certainly provide valuable insights into individual experiences, but the historian would be on shaky ground in any attempt to draw inferences from these specifics to define a general first-passage reality. However, caches of small groups of child slave narratives do exist in East and Central Africa. Missionaries played an important role in encouraging the recording and preservation of slave biographies at their stations in Kenya in East Africa. Significant studies based on these and other missionary collections include the early work of Arthur C. Madan, in which he used narratives from the collections of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA); followed more recently by Ned Alpers (who regarded the UMCA accounts as representing “a genuine African voice”); Margery Perham; and Fred Morton, who explored narratives held in the archives of the Church Missionary Society (CMS).25 The groups are small—those in the UMCA archives number only twelve, with thirty-nine in the collections of the CMS. Nonetheless, these have extended our knowledge of the slave experience on the eastern side of the continent and would suggest that the discovery is possible of further caches of records in the missionary archives of East and Central Africa.
Despite this scholarly interest, no one has yet attempted a systematic group analysis of these pluralities of narratives. Should the Kenyan narratives lend themselves to group analysis, the results could provide a useful comparative study with the Oromo children’s experiences. Of course, the accounts of the Oromo children have the advantage of greater numbers (N = 64), allowing for more effective group analyses and the possibility of determining trends and representivity more accurately. Data quality permitting, there would also be virtue in amalgamating the Kenyan and Oromo data to generate fresh results from the augmented sample. These are enticing possibilities for what the consolidated data might reveal, and for the potential of extending the pioneering findings detailed in this study.
The sensitive topic of African domestic slavery—that is, the enslavement of Africans by Africans as opposed to the raiding for slaves to supply the external, oceanic slave trade—has engaged the minds of many historians of slavery, particularly those who have interpreted the phenomenon as a degree of kinship, and their interpretations have frequently produced vastly different conclusions. Anthropologists have suggested that rather than participating in the commercial trade in slaves, precolonial African slave owners exchanged rather than sold their slaves.26 Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff counterposed the Western notion of slavery as a fixed status of chattel, permanently at the bottom of the social ladder, with a need to consider the influence of rights-in-persons and a slavery-to-kinship continuum within an African model of social and kinship relationships.27 Others noted the incidences of male relatives selling their children in East Central Africa, and there are comparative examples of kin selling their children in southern Asia, where this was apparently common practice.28 Among the Oromo, slave ownership was common.29 Interestingly, the Borana Oromo, living in the southern regions of today’s Oromia as well as across the border in Kenya, practiced a system of adoption, or guddifachaa, by which, for example, child war captives were adopted rather than enslaved. This practice would conform to the Miers and Kopytoff model but takes it further to include those children’s incorporation into the community and ultimately into the national Oromo stream.30
The level of detail of the Oromo children’s data informing this study included the identity of their captors and, subsequently, their successive purchasers and sellers. The children also gave details of the prices paid or commodities bartered for them—for example, “a handful of peppers”—at capture and when they changed hands. These data offered the unique opportunity to explore the nature of the moment of capture and the frequently contested question of agency. They also produced incontrovertible evidence of commodity trading rather than kinship absorption at the time of capture and later during the children’s often long periods of domestic servitude.
The social status of slaves prior to capture has long been an arena of speculation rather than empirical analysis. The rare commentaries on slave status invariably focus on postcapture and postemancipation mobility. However, the eyewitness accounts of two English army officers contributed useful insights into social conditions among the Oromo at the end of Emperor Menelik II’s reign and directly after World War I.31 And Philip Curtin contributed a useful perspective in his study of the social structure of Senegambia, in which he concluded that the slaves who fell within the Senegambian social strata were foreigners or captifs who were later integrated into Senegambian society.32 This study elucidates this generally opaque feature and period of the slave trade and pushes our knowledge forward with intricate details of parental occupation, measures of immovable and movable property (including slave ownership), the species and numbers of livestock, and other measures of relative wealth of the slave children’s families—including evidence that four of the Oromo girls sprang from princely families.
The reasons for targeting particular individuals for captivity and the methods used during capture have been largely broadbrushed in the literature. Those brushstrokes were informed primarily by the third-person accounts of travelers, missionaries, military, and other observers; reasons for capture ranged from spoils of war and housebreaking to debt redemption and retribution; and the modes of capture were largely kidnapping, ambush, or negotiation.33 Whatever else, the moment of capture was indubitably the most traumatic point of a slave child’s life, prompting Fred Morton to write with graphic insight that for children, “life’s memory was anchored in that place and moment.”34 The memories of the Oromo children were indeed firmly “anchored in that place and moment,” and, as demonstrated in this study, they were able to give detailed evidence about the moments when they lost their freedom. They were able to tell us who enslaved them and where their captors came from. They were able to tell us if they were seized by force, if their seizure was negotiated with their parents, if they were sold or bartered, or if they were they stolen by stealth. These are detailed insights from a sizable group of children that no external-observer account could possibly reveal.
Invaluable quantitative analyses have provided innovative models and base grids not only for our better understanding of the middle passages in both the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean slave trades, but also in elucidating the first passage of the Horn of Africa and Red Sea slave enterprise. Philip Curtin broke new ground with his quantification of the Atlantic slave trade as well as his attempt to create a first census. However, he also provided an invaluable model for the calculation of the time slaves spent on the first passage—the journey from capture to the coast—which helps illuminate that recondite and underresearched slave experience.35 Fred Cooper, Jon R. Edwards, Abdussamad H. Ahmad, W. G. Clarence-Smith, Timothy Fernyhough, Ralph Austen, and Patrick Manning have all contributed informed analyses that have advanced our empirical knowledge of the first passage as experienced by captives entrapped in the slave trade of the Horn of Africa, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean regions.36 These studies have, variously, modeled the slave trade, estimated slave numbers, analyzed prices paid, compared routes taken from the scant data available, and also calculated the slave sex ratio on the Indian Ocean side of the African continent.
This study demonstrates the considerable divergence in the Horn of Africa from the Atlantic slave trade norm, not only because of the starkly different target population for slave traders (the trade of the Horn of Africa was a trade primarily of children rather than strong young men to work the transatlantic plantations), but also because the middle passage, which primarily informs our knowledge of the Atlantic trade, was virtually absent in the Red Sea trade. The Oromo children endured no middle passage of any duration. The period they were held aboard the dhows amounted to a matter of a few hours before they were liberated. What this study uniquely contributes in the literature is the probability that deaths on board the slave ships of the Atlantic were not the result of the harsh middle-passage experience alone but primarily the consequence of the lengthy and grueling first-passage ordeal.
When the Oromo children were liberated in the Red Sea through the interventions of the Royal Navy, they technically became “prize slaves.” The British Admiralty instituted a reward system after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 that called for the Royal Navy to intercept vessels believed to be carrying slaves, seize the vessels,
