190 Hubert Gerbeautells us that slaves were taken from the Horn of Africa, in other words present-
day Somalia. The Berbera region furnished a small number and the Ras
Hafun region even more. Beyond that zone, the Periplus, which describes the
southern Arabs as being firmly settled along the East African coast, makes no
mention of slaves among items traded. From the end of the seventh century
onwards, these Arabs were joined by Muslim refugees. The towns of Moga-
dishu, Brava and Kilwa were founded by the latter in the tenth century. From
there they flocked to the island of Mafia, to various points along the coast,
and to the Comoro Islands. The earliest contacts of Arab traders with the
Malagasy coast seem to date also from the tenth century (Vérin, 1967).
Between the time with which we are familiar through the Periplus and
Ptolemy, and the turning-point marked by the tenth century, the source
materials contain practically no information about the East African coasts and
islands which the Greeks called Azania and the Arabs, Sawâhil. But there must
have been a considerable slave trade there, if we are to judge by the 'Zendj'
or 'Zanj' revolt, in other words the Bantu who were taken to Mesopotamia to
work in the sugar-cane plantations and, in the ninth century, played a decisive
part for twenty years in the waging of war and the formulation of a new State.
The Zendj were finally exterminated, but their revolt contributed to the fall
of the Abbassid Caliphate and put an end to the construction of dams in
southern Iraq, which H. Deschamps sees as the ' first model of a great tropical
construction project involving the labour of hundreds of Negro slaves '.
From the tenth century onwards, the accounts of Arab geographers
enlighten us to some extent on the slave trade. Masoudi, about 1050, speaks of
trade between Mogadishu and Pemba in slaves, ivory and iron which were
exchanged for pottery from China and Persia. Edrisi, in the middle of the twelfth
century, tells how children from Zanguebar were lured with dates and captured,
and refers to the expeditions that enabled the prince of the Island of Qishus,
in the Sea of Oman, to supply himself with captives in the 'Zendj' country.
The prosperity of Mogadishu and Kilwa which Ibn Battuta visited in the
fourteenth century is not unrelated to the slave trade practised by the sultans
of the east coast. Along this coast, an Islamized mercantile society of mixed
blood raised to its zenith a culture which Chittick proposes to call ' primitive
Swahili'.
Arab sailing boats from the Red Sea took on slaves in the Comoro
Islands from Muslim traders. In the fifteenth century, those traders, with
reinforcements from Shiraz, increased their activities and brought wealth to
these islands which ' had become slave-trade centres and stores of human flesh
between Africa and Arabia' (Faurec, 1941).
However, the mass conversion of the Negro peoples along the east
coasts of Africa certainly obstructed the slave trade; indeed, it was much more
rife in western Sudan during the same period. For although the practice of