A History of the East African Coast

by Charles Cornelius

  Decomposed or bloated corpses also lay strewn along the seafront, often victims of the infamous and feared Northern Arabs who, when not buying slaves for export to Arabia would simply go and kidnap them, killing those who resisted and dumping their bodies into the harbour. While locals feared the Northern Arabs' tactics, the activities of more peaceable slave traders was accepted by them as the normal state of affairs, and as the slave trade through Zanzibar grew inexorably during the reign of Seyyid Majid, his coffers began to spill over. By the 1860s, Zanzibar was the hub of one of the world's most effective slave trading systems, with tens of thousands of Africans marched from the interior, often carrying loads of ivory led by Swahili merchants and sold in Zanzibar's crowded market in Shangani. One of the greatest of these slave traders was Hamed bin Mohammed, a Swahili born in Zanzibar better known as Tippu Tip because of a facial twitch that resembled a bird of the same name. In the 1860s and 1870s Tippu Tip effectively ruled a region in the Upper Congo half the size of Europe which he bled dry of people in order to supply the insatiable demands of Zanzibar's slave market. In the late 1860s the slave market in Shangani was relocated to Mkunazini on the outskirts of the stone town where it not only had more space but was also fortuitously well away from the eyes and ears of the British consul whose pressure on the sultan to end the trade was gradually becoming more intense, something encouraged by the trickle of European explorers and missionaries who passed through or stayed in Zanzibar from the 1860s, most notably Dr David Livingstone, whose accounts of his expeditions through Africa included lurid descriptions of Zanzibar and the slave trade.

  By the end of the 1860s, Seyyid Majid was spending more and more time away from Zanzibar, preferring to reside at his new palace on the mainland opposite Zanzibar Island. Located to the south of Bagamoyo, he named it Bandur ul Salaam, the Palace of Peace, a name that became contracted to Dar es Salaam, from which the town that grew up around the palace came to be called. Construction of the palace, on a site now occupied by State House, began in 1865, and by 1867 it was complete enough to stage a lavish banquet for the British, French, German and American consuls whose friendship Majid was always keen to court. Majid planned to turn Dar es Salaam into the administrative and commercial centre of the sultanate but his dreams were cut short in October 1870 after he fell badly in the palace and broke his neck, dying shortly afterwards aged 37.

  Majid was succeeded by his brother, Barghash, whose time in Bombay had turned him into something of an Anglophile. In the same year that he took over the sultanate, Dr John Kirk, a surgeon turned diplomat who had considerable experience as a botanist, took over as British consul. Kirk had been with Dr David Livingstone on his five year expedition to the Zambezi from 1858, and the famous explorer played a role in nurturing Kirk's career in East Africa. Barghash and Kirk were to make a great team, displaying immense respect for each other and together they modernised Zanzibar's army, administration and the town itself, with Kirk ensuring Barghash's philanthropy provided Zanzibar with lighting, sanitation and an improved water supply. The high point of Barghash's building spree was the construction of the Beit al-Ajaib, or The House of Wonders, a stunning palace complete with colonnades, balconies and a clock tower which, when completed in 1883, served as Barghash's headquarters. By then, though, the close ties between Barghash and Britain had resulted in another transformation in Zanzibar, this time seeing the end of the slave trade.

   

  Suppression of the Slave Trade

  Without military patrols, the Hamerton Treaty's attempt to limit the slave trade had been utterly ineffective, but by the early 1870s, stirred by Dr David Livingstone's reports of the horrors of the slave trade in Central Africa, demands in Britain to end the slave trade had become such a popular war cry that no British government could afford to ignore it.

  In 1871 a British Parliamentary Select Committee was set up to examine East Africa's slave trade and two years later, in January 1873, with the committee having reported back, a high-powered British embassy arrived in Zanzibar led by a former governor of Bombay, Sir Bartle Frere. Technically, all they sought was Barghash's ‘assistance’ in putting an end to the slave trade, but in reality it hardly mattered whether the sultan complied or not. They intended to stop the slave trade with or without his agreement. Barghash was presented with a treaty that would halt the slave trade along the coast and close down the slave markets of East Africa. When he refused to sign, Barghash was threatened with a blockade of Zanzibar which, if carried out, would have brought the island's economy to her knees.

  The precarious state of the island's economy, something exacerbated by a devastating cyclone the previous year which had destroyed much of the island’s plantations, made accepting an end to the slave trade even harder for Barghash, who was well aware how strongly Swahili traders and farmers wanted him to resist the British. But the British delegation had not come this far to take no for an answer. Deluged by threats both from pro-slavery Swahili and abolitionist Britons, Barghash pleaded to Frere: “a spear is held at each of my eyes; with which one shall I choose to be pierced?”

  As Barghash continued to resist, fourteen British warships moved in and imposed a blockade around all the major slave-exporting ports along the coast. Finally, Kirk informed Barghash that Frere intended to carry out the threat of a blockade around Zanzibar and explained to him in no uncertain terms what effects he might expect should the island be cut off from the mainland. The following day, June 5th 1873, Barghash signed the treaty. That same day the slave market in the town was closed and Frere, fresh from his successful use of gunboat diplomacy, moved north to Mombasa where, on the mainland, he established a town for freed slaves named Freretown in his honour.

  Barghash had done his bit. Two years later he was rewarded with a state visit to England and in the space of four weeks he captivated the nation. Barghash paid visits to Brighton, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, but spent most of his time in London on a whirlwind social tour, taking in theatre and opera, having dinner with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle and with the Prince and Princess of Wales at Marlborough House. Sir Bartle Frere, who accompanied Barghash, made sure the visit was carefully orchestrated, among other things ensuring that one uninvited guest to England, Barghash's sister, Emily Reute, was denied the chance to meet the sultan. She had travelled from Germany in the hope of a reconciliation with her brother but was warned by Frere to keep her distance lest she upset the carefully-laid diplomatic plans.

  Back in Zanzibar, it soon became clear that treaties and patrols alone would still not be enough to end the slave trade. Indeed, while the slave trade in Zanzibar, under the watchful eye of the British consul, was extinguished, in other parts of the coast the 1873 treaty actually boosted the trade. In Lamu the slave trade grew since, far away from Zanzibar and close to the lucrative markets of Arabia, slave traders were able to operate with less chance of detection. Slave trading out of Mombasa and Kilwa were also still big business. In 1877, Kirk convinced Barghash of the need to reorganise the Zanzibari army if it was to be used against the slave traders, and so the old Baluchi soldiers were dumped in favour of African troops who were transformed into a crack unit by the British general, Sir Lloyd Mathews. So successful was General Mathews that the semi-independent chiefdoms of the coast, many of whom were involved in slave trading, were removed from power, strengthening the authority and autonomy of the sultan of Zanzibar. In 1883 British vice-consuls were appointed in Lamu, Mombasa and Kilwa to keep a closer eye on the trade there. In Lamu, the appointee was D.C. Haggard, whose brother, Rider, the writer of 'King Solomon's Mines', penned his great novel, Alan Quartermain, while visiting the island. The combined efforts of Mathews' African troops, the vice consuls and naval patrols gradually forced the slave traders out of the towns, pushing them underground - in some cases literally to places like the caves at Shimoni, which were used to hide slaves from the authorities until they could be loaded on to dhows for the increasingly perilous journey north.

 
; While men like Mathews, Frere and Kirk used guns, boats and treaties to end the slave trade, others came armed with the Bible, not just to eradicate slavery but in a sometimes pompous desire to ‘civilise’ Africans. In 1844 the German Protestant, Johan Ludwig Krapf, arrived in Zanzibar with his wife and baby daughter and soon after established a mission post at Nyali on the mainland north of Mombasa. Tragically, his wife and daughter died within a day of each other of malaria just two months after their arrival at Nyali - their graves can still be seen there - but Krapf bravely continued his mission, joined later by two other Germans, Johann Rebmann and Jakob Erhardt. They journeyed inland and in 1849 Krapf became the first European to see Mount Kenya. Their missionary work was not particularly successful but they established a foothold on the coast upon which others would later build. Two months after the signing of the anti-slave treaty with Seyyid Barghash, the father of the missionary movement, Dr David Livingstone, died near Lake Bangweulu in central Africa. His embalmed body was carried 2,500km to the coast by his servants, Susi and Chuma, on an epic eleven month journey before being shipped back to London for burial in Westminster Abbey. Livingstone's example inspired countless other missionaries and explorers. The night before his body was taken to Zanzibar it rested in the church of the Holy Ghost Mission in Bagamoyo, the headquarters of a group of Catholic priests who had spent the last five years using all the money they could get their hands on buying slaves their freedom. High profile missions like these must have added to the pressure on Barghash in 1873.

  The greatest symbol of the closing of Zanzibar's slave market in June 1873 was the vision of Bishop Edward Steere, the third Anglican bishop to Zanzibar, who secured the financial backing of the Universities Mission in Central Africa for the construction of a cathedral on the site of the old market. To the Victorians, this basilica symbolised the triumph of Christian values over the horrors of the slave trade and its most poignant reminder of what had once been there is a red circle in the floor in front of the altar, marking where once had been the slave market's whipping post.

  Many European Christians had in their anti-slavery arsenal more than just the Bible. Some sought to promote ‘legitimate trade’, an idea that aimed to provide the Swahili with lucrative and morally acceptable forms of commerce as a way to encourage slave traders to abandon their age-old living. Foremost among them was a self-made Scottish Protestant, William Mackinnon.

  Mackinnon was a remarkable man, having risen from the job of a grocer's assistant to become one of Britain's wealthiest men. In 1856 he started a steamship service on the Indian coast, the British India Steam Navigation Company, and in 1872 his ships began operating between Aden and Zanzibar. In 1876 he began the construction of two roads into the interior from Dar Es Salaam, one to Lake Victoria, the other to Lake Nyasa - though they only made it seventy miles inland - and then in 1878 he approached Barghash with the idea of setting up a trading company to develop trade on the mainland on the lines of the British East India Company. Barghash agreed, granting Mackinnon trading rights within the sultanate as well as the power to make laws and treaties on his mainland possessions, but the move collapsed, most likely because the British Foreign Secretary suddenly got cold feet, fearing such a company might eventually need direct government support to survive.

  The fact is that in the 1870s, Britain had no more desire to create British overseas protectorates than they had had at the time of Captain Owen, an attitude shared at the time by every other European country. In the mid 1880s, that situation suddenly changed.

   

  The Scramble for East Africa

  The event that led to direct European control in East Africa actually started in the Congo, but at its root was the growing tension between the major European powers over attempts to extend political and commercial interests in different parts of Africa, a tension that, in the space of a few years, erupted into the biggest land grabbing exercise in human history.

  It all began when Belgium's King Leopold came to verbal blows with Portugal over his dream of a personal empire in the Congo basin. The Portuguese disputed Belgium's rights to control the mouth of the River Congo, and then Germany, Britain and France decided that, even though they had absolutely no interest in the region, they had to become involved. The result was an international conference held in Berlin in 1884 which carved up a region of Central Africa the size of western Europe between Belgium and Portugal. Soon, every major European power wanted a piece of the continent too. First to pile in was the Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, who, in the same year as the Berlin conference, announced a German protectorate over a region to the north and west of the British Cape colony, modern Namibia, in order to protect the interests of German traders there.

  The Scramble reached East Africa at the end of November 1884 when Kart Peters, a founding member of the Society for German Colonisation, arrived in Zanzibar with two colleagues, all disguised as mechanics. Within a month the three men had signed treaties with a dozen tribal chiefs in the region around Mount Kilimanjaro, an area that had long been regarded as belonging to the Sultan of Zanzibar. The following February, the German emperor ratified the treaties and declared a German protectorate over the inland region. Two months later, having informed an astonished Barghash of the annexation, the Germans declared a protectorate over Witu, a town on the mainland opposite the Lamu Archipelago whose ruler, Ahmed Abdullah Simba, was keen to cut his ties with Zanzibar. Barghash threatened to send troops north to force Simba to recognise Zanzibar's supremacy, so the Germans, none too subtly, sent five warships to Zanzibar and suggested that if Barghash didn't accept the German protectorates, they would flatten the island. Aboard one of the ships was none other than Emily Reute, so it seemed as if the Germans were ready to stage a coup. Barghash might reasonably have expected support from the British, but they had no desire to risk conflict with Germany. Bigger global crises, such as the possibility of war with Russia over Afghanistan, completely overshadowed the dispute over Witu and the Kilimanjaro region, so Barghash was forced to back down, also agreeing to a German request for control of the port of Dar es Salaam, a vital point from which to access and exploit the new mainland protectorate.

  To avert future disputes, the British and Germans sat down around a large map and together carved up East Africa. Barghash was not invited. The result was the Anglo-German Agreement in October 1886. It recognised the territory of the Sultan of Zanzibar as consisting of a mainland coastal strip ten miles inland stretching from Cape Delgado in the south to Kipini in the Tana Delta, together with the islands of the Lamu Archipelago, Pemba, Zanzibar and Mafia, and the northern towns of Kismayu, Brava, Merca, Mogadishu and Warsheikh. The vast hinterland that lay behind this strip was divided between Britain and Germany by a straight line drawn from Lake Victoria to the coast at a point close to the Umba River, although as a parting gesture, the British agreed to redraw the line so it skirted the northern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, granting Africa's tallest mountain as a present to the German emperor. South of the line was the German ‘sphere of influence’; to the north was the British sphere, apart from the area around Witu which remained a German protectorate.

  Since neither government was prepared to become directly involved in running their new domains, trading companies were set up to carry out administrative, judicial, military and economic functions. In the German sphere of influence, trading rights were granted to the Society for German Colonization, which later became the German East Africa Company, and to the German Witu Company. The German East Africa Company set up their headquarters in Bagamoyo. Within the British sphere of influence this task was handed over to the British East Africa Association, a company run by William Mackinnon, who had finally succeeded in his desire to create a legitimate trade company. Upon receiving a royal charter in 1888, it became the Imperial British East African Company (IBEA), with their headquarters in Mombasa.

  That Seyyid Barghash was prepared to delegate so much of his authority to three foreign trading co
mpanies is startling proof of how far the power of the sultanate had declined since the heady days of Seyyid Said. Barghash, surrounded by European consuls and threatened with force if he refused their wishes, did the only thing he could to safeguard the territory of the sultanate and his family's inheritance. But by surrendering independence so meekly, it was bound to stir up protest amongst the Swahili, especially after Seyyid Barghash's death in March 1888.

   

  Swahili Resistance

  The new sultan, Khalifa, did not try to hide his dislike for the Europeans but his authority on the mainland was little more than symbolic, and a month after succeeding to the sultanate, Seyyid Khalifa granted the German East Africa Company full administrative rights along the coastal strip adjacent to the German sphere of influence, surrendering even more of his authority.

  In the wake of the new agreement, the Germans entered the coastal region in force and in a breathtaking display of arrogance managed to alienate the local population with a speed that would have embarrassed even the Portuguese a few centuries earlier. One culprit was Emil von Zelewski, an official of the German East Africa Company who, in August 1888, thought it would be a good idea to march into Pangani, tear down the sultan's flag and then announce to the town that he had replaced the local governor as the Sultan of Zanzibar's highest representative. Von Zelewski then decided to have the governor arrested and marched a company of armed German troops, accompanied by a hunting dog, into the town's mosque, an appalling act of desecration in Muslim eyes. Similar acts happened elsewhere along the German-controlled coast and, combined with the sudden imposition of new customs duties and violation of local laws, the coast was soon up in arms, not just against the Germans but against all Europeans. In Tanga, the poet Hemedi bin Abdallah wrote that “at Kilwa and Dar es Salaam, there was a plague of wazungu [white men]. There was no free speech. They had throttled the country.”