The slave trade in the Indian Ocean 197tains to hold slaves. Some distance away, Humblot, the director of a company
and soon to become the 'Resident', bought slaves at sixty rupees a head, then
'hired' them, allowing them to buy back their freedom in five years by their
labour, valued at one rupee per month (Vérin, 1972). On Johanna Island,
Sunley, the British Consul, traded in slaves himself and this enabled him to
supply manpower for the first of the large plantations which were to prosper
on the island. This trade, and the forced labour resulting from it, aroused
Livingstone's indignation and after leaving Johanna he persuaded the British
Government to remove Sunley (Robineau, 1967). Throughout the archipelago,
slavery, which was an integral part of traditional Comorian society, was still
being practised in 1912, when union with Madagascar officially put an end to it.
At that time, Madagascar itself had only recently given up slavery.
Abolition was contemporary with the transformation of the country into a
French colony. The origin and fate of the 500,000 slaves freed in 1896 varied
considerably, as the many Malagasy terms used to designate them show (Nolet,
1974). Throughout the entire nineteenth century a clandestine trade, about
which little is yet known, continued. The principal effect of the prohibition
measures taken by the Europeans and the Malagasies themselves seems to have
been to move the centres and make the traffic more covert. In 1817, Radama I
forbade the slave trade, and in 1877 Ranavalona II freed the ' Mozambiques'.
The slave trade disappeared theoretically in the territories controlled by the
Merina, as well as at Majunga, from 1823 onwards. But shipments continued
elsewhere, especially from Mozambique, with partial redistribution in the
neighbouring archipelagos. As late as 1891, Merina merchants were coming to
Maintirano for supplies of recently landed slaves. As for the effects of the
emancipation in 1896, they were less radical than expected, not only on the
traditional forms of servitude, but even on the slave traffic. In the north-
west, and particularly in the Bay of Baly, the clandestine trade seems to have
been carried on up to 1900 (Vérin, 1972).
The problem of Arab ships registered under French names and carrying
on a slave traffic under the protection of the French flag deserves to be studied
further. We have many unpublished details on a number of cases at the end of
the nineteenth century concerning Arab ships out of Muscat and Zanzibar that
were stopped with slaves aboard, taken on in Madagascar and on the African
coast, whom their owners were preparing to deliver to Mayotte or to take back
to Muscat (Gerbeau, in press).
Behind the effervescence of the slave traffic discernible in all the islands
was the immense human reservoir of the African continent whose east coast
offered a feast on which the slave-traders of four continents threw themselves
during the nineteenth century. The 'Indian Ocean' area, even more than the
Atlantic side, fell increasingly into the hands of the dealers in black flesh as the
century wore on.