Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / The Indian Ocean Slave Trade: East Africa's Forgotten Diaspora
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've done a lot of episodes on the Atlantic slave trade — the Middle Passage, the Caribbean, the Americas. But there's another global slave trade, just as huge, that barely gets mentioned in most history classes. The Indian Ocean slave trade from East Africa. Luna: I've heard of it, but I don't know much. How big was it compared to the Atlantic? Lucas: Estimates vary, but some scholars think around 3 to 5 million people were taken from East Africa across the Indian Ocean between the 7th century and the early 20th. That's comparable to the number of Africans shipped to the Americas, but it happened over a longer period. And the destinations were different — mostly the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, India, and the islands of the Indian Ocean like Zanzibar, Madagascar, and Mauritius. Luna: So it started earlier, too. The Atlantic trade didn't really get going until the 1500s, right? Lucas: Exactly. The Indian Ocean trade existed centuries before Columbus. It was driven by demand for labour on sugar and clove plantations, but also for domestic servants, soldiers, and concubines. The main source region was the Swahili Coast — what's now Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique. And the key hub was the island of Zanzibar. Lucas: Zanzibar was the epicentre. By the 19th century, it was controlled by the Omani Empire, and the city of Stone Town had one of the most notorious slave markets in the world. Captives were marched from the interior — sometimes hundreds of miles — to be sold there. Luna: What was the interior source? I mean, who was capturing who? Lucas: A lot of it was driven by African kingdoms and traders themselves, who raided neighbouring groups or sold prisoners of war. The slave caravans were organised by coastal merchants — often Swahili or Arab — who traded cloth, guns, and beads for captives. The main route went from the coast around Bagamoyo or Kilwa inland to places like Tabora and Lake Tanganyika. A single caravan could have hundreds or even thousands of people chained together. Luna: The caravans sound like the Middle Passage on land. Lucas: In many ways worse. The mortality rate was staggering. People died from hunger, disease, or sheer exhaustion. Those who survived were often marched to the coast, held in pens — sometimes for weeks — and then packed into dhows for the sea crossing to Arabia or Persia. Conditions on those dhows were brutal: cramped, little water, disease rampant. Many died en route. Lucas: And the destinations weren't just plantations. In Oman and the Gulf states, enslaved Africans worked as pearl divers, date farmers, and domestic workers. In India, they served in the armies of local rulers — there were African generals and even kings in places like Gujarat and Bengal. But that doesn't romanticise it; they were still property, bought and sold. Luna: There were African rulers in India? I had no idea. Lucas: Yes, the Siddi communities in India are descendants of enslaved Africans who arrived via the Indian Ocean trade. Some rose to power, like the Siddi rulers of Janjira, a small princely state. But the vast majority were labourers. And in the 19th century, the trade expanded massively due to one crop: cloves. Luna: Cloves? Lucas: Zanzibar and nearby Pemba became the world's largest clove producers in the 1800s. The plantations were owned by a small Omani elite, and they needed huge numbers of enslaved labourers to pick and process the cloves. The demand was so high that the Sultan of Zanzibar, Said bin Sultan, actively encouraged the slave trade. At its peak, Zanzibar was importing around 30,000 captives a year. Lucas: Now, there was resistance. One figure I want to highlight is a Mijikenda chief — the Mijikenda are a group of peoples on the Kenyan coast. In the 19th century, a man named Mbaruk bin Rashid led attacks against slave caravans, freeing captives and raiding the coastal towns that participated in the trade. He was a complex figure — sometimes allied with the British, sometimes against them — but he made life hard for slave traders. Luna: I've never heard of him. Did he succeed? Lucas: He was eventually defeated and exiled by the British, but his resistance is part of a larger story. The British officially outlawed the slave trade in their empire in 1807, but they didn't enforce it in East Africa until much later. It took the famous explorer David Livingstone — who was horrified by the slave trade he saw — to really bring international attention. His writings, along with pressure from abolitionists, led to the British forcing the Sultan of Zanzibar to close the slave market in 1873. Luna: That's a turning point. But the trade didn't stop overnight, did it? Lucas: No, it continued illegally for decades. Smugglers still shipped people across the Indian Ocean well into the 20th century. And even after slavery was formally abolished in Zanzibar in 1897, former slaves were often forced into low-wage labour on the same plantations. The legacy of this trade is still visible today in the African diaspora communities across the Middle East and South Asia, and in the deep cultural connections between East Africa and the wider Indian Ocean world. Luna: It's a completely different story from the Atlantic, but just as important. I'm glad we're covering it. Lucas: Yeah, and honestly, if today was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's how we keep making these deep dives without ads. No pressure, just if it meant something. Luna: Yeah, every little bit helps. Anyway, back to history. You mentioned the Zanzibar slave market closing in 1873. What happened to the people who were already enslaved there? Lucas: Many remained in a state of semi-slavery for years. The British set up a 'freed slave' village near Zanzibar town, but it was underfunded. Some former slaves joined the British navy as sailors or soldiers, while others tried to return to the mainland, often facing re-enslavement. It's a messy, incomplete story. But the end of the legal trade was a big step. Luna: And what about the clove plantations? Did the economy collapse? Lucas: Not really. The plantation owners simply shifted to a system of migrant labour from the mainland, paying very low wages. The clove industry remained profitable. So the end of the slave trade didn't mean an end to exploitation. It's a reminder that abolition was a process, not a moment. And the Indian Ocean slave trade — the scale, the longevity, the human suffering — deserves a place in our understanding of global history.