Slavery on the Swahili Coast

EARLY MODERN AFRICA and the WIDER WORLD HIST 1301 | History Slavery on the Swahili Coast A horrific period in human history, the trade in slaves in East African marketplaces—especially on the island of Zanzibar—represents a crossroads where brutality, violence, and trade all came together. East African cultures like the Yao, the Marava, and the Makua were caught up in a vicious cycle of warfare inside this complex web of trade, attacking one other's lands to take captives for sale. After being separated from their families and homes, these hostages had to travel across dangerous terrain from the interior to the Swahili coast, where they were kept in appalling circumstances while they awaited purchasers. Unfortunately, for many, the trek turned into a death march as over three-quarters of them died from sickness, malnutrition, and weariness before they could even be sold into bondage. The need for slave labour was unquenchable, mainly due to Arab Muslims who were forbidden from enslaving other Muslims yet were in need of workers for a variety of jobs. As a result, the majority of Africans who were sold into slavery ended up in the Middle East—the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, or other regions—where they were made to do a variety of tasks. While men were forced into labour as soldiers, sailors, or agricultural labourers, their autonomy was taken away by the harsh machinery of exploitation, women and children were frequently chosen for domestic slavery. Due in large part to the migration of traders from Oman on the Arabian Peninsula, the slave trade on the Swahili coast had become a profitable operation by the seventeenth century. The geopolitical changes of the era, which restricted the slavery of Eastern Europeans and diverted the attention of slave traders to Africa, contributed to this increase. According to some estimates, the number of enslaved individuals traded quadrupled from around one thousand to four thousand per year as the trade's size increased dramatically. But even these startling numbers might not adequately convey the depth of human misery, as some academics argue that twice as many people were forced into slavery. The commercialization of human life on the Swahili coast was further accelerated by the introduction of European slave traffickers in the seventeenth century. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch East India Company bought an estimated half a million slaves in its ravenous hunt for labour to fuel its colonial operations in the Indian Ocean. Comparably, throughout centuries of exploitation, the Portuguese, who had a lengthy history in the area, took countless people from the island of Mozambique. Following their takeover in the eighteenth century, the French inflicted irreversible misery on the Indian Ocean territories of Réunion, Mauritius, and the Mascarene Islands, where over 100,000 people were forced into slavery. The sale of enslaved persons continued even after Britain purportedly outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and sent naval ships to patrol the Indian Ocean in an effort to stop human trafficking. This is evidence of the unwavering greed and brutality of those who stood to gain financially from the suffering of others. The consequences of this horrific trade were felt on many continents, as East Africans were uprooted from their countries of origin and forced into the pit of slavery in far-off places. These prisoners' journey over the Atlantic was a nightmare of cruelty and dehumanisation; they were transported to the Americas in the holds of slave ships, where they were treated like cargo and subjected to unimaginable atrocities. Their bodies were damaged and their spirits were crushed by the weight of oppression as they worked under the lash of overseers in plantations and mines all throughout the New World. But even in the middle of the darkness, there were glimmers of fortitude and resistance as people who were enslaved held fast to their humanity and formed bonds of defiance and solidarity in the face of hardship. They dared to express their agency and regain their dignity under the shadow of bondage, from maroon settlements in the Caribbean to plantation rebellions in the American South. We face not just the depths of human depravity but also the ongoing legacy of resilience and resistance in dealing with this painful history. It serves as a reminder that the fight for liberty and dignity is a continuous one, one that forces us to face historical injustices and strive towards a day when everyone is genuinely free.