Two - The Transformation of the Slave Sector

Summary

The process of integration of East Africa into the world capitalist system from the last third of the eighteenth century onwards distinguishes the modern history of East Africa from the preceding eras. It is this specificity that tends to be ignored in colonial and neo-colonial histories, especially when dealing with the so-called Arab slave trade. The British imperial historian, Sir Reginald Coupland, for example, argued that the slave trade runs ‘like a scarlet thread* through nearly two millennia of East African history, without paying any attention to the historical specificity of the different phases of that trade, the different modes of production to which they were linked, and the specific nature of the slave sector at different times. He went on to conclude that although the annual volume of the East African slave trade never rivalled the numbers involved in the West African slave trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the total number of Africans exported from East Africa during the two millennia ‘must have been prodigious’. ‘Asia, not Europe’, cries Coupland, ‘bears the chief responsibility for the damage done by the slave trade to East Africa’ - a neat apology for the capitalist role in that trade at its height in the nineteenth century. It was the Arab slave trade, he asserts, that ‘intensified … barbarism’ in Africa, and ‘closed the door to all external aids they [Africans] needed to stimulate their progress’ - a justification, to cap it all, for European colonialism.

Although writing forty years later, Ralph A. Austen prefers to stick to the well-trodden path blazed by Coupland. He tries to quantify Coupland's assertions as is the modern vogue. Although he admits that all the sources before the last quarter of the eighteenth century ‘tell us virtually nothing about the absolute quantity of slaves’, he nevertheless proceeds to assign ‘relative indices’ to different periods on the basis of the more precise figures for the nineteenth century. We are thus presented with a formidable table of the slave trade from East Africa since the rise of Islam, translating Coupland's softer prose into apparently more solid statistics.