Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Abdul Sheriff
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piastres, though by 1804 it had risen to 12 piastres. The date-growers had to be content with a much lower duty on slaves going to the north from Zanzibar, amounting to 1 piastre in 1804.41
The Napoleonic Wars – almost continuous between 1793 and 1810 – were a catastrophe for the Omani and Swahili merchant classes in East Africa. They were not confined to the western Indian Ocean but were global, disrupting the previously lucrative slave trade to the West Indies. In 1804 it was reported that all trade except that between Madagascar and the African coast had been suspended. The French slave trade with Mozambique declined precipitously from an annual average of 9,000 in the late 1780s to just over 2,300 in 1794. For the coast north of Cape Delgado, only five vessels traded at Kilwa and Zanzibar in 1803–4 compared with at least eleven in 1788. French slave vessels, moreover, were subject to capture and were thus kept away from Zanzibar by the presence of British warships. To beat the British blockade around the Mascarenes the French had to devise a circuitous route via the Seychelles, or to encourage the Arabs to transport the slaves in their own dhows to the Seychelles or directly to Mauritius, under the neutral Omani flag. Portuguese entry into the conflict, and the consequent cessation of the French trade at Mozambique, may have given a fresh stimulus to the French slave trade with Zanzibar. The Omanis were able to buy many of the Portuguese and British prizes at low prices and use them to conduct their trade. However, the new opportunities could hardly have been fully exploited under conditions of war. The fall of Mauritius to the British in 1810 dealt a stunning blow to the trade. Although slaves continued to be smuggled into the Mascarenes in later years, the slave trade to the south was clearly a spent force.42
The trans-Atlantic slave trade from Mozambique to Brazil revived after the shift of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1807-8, and especially in the 1820s when up to 16,000 slaves were exported in a single year. It is not unlikely that some of these slaves were obtained from the coast north of Cape Delgado either directly or by transhipment from coasting dhows from Kilwa. However, assertions of the British naval officer, Captain Fairfax Moresby, in the early 1820s that twenty-four slave ships had been fitted out from France to export slaves from East Africa, and that there were more than 20,000 slaves awaiting them at Zanzibar, were grossly exaggerated. Even if all these vessels had carried an average of 300 slaves, they could not have carried more than one-third of the alleged number of slaves. Moresby was a British anti-slavery crusader making a case for the prohibition of the slave trade to the south from East Africa. This was ultimately formalised in the Moresby Treaty of 1822 which prohibited the export of slaves to the east and south of a line drawn from Cape Delgado to Diu Head in western India.43 Seyyid Said claimed that this concession cost him MT$50,000 in lost revenue. This figure may well have been exaggerated, and in later years he continued to inflate the figure to impress the British with the enormity of his sacrifice, in the hope of precluding further demands of that nature and to extract the maximum concession in return. However, even if these figures were accurate, they would represent, at the rate of MT$12 in duty, only about 4,000 slaves per annum.44
The Omani and French demand for slaves during the eighteenth century had served the important function of expanding Zanzibar’s entrepôt role in the supply of the imports, and of developing a large hinterland behind Kilwa. By 1785 developments at Kilwa had reached the stage where they threatened to pull the economic centre of gravity towards Kilwa and revive its medieval glory, in this case based on the French slave trade. The Omanis effectively intervened to prevent the French from supplying Kilwa with an economic base independent of Zanzibar. They also set about converting Kilwa into Zanzibar’s outport, but by the end of the century Kilwa’s well-developed hinterland was still Zanzibar’s only limb, and the French market for slaves was still very important in the economy of Zanzibar. It had given rise to a powerful group of merchants at Zanzibar who had flourished by the slave trade and who were exerting a great deal of influence in the politics of Zanzibar. According to Captain Tomkinson, it had been ‘a lucrative trade for the Island and the people in office made a great deal by it’. Zanzibar was farmed to ‘black merchants connected with the French’, although they were, in fact, mostly Omanis. The strangulation of this branch of the slave trade, therefore, was not only disrupting the economy of Zanzibar but also eroding the economic base of the Omani mercantile class at Zanzibar. It is precisely members of this class who began actively to look for alternative markets for their slaves since the slave trade to the north could not be expanded.45 Perhaps there could have been no better substitute than the agricultural exploitation of the East African littoral using slave labour, for the Omanis were soon to discover that the tender conscience of the British abolitionists was not yet troubled by the consumption of slave-grown spices. Thus the stage was set for the transformation of the slave sector from one that was merchantile, based on the export of slaves, to a productive one based on the use of slaves within East Africa to produce commodities for export.
The genesis of the slave system of production in Zanzibar, 1810–1840s
The collapse of the southern slave trade during the first quarter of the nineteenth century posed a grave crisis for the mercantile classes operating along the East African coast. Before the extension of the European slave trade to eastern Africa the Arab traders had enjoyed a monopoly over the slave trade in the Indian Ocean system, and prices remained low. By integrating the Indian Ocean system into the international commercial system dominated by the Atlantic slave trade, the European slave traders had subjected Indian Ocean consumers to the higher prices that were current in West Africa. As a result the price of slaves at Kilwa had doubled by the mid-1780s. The amputation of the link with the Atlantic slave trade system meant not only the loss of a market for about 2,000 slaves per annum, but also the removal of the higher floor prices. By 1822 the price of slaves had halved to MT$20.46 This must have appeared calamitous to the Omani merchant class which had grown dependent on the trade, and which had every reason to look for an alternative. In a letter to his agent in Bombay in 1828 Seyyid Said put the case succinctly:
In consequence of the abolition of the slave trade the collections [revenue] of Zanzibar have been diminished; it has therefore been deemed necessary to make plantations of sugar cane in the islands.47
And, he might have added, of cloves as well.
It was members of the Omani merchant class who were in a position to initiate the transformation of the slave sector of the economy of Zanzibar. From their acquaintance with the Mascarenes they realised that if slaves could not be exported, the product of their labour could. They witnessed in those islands the employment of slave labour for the, production not only of sugar but also of cloves, which had been introduced from the East Indies in 1770. The clove trade was particularly lucrative as a result of the Dutch monopoly over the spices. As late as 1834, when that monopoly had already begun to crumble, it was still yielding a profit of over 1,000 per cent on the original cost of production.48
Contemporary French observers attribute the introduction of cloves to various Frenchmen, probably all slave traders. M. Guillain attributes it to a M. Sausse, a creole from the Mascarenes who is known to have been trading in slaves since 1785. Richard Burton says that Sausse was the first person to extract clove oil, subsequently a universal favourite with the Zanzibar public. F. Albrand credits M. Desplant with the initiative.49 While the Frenchmen probably played a role, no evidence has come to light of French landholding on the island at this time. It is more likely that they did so in conjunction with members of the Omani merchant class.
Zanzibari tradition, current at least from the end of the nineteenth century, attributes the introduction of cloves to Saleh b. Haramil al Abray who appears to have been the doyen of the Omani merchant class. He is probably the same individual who is referred to by several early nineteenth-century accounts simply as Saleh. Born at Muscat in c. 1770, he left his native country young and visited the Seychelles, Ile de France and Bourbon. He is described by Albrand as ‘a perfect Frenchman’ who spoke ‘the creole of Mauritius passably’ and who appreciated ‘the superiority of our arts’, presumably including the use of slave labour in the production of sugar and cloves. He was a friend or a relative of, as well as an interpreter for, the governor of Zanzibar whom Albrand names as Said. As early as 1804 a Frenchman, Captain Dallons, mentions an unnamed interpreter, ‘a subtle and pliant man on whom all success depends’ in the conduct