Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XXXIV

But the New England merchants energetically sailed there and found that its blood-red flag floated above a major slave market with deep links to ivory.

wrote Michael W. Shepherd, a merchant who visited Zanzibar in 1844 and who corresponded with Connecticut's ivory captains.

Arab traders, for centuries had plied well-established routes through the regions later made famous by Nile River explorations.  Tanganyika, Kilimanjaro, and the Zambesi River were new and magical names to the West but familiar to a trade world that was at least 8 centuries old.  At first from North Africa and Egypt, the traders settled throughout eastern and central Africa and maintained trading centers on Africa's great system of rivers.  Cordial, accomodating, and worldly, the traders functioned as a kind of ruling class, their influence transcending regional boundaries in a fragmented continent.  They maintained cadres of armed mercenaries--Stanley called them raiders--and controlled the flow of ivory and captive Africans.

Although known for being extremely courteous to Westerners, they were unwavering in their practice of slavery.

said the 19th century 's most famous trader, Hamid ibn Mohammed, to David Livingstone.

Middle men, traders such as ibn Mohammed, who was better known as Tippoo Tib--the percussive sound of his nickname was meant to suggest gunfire--dominated Africa until the early 1890s, when the scramble for Africa began in earnest and European colonizers moved in to build railroads, govern trade, and, they said, end the horrors of slavery.

However, in the mid-1800s the desire of an industrialized America for luxury goods dovetailed perfectly with an Africa where slavery was legal and ivory was plentiful.

It was a system that worked for everybody--except, of course, the African tribal people.  For them, it was brutal and often lethal, a system designed to exploit them even as it extracted their ivory and broke up their communities.  Their villages in flames behind them, these captured people, shackled together and carrying the heavy tusks, walked as far as 1,000 miles to the coast.  Many died en route , and the longer the journey, the worse the casualties.

Missionary Alfrred J. Swann, an Englishman, was completely unprepared for the hhorrors of the ivory caravans he saw in Africa in the 1880s.  The feet and shoulders of ivory's black porters were a mass of open sores, made more painful by the swarms of flies that followed the march and lived on the flowing blood.  Swann said the porters were

and were covered with scars left by the chikote, a leather whip made of twisted rhinoceros hide.

Livingstone, while exploring the Zambesi River in southeastern Africa in 1858, came upon another group of these refugees: 

The guards ran when they saw Livingstone and his men, and the explorer freed the Africans.  "Knives were soon busy at work cutting the women and children loose.  It was more difficult to cut the men adrift, as each had his neck in the fork of a stout stick, six or seven feet long, and kept in by an iron rod which was riveted at both ends across the throat."

As pressure from the American and European ivory markets intensified, so did the misery among Africans forced into porterage.

And for those left behind in what remained of their communities, there were burdens in addition to personal loss and abandonment.  Historian Abdul Sheriff, an expert on the economics of East African slavery, writes in his Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar that subtracting the strongest from these tribal groups, many of whom were subsistence  farmers, often meant starvation for those not forced into the ivory caravan.

A staggeringly successful Massachusetts trader named John Bertram (and later, a philanthopist) from whom Samuel Comstock bought ivory sent, in 1843, a young buyer who worked for Bertram on a detailed trip to a coastal city near Mozambique, where he and his partner sold New England cottons and muskets and bought goods from African traders:

More bibliography, then I will write later.

The Blood of Puritans Obituary of Julius Pratt, Meriden (CT) Daily Review, August 31, 1869; collection of Connecticut State Library.

"It is the custom to buy a tooth" Michael W. Shepherd, quoted in NormanR. Bennett and George E. Brooks, New England Merchants in Africa, p. 263.

Downing, Tales of Zanzibar, p.1[/size]

COMPLICITY:How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum