The grave was buried in dry silt and foliage, and it took an hour of hacking and digging in the stifling midday heat before steel chinked on stone. Slowly, amidst the clatter of hoes and machetes, six pillars emerged from the earth. The grave revealed, our excavation party set down their tools to say the Lord’s Prayer in Chichewa, the dust still hanging round them in the windless air.
We were in Mozambique, at the confluence of the Ruo and Shire rivers just across the border from Malawi. We had set off before dawn, travelling by dugout canoe along a stretch of water busy with crocodiles and known locally as Mtayamoyo — the place where you lose your life.
Here, on 31 January 1862, Charles Mackenzie lost his. The last warrior bishop of the Anglican Church, Mackenzie died horribly of blackwater fever whilst leading a campaign against slavery which has been consigned to oblivion in Britain, but deserves to be remembered as amongst our greatest moral crusades.
This was the region that obsessed David Livingstone because, once the transatlantic slave trade had been suppressed, the largest slave market in the world was on Africa’s east coast, and its major source of victims was the territory around Lake Malawi.
The situation Livingstone encountered there in the 1850s and 60s was appalling. Slave raiding was rampant, conducted by local tribes, Arabs and their Islamised African accomplices, and African-Portuguese robber-barons ruling private fiefdoms. Into this scene also entered the Ngoni, an expansionist tribe of the Zulu diaspora. The result was endemic inter-tribal warfare, disruption of agriculture and recurrent famine.
Captives were marched 500 miles or more to the coast, where survivors were sold mostly to Omani Arabs whose empire, re-centred on Zanzibar in 1840, was reaching its zenith. Other buyers came from the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, and even French and Portuguese slavers were occasionally apprehended late in the 1890s.
You increasingly encounter special pleading for slavery as it was practised in the Arab world: that it was somehow not fully “chattel slavery” as in the Americas; that slaves might be treated better, or enjoy a measure of social mobility. For those in domestic service, this was sometimes true, but many others were put to hard labour, especially in spice plantations.
Young boys might be castrated for sale as eunuchs, and there was mass sexual enslavement, particularly of women, with harems kept open on Zanzibar until 1909. The whole system was highly racialised, with the price of slaves varying wildly according to skin tone.
Slavery here had been practised at least since the eighth century. By the mid-nineteenth, between 15,000 and 50,000 slaves were sold each year in Zanzibar alone. Naval policing was difficult. Slavers used small, coast-hugging dhows along an immense, friendly coastline. British warships struggled to intercept them and, if pressed, traders could easily put their cargo ashore.
Read it all in The Critic
