Slavery in East Africa

 Annamaria on Monday

The second in my Africa series relaunched on May 1 in a beautiful new edition.  In celebration of that, herewith, a past post outlining the background history of that story.  It explains why the British were still dealing with the slave trade a few decades after they had, at great cost, abolished it. Stan Trollip, who figures in this little essay, is the Stanley of Michael Stanley - partner of Michael Sears in authoring the marvelous Kubu series. Yes, slavery was still an issue in British East Africa in 1912.  Vis: 

My British East African series is based on the Ten Commandments.  Each story has a plot thread based on the sin of the commandment.  And another based on a sin that has no commandment.  But that I think should.  In The Idol of Mombasa, the second in the series, the sin of the commandment is idolatry.  The other sin is slavery.

When I first started working on the book a couple of years ago, I mentioned the themes to Stanley Trollip.  He immediately said he thought the slave trade had ended well before 1912, when the book is set.  I figured that—as happens with me—I had chosen a topic so obscure that even a person as knowledgeable as Stan would think my story far-fetched.  I had some work to do to make my plot plausible.

I hit the books again.  My further research bore out what I had already learned: In East Africa, slavery did not disappear abruptly the day the British declared it so.  As one of my characters says, “…like every beast, slavery has a tail, and we are dealing with that tail here.”

Let’s take a look at why it took longer for slavery to be stamped out in East Africa.

The black lines represent slave trade routes in the Middle Ages.

In the late Nineteenth Century, the territory that is now Kenya was a protectorate of the British government—a step on the way to becoming a colony.  That is all of it but a ten-mile swath of the coast, which belonged to the Sultan of Zanzibar.

Arabs had been trading slaves from there since the 700s, long before any European put a foot on that shore.  Over the centuries, the Sultanates of the Middle East took African slaves to work for Persia as sailors, to dive for pearls in the Gulf, to fight as troops for Omani.  And mostly to work in houses as domestics and sex slaves.  Some were shipped as far away as China.

They used Mombasa as their shipping point, and the mixture of genes and cultures between the city’s African population and the Arab traders gave rise to the Swahili people and language.  Africans as well as Arabs traded slaves.

When the Brits arrived in East Africa, slavery was an entrenched way of life.  It might have been against British law everywhere else, but it was an important part of the local culture and sanctioned by Shari'a law. 

Also, when the Protectorate of British East Africa was declared, His Majesty’s administrators had a bitter rival for the goodies available to be plundered from Africa—the Germans in German East Africa (now Tanzania) to their south.  The Sultan still had hegemony over the BEA coast.  If the Brits did not make nice with him, he might favor the Gerries and cut them out.  The Brits’ allies in this matter were Arabs who were themselves slave owners and slave traders.

So the British East African Administration never fully committed to enforcing their own anti-slavery laws.

In the end, they prevailed with the Sultan, if paying him 250,000 pounds sterling for the right to govern the coast in his name can be called prevailing.  At least they won out over the Germans.

Little by little, the Brits tried to cut down on the number of people enslaved—by declaring 1474 existing runaways as free men, by declaring that children born after 1 January 1890 were free.  This gradual approach put the government on the outs with the passionate anti-slavery forces on the home front.

In response the government argued that slavery on Zanzibar and along the British East African coast was far more benign than the well-known horrors of the Caribbean.  They could offer as proof that the Qu’ran instructed good Muslims to be kind to their slaves and set them free when they died.

In 1897, the King’s administrators convinced the Sultan to make slavery illegal.  But nobody told the slaves.  If they found out and wanted to bolt, they had to prove that they had the means to support themselves as freemen by showing a contract of employment.  The police ramped up their enforcement of the vagrancy laws to keep the household slaves in their place.

So slavery continued in this area well into the Twentieth Century.

In my story, I wanted to include some low level slave trading, as well as slave possession.  I gave the British a pragmatic fictional reason for turning a blind eye to slave trafficking on the coast in 1912.  It served my story to imagine this.  Just this past Friday, while boning up on my facts to write this blog, I found a new article on the subject.  Here is quote from “The Windmill of Slavery: The British and Foreign Antislavery Society and Bonded Labor in East Africa” by Opolot Okia. 

  

“Moreover, unlike the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the British efforts against slave trading in these areas were more lethargic and gradual and were conditioned more by specific, local circumstances than some amorphous but inexorable anti slavery logic.” (The Middle Ground Journal: Duluth, 2011)

The institution was not finally abolished by law until the 6^th of July 1909.

The Idol of Mombasa set two and half years later in January of 1912.  I hope you will read the book.  Then you can tell me if my story of slavery in East Africa is in keeping with the actual history of the place.

Diasporan Guilt

Definition of diasporan guilt

Diasporan guilt is the term I've coined to define a pervasive feeling of bad conscience for being fortunate to live in a prosperous country (usually UK, France, USA, Canada etc.) while people suffer with poverty in one's birth country in the global south. 

What is the African diaspora?

The word diaspora comes from the Greek διασπορά, meaning "a scattering.” Originally, its most common usage was in connection with the Jewish diaspora, but it’s been extended to other groups, particularly this century. The African diaspora is the global collection of African descendants dispersed throughout the world as a result of historic events, specifically the 16th- to 19th century slave trade from primarily West and Central Africa to the US, Brazil, and Haiti. An aside note, although we hear more about slavery in relation to the US, less than 5% of the total number of slaves were trafficked to the US. More of them went to the Caribbean and South America, particularly Brazil. 

In addition, the African diaspora often refers to Africans who have migrated from the continent but maintain a deep interest in the “motherland” and a willingness to contribute in different ways to the development of the continent. In fact, the African Union defined the African diaspora as "consisting of people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union."

An estimated 11 million Africans were dispersed by the Atlantic slave trade. The modern-day African diaspora numbers about 140 million while the African continent’s population is 1.4 billion.

The African diaspora and politics

The African diasporan phenomenon digs deep into sensitive issues of racism, colonialism, and global domination. Slavery was a system that reflected all of those things and along with slavery came internecine warfare on the African continent. The partition of Africa , also called the “scramble for Africa,” a divvying up of the continent by Europeans in their own interest and not Africa’s, occurred from 1881-1914, during which time the colonization occurred at full speed. In 1884 the German chancellor Otto Von Bismarck held a Berlin conference the purpose of which was essentially to prevent Europeans from fighting each other over territory--who cared about the Africans?

No one knows what Africa would have been like without the slavery and colonization. The African geographic divisions imposed by the Europeans often ignored natural landmarks and political ethnic histories. Could there have been more African unity and development without all these partitions? Whatever the case, Americans and Europeans and Africans came into contact with each other and account for the mixed ethnic nature on either side’s countries to the extent that it exists. In response to a British person’s objection to Indians coming to the UK, standup comedian Russell Peters retorted, “Wait a minute, you started the whole thing!” 

We know many Africans in the diaspora in general do extraordinarily well in their adopted countries, some becoming highly skilled individuals like neurosurgeons. There’s a cruel irony that Africa is suffering from brain drain, and the continent’s best brains are successfully living in the same countries that continue to exploit Africa, particularly in the extractive industries like gold and oil. Foreign aid goes largely into the pockets of the elite ruling class, and I agree with Dambisa Moyo that foreign aid, which arose out of colonization, is not an effective solution to underdevelopment in Africa. It perpetuates the dependency relationship Africa has with the west, and now, with the Chinese.

How diasporan guilt affects me

I have a theory that the dependency relationship Africa has with the west extends to individual Africans. In Ghana, there’s an odd preference given to “asking/begging for stuff” than working to get it--both governmentally and individually. My three brothers and I have family in Ghana on my father’s side and the requests for funds and phones etc. are common. Carlos, the ex-caretaker of our family property in Ghana is barely making it, especially since unemployment and inflation are soaring in Ghana.  I’ve covered Carlos's family’s hospital bills, rent, school for the kids, and so on--apart from the expensive phones and tablets I take for them on my visits. Two of my brothers are quite firm in not getting involved with any such “charitable deeds.” They just don’t see the point, and in some ways I think they’re correct; and like Dambisa Moyo, this giving to the poor can generate a dependency that never ends. Indeed, in a way, my supporting Carlos, his wife, and four kids is a little ridiculous, not to mention unsustainable. But I still do it. Why? Diasporan guilt. I live in a nice house and buy sh*t on Amazon while they suffer in Ghana. Rational or not, it’s a strong sentiment.

Maybe the diasporan guilt was born of my leaving Ghana decades ago when the going got rough with the then-military government and the country’s accompanying economic collapse. Perhaps I felt I had deserted or abandoned friends and family members. My late father was Ghanaian, and even though I don’t even have a Ghanaian passport, the ties to Ghana are clearly still strong. But my always matter-of-fact Black American mother pointed out that even though I was born in Ghana, I’m American through her (jus sanguinis), so I have every right to live in the States. And think about it: if I had never moved to the US, I might well not have created Darko Dawson and Emma Djan. Isn’t life strange?