Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Abdul Sheriff
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January to March to buy merchandise from the monsoon dhows. Taking advantage of the temporary absence of the Omanis in 1771, the local ruling class informed them that they would no longer be tolerated as rulers, though they quickly added that they would always be welcomed as traders.31 Their eager invitation to the Omanis to continue to trade at Kilwa pointed to its economic dependence on the Omanis and their rising entrepôt at Zanzibar.
Kilwa is located towards the periphery of reliable monsoons, and the consequent lengthening of the voyage and the shortening of the trading season at Kilwa led to a preference for Zanzibar as an entrepôt by the monsoon dhows. As Morice explained:
It is to them [Arabs] and to their centres in Zanzibar that the ships from India go in preference to unload their cargoes for distribution all along the coast. When the ships from India arrive in December, January or February, all the Moors from Kilwa, Mafia, Mombasa, Pate, etc., go to Zanzibar to buy cargoes and distribute them subsequently in their districts in exchange for ivory tusks, provisions and slaves. In March and April all the Moors and Arabs come to the Kingdom of Kilwa to trade these for slaves.32
Kilwa’s dependence on the Omanis was also partly explained in terms of lack of deep-sea shipping, capital and commercial know-how, while the Omanis, according to Morice, ‘being richer, more business-like, and more commerical’, were able to attract the trade to Zanzibar. Whatever the merits of these arguments, Kilwa’s economic dependence was a stark reality. As Morice commented, ‘the well-to-do today cannot do without all the materials that the Moors have been bringing them for 300 years’. Consequently, he said, though the people of Kilwa were capable of driving the Omanis back to Muscat, ‘they will never do it so long as some European nation [does not bring] them Surat goods which they need and can take in exchange for their slaves and ivory’.33
The northern circuit of trade on which Kilwa remained dependent, even while expanding the slave trade with the French, thus consisted of the export of ivory, primarily to India and China, and slaves. The imports included Indian textiles and beads of great variety; particularly coarse but durable handwoven textiles, such as bleached basto or bafta, dark indigo-dyed kaniki that was popular in the interior, and dhoties which originated from the Gujarati port of Surat. In addition, striped loincloths were imported from Muscat and the Portuguese Indian port of Diu. Morice was quite eloquent on the role of Indian textiles and beads which sustained the whole trade of the East African coast at this time.34
It was precisely this economic dependence of Kilwa on the Omanis at Zanzibar that Morice sought to break in his schemes. He proposed to provide Indian goods directly, thereby eliminating the Omani middleman and making Kilwa dependent on the French instead. Under his plan of operations he envisaged sending a cargo of French merchandise to Surat to buy there goods suitable for the Kilwa market. In exchange he expected to buy slaves for the Mascarenes and the Americas, and ivory which could be sold at a good profit in India, China or even France. The project called for a capital outlay for the first year of over 170,000 piastres, and Morice also felt he needed the sanction of the French government; neither the capital nor this assistance apparently materialised. The project was therefore abandoned.35
Morice was a monopolist who sought to exclude all European rivals, but not yet the Omanis whom he did not wish to alienate before his project materialised. His monopoly and the freezing of the price of slaves at Kilwa in the agreement may have dampened the growth of trade. With his death in c. 1781 the agreement apparently lapsed, and Kilwa now witnessed intense competition between the French traders. In 1784 one slaving captain, Joseph Crassons de Medeuil, bitterly complained about the lack of planning for the trade as a result of which ‘three or four ships find themselves in the same place and crowd each other out.’ He listed eight vessels which, over a period of 28 months, made a total of 14 voyages and carried off 4,193 slaves, apart from others which may have escaped his attention. This would give an annual average of nearly 2,000 slaves. The Swahili traders were fully aware of this high demand and could therefore dictate the terms, forcing the French to take away slaves without selection. Moreover, the price doubled to 40 piastres and the duty increased threefold to 6 piastres, and even to 10 piastres.36
The consequent commercial prosperity at Kilwa is recorded in the Swahili chronicle of Kilwa. ‘The people and their sovereign enjoyed great profit’, and the period ‘was one of great prosperity for the country.’ A tangible monument to this is the Makutani palace which was enlarged during this period by the addition of a second storey and the enclosure of a large courtyard to the east.37 Kilwa’s prosperity must have appeared to the Omanis as a multiple insult. The shift of the French slave trade to Kilwa from Zanzibar not only deprived the Omanis of part of their middleman’s share, but also buttressed a rebel city-state that threatened to nip in the bud the nascent Omani hegemony. Moreover, the intense competition for slaves in the first half of the 1780s had sent prices skyrocketing not only for the French but also for the Omanis. This underlay an attempt by the Omanis to prevent the Europeans from buying slaves at Zanzibar that led to M. Clonard’s ‘petite guerre’ and to the difficulties that Dutch ships from Cape Town had in obtaining slaves there in 1776 and 1777.38 European competition threatened to deny the Omani date-growers their labour supply. The Omanis were apparently not yet prepared to make the transition, as had the Swahili merchant class, to a more purely mercantile existence from which they might have derived considerable commercial profit by the expansion of the French slave trade. Therefore they had to act.
The French had excited fissiparous tendencies along the coast but, by failing to provide their favourite with adequate protection, they left Kilwa powerless to resist the inevitable retribution. The Omanis may have exploited both the territorial and political weaknesses of Kilwa to subdue it. Since the expulsion of the Omani governor from Kilwa in 1771 Kilwa had been ruled by a diarchy of a Swahili sultan and a family of ‘amirs’ of Malindi origin who represented the interests of the increasingly powerful mercantile class. The latter had successfully resisted the imposition of a tax on them by the ruler in c. 1774, while the agricultural section of the population had to pay the dues on grains and other products. The Omanis may also have taken advantage of the territorial and political fragmentation that was so endemic on the Swahili coast. It seems that many of the Swahili city-states along the southern coast of Tanzania asserted their independence from Oman when Kilwa overthrew Omani rule in 1771, but they were unable to unite against an external invader. By 1784, Mafia, Kilwa’s ‘foster-mother’, on which it had depended for cattle and provisions, had begun to assert its independence from Kilwa, perhaps with Omani encouragement. In desperation Kilwa turned to the pretender to the Omani throne, Saif b. Ahmed, who was seeking a share of his patrimony in East Africa, and together they probed the possibility of French aid, but to no avail. A similar drama was to be enacted at Mombasa four decades later. Kilwa, however, fell under a ‘swift and fierce’ Omani onslaught.39
The Swahili ruler of Kilwa was left with his title and dominion over the mainland section of the kingdom, while the Omanis appropriated half the revenue from the slave trade. The Swahili merchant class had thus once more been subjugated to the demands and control of its Omani counterpart. It was accommodated within the structure of the emerging commercial empire, with both the ruler and the Malindi ‘amir’ being given an annual present of cloth by the Omani ruler. The Omanis, moreover, sought to remove any advantage Kilwa may have had as a source of slaves by charging a slightly lower duty at Zanzibar. The French thus began to shift their trade to Zanzibar though Kilwa was only gradually abandoned by them. Kilwa and the Swahili merchant class there were thus gradually impoverished. In 1804 the customs of Kilwa were farmed out to an Arab merchant for only 6,000 piastres. It had thus become merely an outport of Zanzibar. By 1812 Kilwa Kisiwani (Kilwa on the Island) was described as a ‘petty village’, and was surpassed during the second quarter of the nineteenth century by Kilwa Kivinje, the mainland terminus of longdistance trade routes from the interior.40
Having tasted the nectar of commercial profit, the Omanis were by no means united in their resolve to strangle the French slave trade. The Omani date-growers may have been interested in removing French competition to lower the price of slaves, but the commercial section was apparently too strong to allow the diminution of its profits. The French were therefore permitted to trade ‘in complete safety’, and the duty was increased