Population movements between East Africa,
and the neighbouring countries179of the hierarchy was the Sultan. Seyyid Bargash, for instance, earned $25,000
per year from his estates, which were worked by about 4,000 slaves. By 1890,
he possessed 6,000 slaves. His sister, Bibi Zem Zem, owned about 600 slaves;
and Seyyid Suleiman, another member of the Al-Busaidi tribe, owned over
2,000 slaves. On the whole, the largest landlords owned between 1,000 and
2,000 slaves, while the average landlord owned thirty slaves. At the bottom of
the scale was the smallholder who owned one or two slaves. The important
point to bear in mind therefore was that free laboour was marginal to the Zanzi-
bari economy, and on the plantations virtually all labour consisted of slaves.
By 1870, Zanzibar society had undergone a profound change. The
plantation had become important as an investment and as a way of life. But
it did not dominate society. Commerce was still important to a large segment of
the Omani élite. Moreover, political power was a matter of dynastic and com-
munal politics, not a derivative of plantation ownership.
But the plantation system was not restricted to Zanzibar and Pemba.
It extended to the mainland, with old crops such as grain and coconuts as the
main bases. What changed was the farming methods—from subsistence farm-
ing depending on a family supplemented by a few slaves, to plantations, a
large-scale operation based on slave labour. Arabia and the Horn of Africa
imported foodstuffs from East Africa. In East Africa, places like Zanzibar
with expanding populations and reliance on cash crops had to import food
from the mainland.
Grain cultivation therefore expanded all along, the East African coast,
from Mrima Coast to Lamu, supplying markets in Somalia and Arabia, as well
as Zanzibar.
The significance of this development is demonstrated in the history of
Malindi, an old town which had been abandoned. But from about 1860,
Malindi soon became an important grain-exporting centre. It also contained
thousands of slaves.
By 1874, Malindi was well established. Grain exports were worth about
$150,000 a year. Each year, thirty dhows left Malindi with millet, destined
for the Hodramant, while fifteen to twenty exported sesame. In the words of
John Kirk, Madindi had become 'the granary of East Africa'. The height of
Malindi's prosperty was reached in the 1880s.
Thus in fifteen years, Malindi had graduated from being an abandoned
town to the granary of East Africa. The main reason was the abundance of land
slave labour. By 1873 Kirk estimated that Malindi had 6,000 slaves. By the
1880s, there were about 10,000 slaves, owned by about 2,000 Arabs and
Swahili. The richest of them all was Salim bin Khalfan Al-Busaidi, who
migrated to Malindi from Muscat in the 1860s, as a man of modest means. He
became Governor of Malindi in 1870, and from 1885-87 and again from 1891
until his death in 1920, he was Governor of Mombasa. He became the largest