Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth Century East Africa: The Case of Waungwana Caravan Porters

Rockel, Stephen J.

doi:10.1080/00020180902827464

Cited by 13 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Outside of town, a plantation owner might encourage enslaved laborers to follow Islamic practice. Becoming, at least nominally, a Muslim, was a way for enslaved laborers to express their movement away from washenzi status, as it did for so many others throughout the caravan routes of Eastern Africa during the nineteenth-century (Rockel 2009). But while plantation owners were clearly keen to develop their enslaved laborers into personal clients, as is so acutely shown in the example of Abdalla bin Jabir's aid of Ali bin Abeid, there was also awareness that the enslaved population of plantation were only a part of advancing elite status.…”

Section: Islamic Practice On Zanzibarmentioning

confidence: 97%

The Archaeology of Slavery

Croucher

2014

Capitalism and Cloves

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Section: Islamic Practice On Zanzibarmentioning

confidence: 97%

The Archaeology of Slavery

Croucher

2014

Capitalism and Cloves

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“…Eastern Africa identities in the nineteenth-century were in flux. Ethnicities such as Manyema (McCurdy 2006), Nyamwezi (Rockel 2006a(Rockel , 2009), Arab, and Swahili (Glassman 2000) were mutable. However, this did not mean that they could simply be switched from one day to another, and subjects were constrained in the shifts that they could make.…”

Section: The Caravan Trade Arabs Move Inlandmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Clove Plantations: East African Archaeology, History, and Anthropology

Croucher

2014

Capitalism and Cloves

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Clove plantations such as Mgoli-the site on Pemba discussed in detail later in this book-were a typical part of the rural landscape of nineteenth-century Zanzibar. During the eighteenth century, Zanzibar, along with much of the rest of the East African coast, had come under the rule of Oman. It was only from the beginning of the nineteenth-century, however, that Zanzibar became a serious colonial outpost of Oman, with significant numbers of Omani immigrants (mostly men) coming to the islands. Omani colonial interests were largely focused on mercantile profits from the caravan trade, but the beginning of the nineteenth-century saw a shift; mercantile profits became increasingly invested into plantations. On Zanzibar, an accident of geography and history meant that clove plantations came to dominate the islands' agrarian economy. By the close of the nineteenth-century, Zanzibar was one of the world's major suppliers of cloves (Martin 1991).This last fact hints at the scale of transformation in the agrarian sector of Zanzibar during this period. But this was not simply a shift in terms of what was being grown. Clove plantations are interesting as they were also a root cause of social transformations across much of the islands. They were the institutions through which plantation residents came to understand their lives, through which social positions were often structured, and they were the context of the majority of day-to-day practices of Zanzibaris through the nineteenth-century. Slavery was at the heart of these transformations; agricultural and domestic labor was carried out by enslaved men and women from mainland Eastern and East-Central Africa. Enslaved women were also commonly present as concubines in elite households. As I discuss in greater detail in Chap. 4, the scale of slavery was immense; by the close of the nineteenth-century, enslaved or recently manumitted individuals outnumbered indigenous Swahili and other immigrant populations (even if the line between these groups were not always clear-cut). As several historians have discussed, the large immigrant African population, along with continued labor migration from mainland Africa, came to be decisive in the social and political formation of contemporary Zanzibar

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“…16 For examination of the wanyampara, see Rockel (2006, 72-73). 17 See Rockel (2009) on the Waungwana involvement in east African porterage. 18 For discussions of "intercultural" dynamics in Victorian field notes, see Wisnicki (2010 and.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A romance of slavery: exploration, encounters and cartographies of violence in H. M. Stanley’sMy Kalulu

Livingstone

2017

Studies in Travel Writing

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Crucial to the Victorian exploration of Africa were the books that travellers wrote on their return. The certifying publication, contributing to geographical knowledge, was integral to the claim to be an "explorer". Yet as scholars have examined the literary culture of exploration, they have largely ignored the body of fiction written by various well-known travellers of sub-Saharan Africa. This article focuses on My Kalulu, Prince, King and Slave (1873), a romance by the most prominent Victorian explorer author, Henry Morton Stanley. It reads the novel as an ambivalent abolitionist Bildungsroman and as an imaginative cartography, which maps eastern Africa as spaces of violence requiring outside intervention. The essay also argues that explorer fiction should be regarded as a form of travel writing. My Kalulu is a document of cultural encounter emerging from the circumstances of expeditionary travel, which provides a striking disclosure of the Arab-African transregional caravan system. As an imaginative means of mediating the travel experience, moreover, Stanley's fiction catered for sentiments and desires that had little place in the conventional travelogue.

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Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth Century East Africa: The Case of Waungwana Caravan Porters

Cited by 13 publications

References 12 publications

The Archaeology of Slavery

The Archaeology of Slavery

Why Clove Plantations: East African Archaeology, History, and Anthropology

A romance of slavery: exploration, encounters and cartographies of violence in H. M. Stanley’sMy Kalulu

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