Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Abdul Sheriff

       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

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