Slavery in Zanzibar
Slavery existed in the Sultanate of Zanzibar until 1909. Slavery and slave trade existed in the Zanzibar Archipelago for at least a thousand years. During the 19th century, the rise of large-scale clove and coconut plantations under Omani Arab rule led to a significant expansion of the slave system. By some estimates, enslaved people constituted up to two-thirds of the archipelago's population at its peak. Zanzibar was internationally known as a major player in the Indian Ocean slave trade, where slaves from the Swahili coast of Eastern Africa were trafficked across the Indian Ocean to Oman in the Arabian Peninsula during the Zanzibar slave trade.
During the 19th-century, Britain conducted an international abolitionist campaign against the Sultanate and restricted and eventually abolished the slavery and slave trade in Zanzibar via a number of treaties between 1822 and 1897, resulting in the end of the slave trade and finally the end of slavery itself in 1909.
History
It is unknown when slave trade from Zanzibar started, and it may have existed also before the Arabs arrived in the area in the 8th century.During the Middle Ages, the Zanzibar Archipelago became a part of the Swahili culture and belonged to the Kilwa Sultanate, which was a center of the Indian Ocean slave trade between East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, and the islands of the Zanzibar Archipelago are known to have traded in ivory and slaves long before it became a part of Oman.
In the 1690s, it finally became united with Oman in the Omani Empire.
Zanzibar slave trade
The slave trade consisted of a third of the income to the Sultanate alongside ivory and cloves.The slave dhows were often rented of commercial ventures, and their crew a mix of Arab-Swaihili free men and slaves, with the profit divided via an owner-Captain-crew share system.
Northern slave route
Zanzibar was united with Oman in the Omani Empire, and the history of its slave trade was therefore intimately linked with the history of Oman. Slaves from the Swahili coast were transported via Zanzibar to Oman, and from Oman to Persia and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East. Together, Zanzibar and Oman dominated the Indian Ocean slave trade during the 18th- and 19th-century. This continued after the union between Zanzibar and Oman was broken in 1856 and the Sultanate was split in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman.After the unification of Zanzibar and Oman, slaves became the biggest industry of Zanzibar alongside ivory and clove.
The Arabian slaveships, dhow, were normally rented or were a part of a commercial enterprise, with an Arab and Swaihili crew, partially or fully enslaved, in which the profit was shared between the owner, the captain and the crew.
The numbers of the slave traffic is not known, but one estimation is that about 2250 slaves were trafficked between Zanzibar and the Arabian Peninsula between 1700 and 1815.
After 1867, the British campaign against the Indian Ocean slave trade was undermined by Omani slave dhows using French colors trafficking slaves to Arabia and the Persian Gulf from East Africa as far South as Mozambique, which the French tolerated until 1905, when the Hague International Tribunal mandated France to curtail French flags to Omani dhows; nevertheless, small scale smuggling of slaves from East Africa to Arabia continued until the 1960s.
Southern slave route
The French islands in the Indian Ocean initially imported their slaves from Portuguese Mozambique and from Madagascar, but in 1775 the first French slave trader visited Zanzibar and acquired 1625 slaves during his first two visits, which opened the "Southern route" from Zanzibar to French Mauritius, Réunion and Seychelles.Mauritius and Seychelles became British colonies in 1815, and the British ended the legal slave trade to those islands. In 1848, France abolished slavery on French Réunion.
Slave market
The slaves in Zanzibar were categorized as plantation laborers, house slaves, concubines, craftsmen, coolies and day laborers.After introduction of a plantation economy, slaves were no longer merely exported via Zanzibar but the import of slaves to the Sultanate expanded because of the need for slave laborers for weeding, picking, drying and stemming on the clove and coconut plantations.
Slaves were affordable in Zanzibar, and every free man in Zanzibar was said to own slaves.
In the 1850s, two thirds of the population on Zanzibar are estimated to have been slaves.
Female slaves were generally more prioritized in the slave market in the Islamic world. The Zanzibar slave trade focused on children "the reason given by the dealers being that children were driven more easily, like flocks of sheep...", and particularly girls; while a "fresh boy" newly arrived from the mainland was sold for a price of 7-$15 in 1857, a girl between the age of seven and eight was sold for 10-$18.
Female slaves
The slave market for women in the Sultanate followed the normal pattern in the Islamic world. Female slaves were sold for use as either domestic servants or for sex slavery as concubines.Aside from the female slaves used as concubines in private harems, female slaves were also used for prostitution. While there were male prostitutes, there were very few or no free female prostitutes in Zanzibar. The Islamic Law formally prohibited prostitution. However, since Islamic Law allowed a man to have sexual intercourse with his female slave, prostitution was practiced by a pimp selling his female slave on the slave market to a client, who returned his ownership of her after 1–2 days on the pretext of discontent after having had intercourse with her, which was a legal and accepted method for prostitution in the Islamic world.
In 1844 the British Consul noted that there were 400 free Arab women and 800 men in Zanzibar, and the British noted that while prostitutes were almost nonexistent, men bought "secondary wives" on the slave market for sexual satisfaction; "public prostitutes are few, and the profession ranks low where the classes upon which it depends can easily afford to gratify their propensities in the slave market", and the US Consul Richard Waters commented in 1837 that the Arab men in Zanzibar "commit adultery and fornication by keep three or four and sometimes six and eight concubines".
Sultan Seyyid Said replied to the British Consul that the custom was necessary, because "Arabs won't work; they must have slaves and concubines".
The concubines were often treated harshly by the wives of their enslavers, who were claimed to have " the concubines with a rod of iron".
Sultan Barghash was only married to one wife, who made him the request to never acknowledging the children he had with his slave concubines as his own.
In his contemporary report A Report on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Zanzibar, Pemba, and the Mainland of the British Protectorates of East Africa from 1895, Donald MacKenzie noted that sexual slavery did not, in fact, result in many children, which necessitated the need for constant slave import:
"It is a curious fact that Slaves have but very few children, owing, it is said, to the manner in which very young girls are treated by the Arabs and others ; hence the necessity for the continued importation of raw Slaves to supply the demand. I was much struck with the evidence of non-increase amongst the Slaves as regards children. Taking the death-rate at 30 per mille, upwards of 7,000 Slaves would have to be imported annually to supply this deficiency in labour".
Royal harem
The model of the royal harem of Zanzibar were similar to most royal harems at the time. Enslaved eunuchs were employed to guard and manage the affairs of the harem, while female slave maids were employed to see to the needs of the slave concubines, the wives and the female relatives.The memoirs of Princess Emily Ruete provides valuable insight and description of the royal harem. Sultan Seyyid Said had three legal wives, but despite all his marriages being childless, he nevertheless had 36 children, who must thus have been born to slave concubines.
The concubines were referred to as sarari or suria, and could be of several different ethnicities, often Ethiopian or Circassian. Ethiopian, Indian or Circassian women were much more expensive than the majority of African women sold in the slave market in Zanzibar, and white women in particular were so expensive that they were in practice almost reserved for the royal harem.
White slave women were called jariyeh bayza and imported to Oman and Zanzibar via Persia and it was said that a white slave girl "soon renders the house of a moderately rich man unendurable".
The white slave women were generally referred to as "Circassian", but this was a general term and did not specifically refer to Circassian ethnicity as such but could refer to any white women, such as Georgian or Bulgarian.
Emily Ruete referred to all white women in the royal harem as "Circassian" as a general term, one of whom was her own mother Jilfidan, who had arrived via the Circassian slave trade to become a concubine at the royal harem as a child.
When the sultan Said bin Sultan died in 1856, he had 75 enslaved sararai-concubines in his harem.
Emily Ruete described the multi ethnic Royal harem in her memoirs:
Male slaves
While most enslaved women, eunuchs and children were used in urban households as domestics or concubines, only a minority of non-castrated male slaves were used in the city as craftsmen or porters.The majority of non-castrated male slaves were instead used for hard slave labor in the clove and coconut-plantations.
In 1828 the sultan ordered his subjects on Zanzibar to grow a certain proportion of clove; and since the original inhabitants of the islands, the shirazi, had converted to Islam and was therefore not legitimate to enslave, the growing clove industry resulted in a big import of slave labor.
The sultan's order resulted in a plantation economy centered on clove and coconut plantations on particularly Unguja, Pemba and the mainland of the Sultanate, which resulted in a booming slave import for domestic use in the Archipelago, from which most slaves had previously been sold on rather than kept on the islands.
While Black Africans were not the only ethnicity enslaved, there was a particular racism toward them among Arabs. Black African slaves were referred to as ugly and uncivilised washenzi, and while female Africah slaves were sexually abused by male Arab slave masters, the Arab text Alf Laylah Wa Laylah described how "the good woman will welcome death rather than be touched by a black man".
Slavery in Zanzibar was known to be hard, with slaves often subjected to bad treatment. Slaves were often forced to convert to Islam.
Many enslavers had a reputation of being cruel slave owners, particularly plantation owners, such as Princess Khole; the Hinaway family had 600 slaves on their plantations and was known to treat their slaves harshly; caught ranaways were punished by being placed in the Mapinguni, Mgooni or Mashimoni.
Manumissions normally took place at the deathbed of an enslaver who wished to be given a reward for it in the afterlife, but was otherwise rare; slaves often attempted to escape, particularly from the plantations, and often died from the punishment when caught.