Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / The Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean: Zanzibar and the Clove Islands
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've spent a lot of time in the Atlantic — the Middle Passage, the rebellions in the Americas, the forts on the Gold Coast. But there's another slave trade that ran for centuries, just as brutal, and it's often overlooked. Luna: The Indian Ocean one? Lucas: Exactly. And the heart of it, at least for a couple of centuries, was Zanzibar. That little island off the coast of Tanzania — today it's a tourist paradise, but in the 1800s it was the center of a massive slave economy, built on cloves. Luna: Cloves? Like the spice? Lucas: Yeah. Cloves were the cash crop, just like sugar in the Caribbean. The Omani sultans who ruled Zanzibar — they'd moved their capital there from Muscat in the 1830s — they turned the island into one giant clove plantation. And to work those plantations, they needed enslaved labor, brought in from the African mainland. Lucas: The scale is staggering. By the mid-19th century, Zanzibar was exporting around 20,000 enslaved people a year, just to the island itself and the nearby coast. And that's not counting the ones shipped to Arabia, Persia, India. Some estimates put the total East African slave trade at several million people over the centuries. Luna: How did they get them? Was it like the Atlantic, with ships full of captives? Lucas: Partially. There were dhow ships, but the journeys were shorter — a few days from the mainland to Zanzibar, not weeks across the ocean. But the conditions were still horrific. Captives packed into the hold, often with no sanitation, and the dhows were small, so the death rates could be just as high. One British observer in the 1860s described a dhow carrying 250 slaves when it could barely hold 80. Lucas: But the real difference was that a huge number of enslaved people in East Africa were moved overland, not by sea. Caravans that went hundreds of miles inland, all the way to the Great Lakes region, to what is now Congo. They'd march in coffles — chains around their necks — carrying ivory, which was the other big trade. Luna: So it's slaves and ivory together. Lucas: Right. The same caravans brought both. And the man who ran the biggest of those caravans was Tippu Tip. He was a Zanzibari trader of mixed Arab and African ancestry, and he basically carved out his own empire in the Congo basin in the 1870s and 1880s. He traded guns for slaves and ivory, and his caravans went as far as the Lualaba River, deep in the interior. Lucas: Tippu Tip is a fascinating figure — he was a slaver, no question, but he also established a kind of state, with his own army, and he later worked with Henry Morton Stanley and the Belgians. He even wrote a memoir, one of the few firsthand accounts from an African slave trader. Luna: What about the British? They were suppressing the Atlantic trade after 1807. Did they try to stop this one too? Lucas: Eventually, yes. The British navy patrolled the Indian Ocean, and they pressured the sultans of Zanzibar to sign treaties. The big one was the Frere Treaty of 1873, named after Sir Bartle Frere, a British envoy. Sultan Barghash — who'd succeeded his brother Majid — was forced to close the slave market in Zanzibar Town and ban the export of slaves from the island. Lucas: But it was a partial victory. The treaty only applied to Zanzibar itself and the sea trade. The overland caravans continued, and slavery remained legal on the mainland until the British took over East Africa in the 1890s. And even then, it persisted in some forms deep into the colonial period. Luna: So the market in Zanzibar is closed, but the trade goes underground? Lucas: Pretty much. And the clove plantations still needed labor, so there was a lot of evasion. The British also had to deal with the fact that the Omani ruling class themselves owned slaves — the sultan's own household had hundreds. It was a deeply embedded system. Lucas: One thing I find interesting is how the Indian Ocean trade was often justified differently. In the Atlantic, the ideology was racial — Africans were seen as inherently inferior. In the Islamic world, slavery was theoretically based on religion: you could enslave non-Muslims, but not fellow Muslims. In practice, though, it was still overwhelmingly Africans who were enslaved, and there was a racial hierarchy too. Luna: Was there any resistance? Like the rebellions we talked about in the Atlantic? Lucas: There were, but they're less documented. One famous example is the Shirazi myth — the idea that the coastal Swahili people were descended from Persian immigrants, partly as a way to distinguish themselves from enslaved Africans. That's a form of cultural resistance, though a problematic one. There were also slave revolts on the clove plantations, but they were brutally suppressed. Lucas: Another aspect is the role of the Swahili city-states like Mombasa and Malindi. They had their own slave trading networks, often competing with the Omani sultans. The Mazrui family, who ruled Mombasa for a while, were particularly independent-minded. They fought the Omani expansion, and at one point even allied with the Portuguese. Luna: The Portuguese were still there in the 1800s? Lucas: They had been pushed out of most of the coast by the Omani, but they held onto Mozambique, which had its own slave trade — that's a whole other story. But yeah, the Indian Ocean world was a complex web of competing powers. Lucas: Maybe we can talk about David Livingstone for a second, because he's a key figure in the British campaign. He was horrified by the slave trade he saw in East Africa — he called it 'the open sore of the world.' His explorations were partly aimed at finding routes for legitimate commerce that would replace the slave trade. But he also worked with some of the traders, including Tippu Tip, which complicates his legacy. Luna: That's a lot to unpack. Lucas: If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Even a small contribution keeps us going, and we really appreciate it. Now, back to the Indian Ocean — let's talk about the end of the trade. Luna: Yeah, how did it finally end? Lucas: The British took over Zanzibar as a protectorate in 1890, and they officially abolished slavery there in 1897. But emancipation was gradual — former slaves were supposed to become 'apprentices' for several years, and many ended up working on the same plantations for little change. On the mainland, the German and British colonial regimes also banned slavery, but they needed labor for their own plantations, so they created systems of forced labor that weren't much better. Lucas: The long-term legacy is still visible today. Zanzibar's population is diverse, with descendants of Omani Arabs, enslaved Africans, and indigenous Swahili. The clove economy declined, but the island's tourism now centers on that same history — visitors go to the old slave market, to the Anglican cathedral built on its site, and to the Stone Town where the traders lived. Luna: It's like the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, but for the Indian Ocean. Lucas: Exactly. And that's why it's important to remember. The slave trade wasn't just an Atlantic story. It was a global one, and it shaped the modern world in ways we're still uncovering.