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(^198) Hubert Gerbeau
The Bombay Record Office enables us to follow the last stages of the
importation of African slaves into India in the nineteenth century, while the
New Delhi archives reveal the struggle of the British against the slave trade
during the same period. In 1814, ships from Muscat brought slaves from Africa
whom they exchanged for Hindus to be sold in Zanzibar. By the 1840s it would
seem that only a few hundred African slaves a year were being brought to India
(Keswani, 1974). The huge demand for slave labour came from the islands of
the Indian Ocean, to which I have already referred, the Muslim countries
where slavery had existed for thousands of years, and the American continent
with its adjacent islands.
For the slave trade in the Portuguese possessions, a great deal remains to
be unearthed in the Lisbon archives and in those of Lourenço Marques, and
these data should be compared with those to be found in the receiving countries
and with diplomatic records, especially British ones. Estimates based on Foreign
Office documents already reveal the extent of the traffic in Mozambique in the
1817-43 period, both as regards departures from Africa and arrivals in slave
countries such as Brazil and Cuba (Curtin, 1969). The existence of slaves in the
Portuguese colonies until 1869 undeniably stimulated the clandestine traffic,
despite the Anglo-Portuguese Agreement of 1842 prohibiting the slave trade.
The incident of the Charles-et-Georges, intercepted in 1857 while sailing from
Mozambique to Réunion with 110 Negroes aboard, who were theoretically
'free-employees' but claimed to be slaves stolen from their masters, has a
certain piquancy when discovered in both the Portuguese and the French
archives. A commerce in slaves seems to have been carried on as late as the
1870s along the coasts of Mozambique (Filliot, 1974).
At the latitude of the Islamized towns along the coast, the slave routes
penetrated into the interior. In the centre, across from Zanzibar, was the road
of the Nyamwezi; to the north that of the Kamba; and to the south that of
the Yao. A great deal has been written about this slave trade, its volume, its
atrocities and the reactions to which they gave rise. For the record, I would
mention the accounts of such European travellers as Burton (1857-59), Living-
stone (1858-64 and 1866-73) and Cameron (1873-76). The interior routes
were dotted with supply centres and the traffic was in the hands of local chiefs
and a few hundred Arabs. The money-lenders were Banyans, i.e. Indian mer-
chants settled in Zanzibar. The slave trade was stimulated on that island when
Seyid Said, the Sultan of Muscat, established his capital there in 1832. The
cultivation of clove trees, sugar cane and copra in Zanzibar and Pemba
created the need for a fresh batch of slaves every three or four years. But this
manpower drain does not suffice to explain the annual importation of 15,000
slaves from 1830 to 1873, as recorded in the customs registers of Zanzibar
(Marissal, 1970). Some of these slaves, to whom must be added those who
arrived fraudulently and those who were disembarked in other ports, were