds of plantations at Dunga and Bweni. When he died in 1865 his plantations were inherited by his son Ahmed, who died of smallpox in 1873, and by two daughters who married into prominent Arab landowning families, unions that emphasised the confluence of the different ethnic sections of the landowning class.⁵⁸

Map 2.2 Clove areas of Zanzibar

Plate 4 Mwinyi Mkuu Muhammad bin Ahmed bin Hasan Alawi, the Shirazi Ruler of Zanzibar, with his son, the last Mwinyi Mkuu

By the 1840s some of the Indian merchants had also begun to pay ‘their tribute to this mania’, according to Loarer, each having his small shamba. Ibji Sewji, brother of the custom master of Zanzibar, acquired a new shamba in 1844, and another merchant had 3 plantations and 175 slaves when he went bankrupt in 1846. Production of cloves on non-Busaidi plantations had initially lagged behind, partly as a result of those early confiscations, but as the ‘mania’ gripped the population, production jumped, surpassing royal production in 1845 by two to one.⁵⁹

By the late 1840s, therefore, a landed aristocracy had emerged which, though predominantly Omani, was not exclusively so. And it was as a class that it enjoyed economic privileges, the most important of which was freedom from taxation, although members of the ruling dynasty also enjoyed exemption from duty on the import of slaves. It was only when overproduction threatened the prosperity of the class that Seyyid Said imposed a tax of MT$-1/4 per frasela on cloves from Pemba in an effort to slow down expansion there. The source of capital for the clove economy was primarily commerce which provided most of the Sultan’s revenue and the merchants’ commercial profit. Some Arab merchants involved primarily in coastal trade, such as Muhammad b. Abd al Kadir, diverted their capital from commerce into clove production, especially during the highly lucrative phase in the early 1840s, as did members of the Indian mercantile community. And many caravan traders into the interior of Africa, after three or four journeys, settled down to a more leisured life in Zanzibar. The most outstanding case was that of Tippu Tip who reportedly owned 7 shambas and 10,000 slaves, worth MT$50,000 at the end of the nineteenth century.⁶⁰

It was during this same lucrative period that cloves spread to Pemba. Loarer reported in 1849 that two-thirds of the island had been, until a decade before, ‘a very good forest’ which was then being cleared by Busaidi and other rich landowners of Zanzibar to establish clove plantations. By 1848–9 Pemba was producing 10,000 fraselas of cloves, but the imposition of the tax on Pemba cloves, coupled with the fall in the price that accompanied overproduction by the late 1840s, postponed the rise of Pemba as a major producer until after the hurricane of 1872.⁶¹

So feverish had been the spread of cloves in both Zanzibar and Pemba that they had begun to encroach seriously on areas better suited to other crops and to undermine the islands’ self-sufficiency in foodstuffs. Traditionally Pemba had been a granary for Mombasa and Arabia, and even Zanzibar had exported large quantities of foodstuffs to Arabia and the mainland as late as 1819. But as Burton put it in his characteristic style:

Requiring little care, [cloves] speedily became a favourite, and in 1835 the aristocratic foreigner almost supplanted the vulgar coconut and the homely rice necessary for local consumption.⁶²

Loarer adds cassava, sweet potatoes and grains to the list of foodcrops displaced by cloves. While it is questionable whether cloves could have displaced rice from the flat swampy valleys where they cannot thrive, the higher price enjoyed by cloves may have led to a diversion of labour from foodcrops. This contributed to the transformation of Zanzibar into an importer of foodstuffs. By the 1860s Zanzibar was importing large quantities of rice and other cereals, only a small proportion of which was re-exported, as Table 2.2 shows.