Children Of Ham

Freed Slaves And Fugitive Slaves On The Kenya Coast, 1873 To 1907

Fred Morton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429714498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Children of Ham: Freed Slaves and Fugitives Slaves on the Kenya Coast, I 873 to 1907 is a chronological account of the repeated bids for freedom made by slaves and ex-slaves on the Kenya coast and of the obstacles placed in their way by the British, the Busaidi Arabs, and the peoples of the coast. Efforts to escape slavery are as old as slavery itself on the Kenya coast, but the principal story begins in 1873, when Britain pressured the sultan of Zanzibar to abolish the ocean-going slave trade. Thereafter, political and military conflict intensified on the coast, while opportunities for slaves to escape increased accordingly. This period, ending roughly with the abolition of the legal status of slavery in 1907, corresponds to the imperial scramble from its earliest stages to the effective establishment of European rule.

1
Slavery and Escape

William Jones, 1861:

Cruelly did the other fellow creatures suffer who came with me from my country; but I was free....¹

1. Slavery on the Kenya Coast

Modern plantation slavery was introduced on the Kenya coast no earlier than the 1820s, but within decades slaves made up nearly 25 per cent of the population. Of an estimated 168,000 people living between Tanga and the Lamu archipelago in 1887, slightly more than 40,000 were slaves.² Since the early nineteenth century, when the slave markets in Kilwa and Zanzibar expanded, coastal Kenya had become a slave-importing region in which all coastal groups--Arab, Swahili, Miji Kenda, Oromo, Pokomo, Somali, and Wata--used slave labor. Slaves of the Kenya coast performed a variety of tasks and roles, such as artisans, soldiers, and domestics, but the large majority worked as field hands near the coastline and became the mainstay of a lucrative grain-export trade. Furthermore the majority of slaves lived in areas suitable for farms and plantations. Three such areas of importance had emerged by 1873. The first was the barani (mainland), opposite the Lamu archipelago. The barani was developed as a millet-, rice-, and sesameproducing region in the 1820s by the Bajuni, and other island dwellers, after Sultan Seyyid Said of Zanzibar established Busaidi rule in the archipelago and improved Lamu's port,³ The second slave area was established at Takaungu by the Zaheri Mazrui following their eviction from Mombasa in 1837 by the forces of Sultan Said.⁴ The third was the Malindi hinterland, developed in the 1860s by Said's successors as Zanzibar's breadbasket. In addition to Lamu, Takaungu, and Malindi, small numbers of agricultural slaves were located in the rural suburbs of Mombasa and other southern ports, and in the southern coastal hinterland.⁵

Slavery preexisted the plantations, but in mild form. In the early nineteenth century slaves were owned by leading townsmen. The Mazrui governors of Mombasa were the largest slave owners, prior to their ouster by the Busaidi, and turned out large groups of slaves for public works and military service. Male slaves were especially important to the Mazrui and to the rival political groups in Mombasa as personal retainers who could be called upon for military support. Such slaves, along with the children of slave concubines, were grafted onto existing lineages.⁶ In later years, slavery underwent considerable change as a result of the expansion of grain production in Lamu, Takaungu, and Malindi. Large-scale slave importation resulted in more pernicious forms of slavery based on coercion and on exclusion from coastal society.

By the 1840s, the burgeoning slave community constituted a large and differentiated underclass on the coast. Collectively they were known as watumwa or waja. Those recently arrived, called mateka or waja na ngoma, occupied the bottom rung. New slaves were regarded as wajinga ("fools," "ignoramuses"), whose unfamiliarity with the Swahili language and culture suited them only to the simple, unskilled tasks. They worked primarily in the fields, but some fished, worked as boatmen, or provided general labor in the towns. Slaves who had lived for a while on the coast and their offspring (vivyalia in Mombasa, wazalia in Lamu) performed domestic chores or became skilled artisans in the towns. Male Slaves (watwana), or young lads (vitwana) ranked from the domestics (watumwa wa nyumba), working as pages, personal attendants, and messengers, up to the mafundi, who were the artisan builders, tailors, carpenters, and metalworkers. Women slaves (wajakazi, girls vijakazi) not employed in the fields worked mainly in their owners' domiciles. Slave concubines (masuria, sing, suria), ranked above other female slaves in the home and, alone among slaves, were liable to have their children regarded by the father as free. The daughter of a suria, however, could be made a suria herself.⁷ Slaves distinguished among themselves according to dress and their owners' social status. They used the term mjoli ("fellow slave") to refer to their rank peers rather than to any mtumwa.⁸ Regardless, the freeborn regarded slaves collectively as an inferior, nonassimilable group.

Legally slaves had mere chattel status. Islamic law, of which the Sunni school was used along the coast, enjoined owners to treat slaves well, provide for their upkeep, respect their rights of property and family, and manumit them as a pious act. But the law was not consistently enforced until 1890; no higher authority was prepared to censure owners except in cases of extreme cruelty.⁹ To the freeborn, slaves were kinless persons. A common term for slaves, waja, underlines their plight: newcomers, those without local roots or families.¹⁰ The exercise of full privileges within coastal Muslim society depended on freeborn legitimacy and the relative position of one's family within the freeborn community. Freed slaves (wahuru) thus lacked the family ties necessary for leaving the slave class.Uhuru was an unprotected, though legal, status that carried no importance in the social sphere, and manumitted slaves were commonly reenslaved. Slavery was itself an inherited, though kinless, status for which association with the owner's family determined one's home. The children of slaves (wazalia, lit. "those born here") became the dependents, if not slaves, of their parents' owner and his or her family.

As a class, slaves were identified exclusively with manual labor and dark skin color. "Work is the badge of the slave," noted Charles New who lived in the Mombasa area in the 1860s. In the estimate of freeborn Swahili, work was "disgraceful."¹¹ Debasement of manual labor among freeborn Muslims is a trend noted by other contemporary observers.¹² Among freeborn women, seclusion (utawa) represented a parallel development. Spending time outdoors was for slaves, an attitude observed as well by New during his visit in 1865 to Takaungu, where he chatted with two young married Arab women and an old female slave attendant When New criticized the practice of seclusion, which, he claimed had "blanched [the women's skin] to a sickly whiteness," it was not the Arab women who rebutted him, but the slave:

"Ah," she said, "that may be, but it is not so here. The Waungwana [freeborn persons] must remain indoors, while the slave woman only go out into the sun, and on this account," said she, "look at me. I am black, while these children are almost white."¹³

Cooper has argued that, because many freeborn persons were black, color lines did not correspond with class division, but this was not so.¹⁴ What appears to have been the case was that slaves, being as they were black Africans, imbued their skin color with inferior social rank and encouraged dark-skinned, freeborn Swahili to pose as non-Africans.

Race consciousness among coastal freeborn is revealed in their notions of group descent. During the nineteenth century on the Kenya coast, the historical traditions of many established clans began to affirm southern Arabian or Omani origins. Many accounts of "Shirazi" or other, usually Africanized, origins were submerged or eliminated. The ascendancy of the Arab ancestral myth followed the period of the post-Portuguese influx into East Africa of Shafi Arabs from the Hadramaut, which according to J.S. Trimingham, "was responsible for remolding Swahili culture and imprinting it with the dominant stamp it bears today." Trimingham claims that the "Arab racial myth, together with the strong Arabism of Hadrami influence, caused the Arab element to dominate, whereas the earlier exotic traditions had succumbed to both Arabism and Bantuization."¹⁵ Evidence that the Arab myth was accepted on the Kenya coast exists in the Kitab al-Zanuj ("Book of the Blacks"), a late nineteenth century account which relates the story of the founding of towns on the Kenya coast by Yemini Arabs of the "Tubba' himyarite "¹⁶ The Kitab al-Zanuj places emphasis on several important clans of Mombasa, such as Changamwe, Kilifi, Mtwapa, and Mombasa, the names of which are alleged to represent certain places in southern Arabia. In light of earlier Mombasa clan traditions, which attest to "Shirazi" origins, the Kitab al-Zanuj version appears to be spurious, likely written to promote locally the notion of Arab descent.¹⁷ Of greater importance here, the Kitab al-Zanuj encouraged members of established clans not only to claim Arab origins, but to distinguish themselves racially, as well as in terms of descent--i.e., historically--from Africans. According to the Kitab al-Zanuj, the origin of the Africans is accounted for in the legend of Ham, the accursed son of Noah:

Ham was very handsome in appearance and gracious of feature, but God changed his color and [that] of his progeny because of the curse of Noah, who cursed Ham with the blackening of the features and blackening the faces of his progeny. And that his children were the slaves of the children of Sham and Japhet.

And he made them numerous and he multiplied them. When the Prophet of God (Noah) divided the land among his sons, Africa was dealt to Ham. The latter begat sons who are the blacks, whose hair does not go beyond their ears as we now see them.¹⁸

It was perhaps a natural outcome in a Muslim society in which ancestry played a vital role that the growing presence of a black slave class would lead to the acceptance of the Hamitic myth in popular ideas of race. In 1845 Ludwig Krapf heard it circulating in Mombasa:

I did not know before, that the name of Ham is known to the Suahelees. [To them] Ham signified a black man and a slave. If for instance a slave would take too much liberty in the presence of his master, the latter would say to him: get thee hence, thou son of Hami, thou art a slave and no Unguana [mngwana], which means a free man, or a Lord. All the white people, the Wasungo, Arabs, and Indians are called Unguana, in opposition to the blacks and slaves, or watoto wa Hami [children of Ham].¹⁹

Rendered inferior by color, birth, and occupation, slaves were reduced to objects of abuse. European observers, mostly resident missionaries, witnessed many incidents of severe punishment and cruelty inflicted on slaves, especially in the towns. In Mombasa the means of demanding obedience were harsh. "The instruments by which household dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Slavery and Escape
• 2. Watoro
• 3. The Freed Slaves of Frere Town
• 4. Missionaries and Fugitive Slaves
• 5. Rabai and William Jones
• 6. The Imperial British East Africa Company
• 7. The East Africa Protectorate
• 8. After Slavery
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The Bombay Africans
• Abbreviations
• Glossary of Swahili and Miji Kenda Terms
• Sources
• Index