202 Hubert Gerbeau
affected by the slave trade; after that date devastation and anarchy were
rampant along the slave routes. But all the regions were not involved to the
same extent. Sometimes a strengthening of power was not unconnected with
profits from the slave trade, as in the case of Seyid Said in Zanzibar; in other
cases, a new power was set up thanks to the trade, as for example that of
Tippoo Tib who, about 1872, founded a State on the Lomani River, a tributary
of the Congo.
Sometimes the slave trade brought about a certain interpénétration of the
African and European social systems, as for instance in Portuguese territories.
More often, it accentuated cultural antagonisms and helped to establish a firmer
claim to political, social and religious originality, especially in the Islamized
portion of East Africa. In casting about for types of research to be undertaken,
the need for a methodical correlation between lands of departure and lands of
destination becomes evident. The slave trade is sometimes overworked as an
explanation of events. Thus 'it is impossible to go on maintaining that the
"Africans" of Madagascar who came there before the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries (Makoa, Mozambika) were brought in as slaves' (Ottino, 1974).
More often, however, we are afraid of going too far the other way, because the
silence about the slave and the silence of the slave are profound. We are
afraid of minimizing the economic and cultural influence of the slave in a
receiving society by failing to pay attention to the quality of the transplanted
African values or by being ignorant of the quantitative extent of the slave trade.
Although the slave trade sometimes brought about a reduction in the population
when an epidemic was carried by a contaminated ship, it was generally found to
add to the population, as the clandestine arrivals alone show. While still
aboard ship, the slave in transit gave vent to his feelings by his songs, his
rebellion or his suicide. It may not always be possible to locate him in the
archives, but he did leave traces of his departure and his arrival. I should like
to recall that there are two ways of approaching the phenomenon of the slave
trade when written documents are scarce. One way is via archaeology, which
may confirm, ' sometimes in a spectacular fashion, realities of ancient times
that are reflected in the texts'; and the second is via oral tradition which,
although 'a very tenuous Ariadne's clew',^8 may save us from losing our way
once and for all. P. Vérin observed in the Boeny area, in Madagascar, the
presence of eighteenth-century monuments whose construction was directly
linked to slave-trade profits. The excavations currently under way in East
Africa and Madagascar, those recently begun in the Comoros, and perhaps
even those being planned in the Laccadive and Maldive Islands may yield a
wealth of information. No site in the Indian Ocean should be excluded out of
hand. The difficulty facing the historian of the slave trade is how to single out
the detail which is significant for his subject from the mass of data available,
without making arbitrary additions.