SURPRISING ELEMENTS OF AFRICAN SLAVERY
By Daniel Karanja

NEW BEDFORD, Mass-The role that black Africans played and their contributions to slavery is almost a taboo subject, most of us put our blinders on in order to maintain a focus on a single dimension of a very complex story . When we look at the broader picture, what we see is actually more interesting and thought provoking.

For instance, did you know that freed slaves living in East Africa frequently had their own slaves when opportunities arose. The names of some of these slave owners can be surprising. One of these men was none other but James chuma of Livingstone's fame.

On his deathbed, he wrote out a will and one of the beneficiaries of his estate was his slave. For someone who had been freed from slaverly by the British, been to a missionary school and spent a great deal of time with Livingstone, one woud have expected Chuma to have higher ideals than slave ownership. Another man in this category was Mbarak Bombay.

When Speke and Richard Burton set out in 1857 to investgate the sources of the Nile, they gathered a crew of porters, guides and an escort guard. One of the soldiers these soldiers was a Yao man who had been freed from slaverly and sent to Mumbai, India (where he aquired the name Bombay).

He then found employment as a soldier for Seyyid Said and had been posted on the mainland opposite Zanzibar when Speke and Burton showed up looking for soldiers. He was volunteered by his commanding officer and therefore left his post to journey with Speke. When they got to Ujiji, we learn from speke's diary that Bombay as with other members of the caravan, bought a slave for himself. (technically, this was perfectly legal)

Africans were also not averse to raiding and selling to slavery their fellow human beings. One especially heart-rending story is that of a boy and his mother sold by a Kikuyu man in 1888. In that year while Count Samuel Teleki was returning from the lake he had just named "Lake Rudolph", one of the many places he stopped at was a kikuyu village somewhere between present day Kikuyu town and Dagoretti.

At that location, there was for sale a "pretty young woman with a baby at her breast" and "a little three year old boy". The seller wanted to sell off the woman and infant but keep the boy. With tears rolling "down the little boy's fat cheeks on to his yet plumber body", the boy cried. A Swahili trader acting as a guide to Teleki wanted to buy the woman but probably did not have enough money to buy the boy too. Teleki's heart softened and he provided the funds to buy the entire family with the stipulation that they would always remain together. Later on we learn that the "jolly little chap" became "a first-rate goatherd[sic]".

A missionary named Charles New who was stationed at Ribe near Mombasa had his first look at "the horrors of slavery, such as we had scacely conceived of" in 1867. While journeying to wards Lamu, he stopped at Malindi (which he found to be "a seething mass of corruption") to strategise on the next leg of the trip. He saw the stocks in which the slaves were locked up like cattle in a yard waiting for buyers.

Here the slaves would be left for days on end "roasting in the sun, and now bitten by the keen midnight blast" He goes on to describe how men were "slung up by their wrists ... and thrashed upon their bare backs within an inch of their lives". The litany of horrors continues on and on. His men, who had accompanied him from Ribe were so afraid that they urged him to return home and stay away from that wretched place.

So how did slaves such as those at Malindi end up in that situation? Were they captured by Arabs from the interior? Some no doubt were, but not all. Later on in 1871, the same missionary had a first hand look into the capture of inocent men and women for slavery. In that year during his first attempt to reach the snowline of Mt. Kilimanjaro, he travelled West towards the mountain. When he reached Moshi, he hired some Chagga men to act as guides and took off.

While walking on a narrow path through a thick forest, some fresh foot steps were observed and his guides quickly rushed forward out of sight, when he caught up with them, they had a woman captive and a dagger at her throat firing questions at her. It turned out that the woman who came from a different tribe, had been travelling with two men and when New's men were heard, the three took off. But the woman was not fast enough and she was caught.

They intended to sell her as a slave but first tried to question her regarding the whereabouts of her escaped tibesmen. In the end, it took all of the missionary's persuasive powers to get the woman freed and on her way. In a case such as this, there were no Arabs or whites, just black Africans stopping at nothing to make a coin at the expense of a fellow human being.

Stories like this are unfortunately numerous, testament to what our forefathers did to their own people. The presence in our languages for words differentiating between slaves and  hired workers is proof enough that this practice was not foreign to us. Man's capacity for cruelty knows no race, colour or creed.