Ebook: The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa

This study was originally intended to cover the slave trade on the East African coast in the nineteenth century. The ramifications of this trade however led to an ever-widening field of research, embracing most of Eastern Africa and extending into the Middle East: a much larger world than originally contemplated, and one in which there is a singular lack of written sources on the slave trade.

A blanket silence has covered the history of the slave trade on the eastern side of the African continent. The self-reproach and polemics, the political and ideological interest which characterizes so much of the writing on the West African/Atlantic slave trade, finds no comparable fertile field in which to flourish on the eastern side of the Continent. There is here no ideological or political cause to serve by such an approach, no lingering bitterness. It is difficult today, when surveying the Eastern African scene, to visualize the dimensions and reality of the slave trade, which dominated so much of the life of that world in the nineteenth century.

In this book, an estimate is made of the total number of slaves exported from Eastern Africa in the nineteenth century. It is based on incommensurate data and appropriate averages; it is no more than tentative, and open to suppression and quantitative exactitude. But to be within a substantial percentage, whether 10, 20, 30%, minus or plus, of the real number is no more or no less than has been done for the West African/Atlantic slave trade with its infinitely more copious documentation and tabulated data.

This is one of the first studies to treat the subject of the Eastern African trade at an overall level and it is hoped that it will help to stimulate further and detailed research at a regional level.