The Arab Slave Trade Finally Breaks Through

It's funny how you can live in a society whose wealth was built upon the slave trade and not be aware of it even though the legacy of the trade is layered in the language, social relations, and racialized prejudices of the present-day population. No, I'm not referring to the American South. I'm reflecting on the time I spent learning about Swahili language and culture on the East African coast.

My introduction, through a two-month intensive Swahili language program for graduate students, was not designed to bring out the dark underside of Swahili history. A cohort of 25 students from around the U.S. was subjected to language classes, lectures, and excursions in Malindi, Mombasa, and Lamu. The program, put together by Yale, was an elite training that drew its contacts and expertise from the Swahili crème de la crème of the Kenyan coast. Our principal lecturer, Sheikh Ahmed Nabhany, was a highly regarded poet and scholar but clueless about how to impart his deep, culturally embedded knowledge to American neophytes. (One of his lectures was comprised of a slide show and the Swahili names of 40 different kinds of local fish.)

The men, during our stay in Mombasa (the women were housed elsewhere), were the guests of the illustrious Fahmy Hinawy whose family home had served as the Imperial German Consulate for Britain's East Africa Protectorate from 1903 to 1914. We learned about Swahili cuisine, marriage customs, Koranic education, styles of dress, local structures of government, but nary a word about slavery.

I returned to the Swahili coast three years later, spending ten months as a Research Associate in the Literature Department of the University of Dar es Salaam. I was writing my dissertation on Ebrahim Hussein, East Africa’s best-known (but still untranslated) Swahili playwright. Hussein was also a product of elite Swahili society, but he came of age as part of the Arusha generation, briefly inspired by President Nyrere’s socialist idealism, and opened his thinking up to Marxism and class analysis that were permanently beyond the ideological horizons of Nabhany and his ilk. In fact, Hussein's second great play, Mashetani (Devils), confronted the great historical schism of the East African coast head-on, and still I didn’t see it! 

The “secret” lay in the very name of the country that had adopted an indigenous language as its national medium of commerce, education, and government—a radical linguistic move that no other African country attempted. Tanzania was the welding together of Tanganika, the large inland empire that England had “inherited” from German East Africa when that country was stripped of its colonies after losing World War One, and Zanzibar, the Arab-dominated archipelago that had flourished under Omani and Swahili rulers as the last great slave entrepot in history.

I had done my background research. I'd read that the sultanate of Zanzibar, at the apogee of its trade dominance in the mid-19th century, extracted enormous wealth from the African interior in slaves and ivory—as if "ivory" did not entail the slaughter of elephants and "slaves" did not require the dehumanization of the "washenzi" (savages) of the mainland. The coastal town where I'd visited the College of the Arts was called Bagamoyo—lay down your heart—because it was the point of departure for the tens of thousands of captives who were then transported to the Zanzibar slave market, where they were sold to masters in Arabia, India, and sometimes kept on the island itself. But there was no slave castle, no "Door of No Return," no anguished groups of New World Blacks confronting the brutality of their past—no physical evidence at all.

When I spent time on Zanzibar, I, like all tourists, was dazzled by the exoticism of the Swahili populace, the coral rag masonry, the elaborately carved doors, the profusion of street food sold from the stalls fronting the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, my knowledge of Swahili allowed me to be adopted by a baraza of young men who met nightly for dominoes and banter. Now I was rubbing shoulders with the people, not the elite, who were mostly dark (colorism played its usual noxious role), mostly descendants of the inland tribes who had been forced to carry elephant tusks to the coast and then sold into a domestic slavery of clove plantations. And yet everybody was Swahili, everybody spoke Swahili, and—this was key—everybody was Muslim. Even though the Arab overlords had been killed or chased out during the uprising of the oppressed that fueled the Zanzibari revolution of 1964, Arab values and culture remained dominant. 

Slavery had played an integral role in Arab culture from its burst onto the world stage in the 7th century to the 20th. The toll of the Arab slave trade on the African continent was much greater in terms of numbers (some 17 million as opposed to the 12 million of the Atlantic trade) and lasted almost 1000 years. Zanzibar’s most famous native son, Tippu Tip, had built up his fabulous fortune as the second richest man in history on the backs of the thousands of inland Africans he had forced into slavery. That was how the coastal language of Swahili had become the lingua franca of East Africa, the trade. And yet as far as I could tell, here in the amputated heart of the great empire, nobody spoke of it. It was everywhere and nowhere at once. 

I returned to the States, finished my dissertation, published articles on Swahili literature, and privately vowed to return someday to Zanzibar, even though academia had cast me aside and I had no professional reason to go again. In 2022, I made good on my promise. My Swahili was in tatters, so I hired a local guide to pilot me through new tourist adventures. He took me to see something that hadn’t existed during my first sojourn, the Slave Monument located next to the Anglican Church, which began construction on the site of the last functioning slave market in the world when it was finally forced out of business by the British in 1873. 

There wasn’t much to look at. The sculpture, five downcast figures in rough pebbled stone, is rather restrained. The underground slave chambers are empty. The nearby Heritage Education and Visitors Centre was simply two rooms containing large explanatory panels in English and Swahili. However, this was the only extensive public presentation of Zanzibar’s role in the slave trade, and the picture of the recuperated captives on the HMS Daphne that I photographed there I have not seen reproduced anywhere else. The guides add many gruesome details, not necessarily historically corroborated, about the ordeals that the upcountry captives had to endure during their passage through the slave market. 

Many Zanzibaris refuse to visit the monument or museum, claiming that the narratives are born of more Christian prejudice or Western Islamophobia. That may be so, but look at the photograph. The difference between the slavers and captives, in dress, in demeanor, in gestalt, is just as clear as in any sketch of an American antebellum slave market. Having grown up in the United States, I associated these oppressions with race. I couldn’t do that with the Arab slave trade, at least not on the Swahili coast. The chasm between the masters and the enslaved was defined by religion. Swahili culture—and language—had been Islamized since its inception centuries ago. The word for "civilization" is ustaarabu, the root being -arabu.

There was no “black” population; everybody was “black.” There was no identifiable subset of slave descendants in the destinations of the Arab trade as there was in the West. The trade favored women over men, two or three to one, for obvious reasons. If a female slave gave birth to her master’s child, both were eligible for emancipation. As for the men, the vast majority were castrated, which either killed them off immediately or ensured that they’d leave no biological inheritance.

Anyway, once the Arab dhows had sailed over the horizon with their doomed and helpless cargo, their fate provoked zero concern on the part of the Swahilis past or present.

— Robert Philipson

Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in An Embarrassing History.

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