Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Abdul Sheriff

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СКАЧАТЬ for ivory induced south Arabian traders to extend their commercial activities down the East African coast as early as the second century BC. After the collapse of the Roman empire its place was taken by India and China which remained the main markets until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Gold was procurable in sufficient quantities only from Zimbabwe. As demand in Asia increased at the beginning of the second millennium AD, greater amounts of labour, including that of young females, were mobilised to mine gold. Coastal shipping was extended south from Kilwa to Sofala where it met the land routes from Zimbabwe. The medieval glory of Kilwa was directly dependent on this entrepôt trade.³

      International trade induced not only the diversion of labour from one economic activity to another within the same social formation but, at various times, even the physical transfer of that labour. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which was probably written in the late first or early second century AD, mentions the export of slaves, but only from the Horn of Africa. From the seventh to the ninth century, however, there was a massive demand for slave labour to reclaim the marshlands of southern Iraq. Severe exploitation and oppression of a large number of slaves concentrated near Basra led to a series of slave revolts from the end of the seventh century, and culminated in the famous ‘Zanji rebellion’ in the ninth century when the rebels controlled southern Iraq for fourteen years (868–83). The revolt was suppressed but, by their resistance, the slaves had ensured the failure of one of the few cases of agricultural exploitation based on slave labour in Muslim history. The subsequent economic decline of the Middle East meant that the slave trade did not again attain such massive proportions until the eighteenth century.⁴

      In return for African products merchant capital made available to the East African social formations manufactured goods and luxuries which helped expand the sphere of circulation. During the first century AD, imports included metal tools and weapons, but also wine and wheat ‘to gain the goodwill of the barbarians’. By the thirteenth century they included beads, Chinese porcelain and cloth, part of which was consumed by the affluent merchant classes in the city-states themselves. Such imports may at times have offered stiff competition to local bead and textile industries. These industries, which apparently flourished at Mogadishu, Pate, Kilwa and elsewhere, showed signs of decline, although at Kilwa they were killed only with the coming of the Portuguese.⁵

      While merchant capital thus helped to expand the production and circulation of commodities, it may also have helped to impart to East African economic structures a certain lopsided character, with overdeveloped commercial, mining and hunting sectors, and a more stunted industrial sector. Moreover, international trade appears to have been conducted on the initiative of foreign traders to supply the needs of their own homelands, and generally in their own ships. As late as the eleventh century, al-Idrisi commented that ‘the Zanj have no ships to voyage in, but use vessels from Oman and other countries’.⁶ This suggests inequality in the level of technological and socio-economic development between the trading partners. Under these circumstances there may have been an imposition of a pattern of development on the East African social formations that made them dependent on international trade, and that was more beneficial to the more developed social formations across the ocean. This tendency, however, should not be exaggerated for the period before the rise of capitalism since commodity production, largely of luxuries, played only a limited role in total production.

      International trade stimulated the growth of market towns, some of which may have been initially established by the indigenous people themselves. In these market towns trade provided a base for the emergence of a ruling merchant class which appropriated its middleman’s profit from commodities passing through its hands. It ruled over a coastal population that was no longer undifferentiated. In the first century AD the Periplus talks of ‘men of the greatest stature, who are pirates, inhabit the whole coast and at each place have set up chiefs’.⁷ Commerce may have begun to undermine the tribal constitution, paving the way for the emergence of a class society and a state. By the second century, Ptolemy talks of Rhapta, one of the market towns, as a ‘metropolis’, which Gervase Mathew suggests meant the capital of a state. A thirteenth-century Chinese source describes a stratified society along the coast consisting of the ‘bareheaded and barefooted’ commoners who lived in ‘huts made of palm leaves’, and a ruling class whose stone habitations are alone visible among the coastal ruins today. The populations of some of these city-states are said to have numbered several thousand, and yet none of the ruined cities seem to have more than about fifty stone-built houses.⁸

      In these coastal city-states flourished a civilisation which was prosperous but not self-reliant. The cultural level attained surprised the early European visitors, one of whom was moved to compare the mosque at Kilwa with that at Cordova. A modern archaeologist has been impressed by ‘the complexity, luxury, variety and sensitivity’ of design of the Husuni Kubwa palace at Kilwa. The merchant class, according to the early sixteenth-century Portuguese factor, Duarte Barbosa, exhibited great opulence and luxury:

      The kings of these isles [Pemba, Mafia and Unguja] live in great luxury; they are clad in very fine silk and cotton garments, which they purchase at Mombaca from the Cambaya merchants. The women of these Moors go bravely decked, they wear many jewels of fine Çofala gold, silver too in plenty, earrings, necklaces, bangles, and bracelets, and they go clad in good silk garments.⁹

      But that civilisation was mercantile and dependent, as evidenced by the storage rooms which backed the Husuni Kubwa palace. Its dependence on the international connection was not confined to the economy, but permeated the whole range of cultural and social life of the Swahili city-states. Religion and the fundamental bases of culture generally came from abroad, though they were gradually indigenised. The standing architecture appeared on the coast ‘fully fledged’ in the earliest known buildings, and thereafter, according to Peter Garlake, only ‘a slow deterioration in the standards of workmanship is discernible’. This occurs not only when cultural links with the motherland weaken, but also when commercial connections are strengthened, permitting new imports to extinguish some indigenous workmanship. Thus increased imports of Chinese porcelain began to replace the exquisitely carved coral decorations on mosques and tombs. The reliance of the coast on the international connection was so complete that when the Portuguese cut the economic lifelines across the ocean, the mercantile civilisation suffered a major setback. Some of the most prosperous city-states, such as Kilwa, never recovered their medieval glory.¹⁰

Portuguese intervention

      In 1497 the Portuguese inaugurated what K.M. Pannikar has described as ‘the Vasco da Gama epoch of history’. It was characterised, first, by the ruthless destruction of the pre-existing system of international trade in the Indian Ocean and its forcible integration into the emerging international economic system dominated by Europe, then in transition from feudalism to capitalism. It was also characterised by the dominance of maritime power over the land masses of Asia, and by the imposition of a foreign commercial economy over social formations originally mainly based on agricultural production and internal trade. In their crusade, ‘commerce and Christianity’ were closely intertwined, the former providing the material motivation, the latter the ideological justification. Royal instructions to Portuguese captains enjoined them ‘to conduct war with the Muslim and trade with the heathen’. Should the infidels prove unwilling either to be converted or to engage in trade, then the spiritual weapon of the cross was to be augmented by the carnal weapon of the sword.¹¹

      The Portuguese objective was to capture the Indian Ocean trade and divert it from its traditional paths across western Asia to their own maritime artery round the Cape of Good Hope, thus outflanking the Italian-Muslim monopoly over the spice trade. Their geopolitical strategy involved the blocking of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf by capturing Aden and Hurmuz, the capture of Malacca and Goa to control and centralise the Far Eastern and Indian trade, and the establishment of a provisioning station at Mozambique. The threatened interests of Venice, Egypt and the Indian Ocean merchant classes combined to thwart Portuguese designs commercially, by attempting to deny them access to spices, and militarily, by trying to defeat Portuguese СКАЧАТЬ