2 - Building the Slave Market Church in Zanzibar, 1864–1900

Summary

It was the Christmas Day service of 1879 when the building work of Zanzibar's Slave Market Memorial Church was almost complete. Scaffold poles were adorned with palm branches and the floor was laid with grass mats. Benches and chairs were brought in for the use of the missionaries and other Europeans from the town; everyone else sat on the floor. The congregation, all dressed in their finest attire, was noted as an ‘effective and picturesque’ symbol of the mission's progress as it included Arabs and ex-slaves, ‘Groups so similar, but assembled for how different a purpose!’ Six years earlier the site of the church had been ‘the last open slave market in the world’, now it epitomised the presumed affinity between Christianity and anti-slavery as a ‘home of freedom’ for ‘all colours and races’. The edifice was said to be built by the freed slaves under the mission's care at the Mbweni shamba (farm) under the initiative of Edward Steere, a UMCA Bishop (1873–82). The UMCA made much of their choice to employ ex-slaves as labourers, which symbolised their commitment to the anti-slavery cause. The Cathedral still stands today, nearby a building with dark cellars popularly thought to be where slaves were kept. Tour guides routinely inform visitors that the glorious juxtaposition to this dark past is that freed slaves built the Cathedral as part of the missionaries’ humanitarian efforts to provide employment and general care to the slaves who had been rescued by the British navy; thus, a promising sign of a transition to wage labour in East Africa.

However, in 1883 Steere was posthumously accused (by a member of the same missionary society) of employing slave labour to build this monument to Christianity and anti-slavery. The Cathedral had not, after all, been built solely with free labour. Steere had contracted hire slaves, paying them a wage, only some of which their masters would allow them to keep. Hiring slaves was a common labour practice for Europeans and Indians in Zanzibar, most notably amongst the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) in the 1890s. This practice offended British audiences, and slave owners saw it as hypocritical. This was quite a different matter from taking in runaway slaves or redeeming slaves, a practice that has been more widely researched.