Trafficking in Slavery's Wake

Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa

Benjamin N. Lawrance, Richard L. Roberts

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780821444184
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Women and children have been bartered, pawned, bought, and sold within and beyond Africa for longer than records have existed. This important collection examines the ways trafficking in women and children has changed from the aftermath of the "end of slavery" in Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present.

The formal abolition of the slave trade and slavery did not end the demand for servile women and children. Contemporary forms of human trafficking are deeply interwoven with their historical precursors, and scholars and activists need to be informed about the long history of trafficking in order to better assess and confront its contemporary forms. This book brings together the perspectives of leading scholars, activists, and other experts, creating a conversation that is essential for understanding the complexity of human trafficking in Africa.

Human trafficking is rapidly emerging as a core human rights issue for the twenty-first century. Trafficking in Slavery's Wake is excellent reading for the researching, combating, and prosecuting of trafficking in women and children.

Contributors: Margaret Akullo, Jean Allain, Kevin Bales, Liza Stuart Buchbinder, Bernard K. Freamon, Susan Kreston, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Elisabeth McMahon, Carina Ray, Richard L. Roberts, Marie Rodet, Jody Sarich, and Jelmer Vos.

PART I

Trafficking in Colonial Africa

1

Trafficking and Reenslavement

The Social Vulnerability of Women and Children in Nineteenth-Century East Africa

ELISABETH MCMAHON

IN THE waning years of slavery on Pemba Island in the Zanzibar archipelago, a variety of people, mostly women and children, petitioned the British vice-consul for help because they had recently been kidnapped and trafficked as slaves. Scholars often focus on how the slave trade was suppressed during the abolition era; however, it is clear that slavery survived and was reinvented in new forms by traffickers eager to continue the lucrative process. Trafficking and abolition were not polar opposites in East Africa but rather points on a continuum. As the British cracked down on slave trading, trafficking began on a smaller scale, with individuals kidnapping vulnerable people, especially women and children, and enslaving them. While the British abolished the slave trade along the East African coast in 1873, it took several decades of consistent vigilance before the trafficking of large numbers of individuals began to diminish. Moreover, as Hideaki Suzuki has observed, the increase in kidnapping in the coastal and island regions indicates that as abolition of the slave trade progressed, the areas for “slave hunting” shifted from the large-scale interior caravans into opportunistic captures near coastal shores.¹ Kidnapping had certainly occurred throughout the nineteenth century in East Africa, but the locations and manner of trafficking shifted by the end of the century.

In 1895 a newly appointed vice-consul on Pemba Island attempted to extend British political and economic control to the island. Initially there was little intention that the he would have any interaction with enslaved people; he was there to protect the interests of British citizens and subjects (the island’s Indian population). As both Richard Roberts and Jean Allain note (chapters 3 and 7, this volume), European states pushed abolition and antitrafficking policies, and yet they were loathe to enforce them in African colonies. Scholarship on abolition in Africa consistently shows that European colonizers were unwilling to confront the realities of the continuation of enslavement and trafficking in their regions.² The cases of women kidnapped into slavery in late-nineteenth-century Pemba are reflected in the developments and problems of trafficking found one hundred years later; in many respects little has changed. While bureaucracies and international agencies have expanded in the intervening years and pushed for expanding legal frameworks, the chapters in this volume show that, absent the will of officials on the ground, legislation alone will not stop trafficking. Moreover, much like the expansion of kidnapping from coastal territories in the nineteenth century, twenty-first-century traffickers continue to adapt their systems and find ways to work around the laws against trafficking. Jody Sarich and Kevin Bales’s illuminating exposition on visas, in the afterword of this volume demonstrates that legal systems are continually manipulated to expand the numbers of enslaved people. The cases discussed in this chapter illustrate not only the problems of bureaucracies in dealing with trafficking but also how one official on the ground, willing to make a difference, may enact powerful change.

Most individuals, who complained to the British vice-consul on Pemba that they had been kidnapped, claimed either that they were slaves of someone else already, that they were freed slaves and as such could not be reenslaved, or that they were born free. For the people already slaves, reenslavement meant the unpredictability of new masters, under whom working may or may not have been easier. In general, slaves on Pemba were more likely to work longer hours at agricultural work, thus those captured from Zanzibar or the mainland were likely to resist efforts to sell them to a new master on Pemba. Freed slaves, usually women with no adult male relatives, were especially vulnerable to being reenslaved. For both these groups, reputation significantly impacted the results of their efforts to attain their freedom from the British vice-consul. Women who claimed to have been captured into slavery but never enslaved were less likely to get the vice-consul to believe them than women who either claimed to be slaves of someone else with a good reputation or who had been freed and could prove their community connections. These cases illustrate the vulnerability of women to enslavement. While colonial officials asserted a desire to emancipate slaves, in reality they wanted to emancipate male slaves only, not women. The law that concubines were considered part of the harem, and as such not able to seek emancipation until 1909, highlights the fears associated with allowing female slaves control over their own persons. The British government still viewed all women as dependents and believed a woman should be attached to a man. Women who were successful in contesting their reenslavement via the vice-consul did so because they either placed themselves under the protection of another person, usually male, or had recently lost their male guardian.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, kidnapping was a major form of enslavement for Africans, especially women and children.³ The (in)famous narrative of Olaudah Equiano’s enslavement began with children being kidnapped. Thus the notion of kidnapping as part of the enslavement process in Africa was commonplace. While scholars often focus on children, adults were also regularly kidnapped in the East African coast during the nineteenth century.⁴ The records of Pemba abound with stories of kidnapped children, women, and occasionally men. From the men who were hired as porters but were tied up once on board a ship to the children and women who were kidnapped from the beach and even their homes,⁵ the unexpected nature of kidnapping demonstrates the social and physical vulnerability, especially of women and children, in a slave-owning society. Even people born free had to protect themselves from the predations of slave traffickers and also their neighbors. The kidnapping and enslavement of neighbors is less commonly discussed in the literature on slavery. Andrew Hubbell has shown that people in the Niger Bend at times kidnapped their neighbors’ children, causing intravillage conflict.⁶ As I discuss below, people on Pemba at times turned to the kidnapping of their neighbors in an effort to repay debts or make extra money.

Kidnapping for enslavement, as well as reenslavement, was common in both the interior and coastal regions of nineteenth-century East Africa.⁷ From as far north as Lamu to the interior districts and the southern coastal region, opportunistic capture of slaves was a common means of enslavement.⁸ A British official stationed in Lamu in 1884 and 1885 complained regularly about the “slave stealers of whom there are plenty in the area.”⁹ In 1895 the vice-consul on Pemba reported concerns about a disreputable Arab who “was a notorious bad character and stealer of slaves.”¹⁰ Katrin Bromber notes that in Germancontrolled territories “the capture and sale of already freed slave women” was not uncommon.¹¹ While she argues this was “clearly different from the accepted norm,” I would suggest, on the contrary, that it may not have been formally accepted, but nonetheless certainly happened often. Justin Willis argues that around Mombasa, kidnapping happened as early as the 1840s but that it increased by the end of the century.¹² As late as 1920, Harold Ingrams said that people living on Tumbatu Island fled when he arrived because “in the old days slave raiders used suddenly to descend on the island and kidnap any women and children they found.”¹³

In the mid-1920s a missionary named Theodore Burtt from the Friends’ Industrial Mission on Pemba, wrote down brief “life histories” of twenty-six former slaves living on the mission station.¹⁴ From these records I draw some conclusions about the commonality of kidnapping along the Swahili coast during the late nineteenth century. Of the twenty-six former slaves, four were mzalia—people born into slavery on the islands—and the other twenty-two had been kidnapped into slavery. Of those kidnapped into slavery, fourteen were kidnapped as children and eight as adults, although one of the adult men was a dwarf, so he could have been initially mistaken for a child.¹⁵ These data show the emphasis on children as the most vulnerable group to kidnapping and trafficking. Of the eight people kidnapped as adults, five were women. Females made up 66 percent of the overall kidnapped slaves as well, whether as children or adults. Kidnapping occurred with other relatives or friends one-quarter of the time—and these were always among groups of women and children. Females constituted 71 percent of those captured in groups, showing that they were more likely to be kidnapped with family members. Several of the male adults and children mentioned being kidnapped from “the shore,” suggesting this was a real place of vulnerability for males. But most interesting is that 14 percent of the former slaves had been reenslaved by new captors and moved to new locations.

This trend of rekidnapping and movement from the kidnapping location was not unheard of. Donald Mackenzie reported in 1895 that “many of the slaves who have been set free by the Consul-General have afterwards been kidnapped and no trace of them has been found.”¹⁶ Whether kidnapped in Zanzibar, Tanga, Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo, or elsewhere, all were taken far enough away that they could not easily seek redress. Even as late as the 1890s, numerous people complained to the vice-consul of being kidnapped in Zanzibar and brought to Pemba for sale.¹⁷ The three kidnapping cases that I discuss in detail here point to a change in a more localized effort by traffickers to avoid the severe penalties they faced if caught selling or trafficking large numbers of slaves. Traffickers were vulnerable too—to new laws that enforced the abolition of the slave trade.¹⁸ The kidnapping cases from Pemba suggest that traffickers began shifting their tactics in response to the new legal infrastructure of the 1890s: from a regional slave trade to a localized selling of slaves. As I argue below, such kidnapping or reenslavement may have been driven by temporary labor needs and not designed as lifetime enslavement.

This chapter explores the cases of three women from Pemba Island (Bahati, Mia, and Mauwa) who were kidnapped or claimed as slaves by neighbors during the 1890s, in a period when slave trading was no longer allowed but slave owning was still legal. While I focus on three women here, orphaned children were also particularly vulnerable to being “claimed” as slaves by neighbors.¹⁹ Illustrating the social vulnerability of these women, in each instance the enslaved woman was either born free or had been living as a free woman for an extended period. Moreover, each was recognized in her community as a free individual. Yet, their other neighbors (and spouse, in the case of Mauwa) did not want to or were unable to defend the women’s positions as free to those who enslaved them. All three women approached the vice-consul in the capital of Pemba to clear their names and assert their free identities. Critically, these three cases suggest that the phenomenon Bales describes as the new slavery, began well before the beginning of the twentieth century. Bales argues that among the changes from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries is that tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction Contextualizing Trafficking in Women and Children in Africa
• PART I:TRAFFICKING IN COLONIAL AFRICA
• PART II: CONTEMPORARY ANTITRAFFICKING IN AFRICA AND BEYOND
• Afterword The Paradox of Women, Children, and Slavery
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index