Population movements
between East Africa, the Horn of Africa
and the neighbouring countries
Bethwell A. Ogot
Although the African diaspora is of global significance, very little research
has been done on the African presence in the Middle East and Asia. How many
Africans migrated to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Aden, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India
and China? What happened to them? What contributions did they make to
the history and cultures of their adopted lands? These are all important ques-
tions which deserve the same serious treatment as that given to the Atlantic
slave trade.
As on the west coast, the slave trade was the major cause of population
movements in the Indian Ocean region. Historians still differ about the volume
of the trade before the nineteenth century. Coupland in his East Africa and Its
Invaders (1938) and The Exploitation of East Africa 1856-1890 (1939), argued
that the trade had gone on between East Africa and Asia for at least 2,000 years.
During that period the theme ran 'like a scarlet thread through all the sub-
sequent history of East Africa until our own day '. Millions of East Africans
were shipped from the region, resulting in a general depopulation of the area.
This thesis is repeated in standard school textbooks.^1
Recently, many scholars have rejected the Coupland thesis. G. S. P.
Freeman-Grenville, for example, has contended that it was only after Omani
Arabs began to intervene in East African affairs in the seventeenth century
that slaves were exported from the Somali region.^2 Edward Alpers goes even
further and categorically states:
It is very clear that the east African slave trade as a factor of continuing historical
signifance traces its roots no further than the first half of the eighteenth century.
Coupland's argument that it was of continuing importance from the earliest contacts
with Asia simply cannot be substantiated.^3
While Coupland might have exaggerated the volume of the traffic in
human beings and its duration, it is difficult to accept the modern revisionist
theory championed by Freeman-Grenville and Alpers that it was negligible
before the eighteenth century. Writing in the same book as Freeman-Grenville,
Gervase Mathew shows that slaves were exported from Opone (the southern