3 - Slave Status and the Mission Boys’ School in Zanzibar, 1864–c.1930

Summary

In 1901 in Kiungani Boys’ School, Zanzibar, at nine o’clock on Christmas Eve, the missionary Frank Weston had a memorable interview with one of his ex-slave students, who he was mentoring. The student had been under Weston's guidance for eighteen months, reputedly progressing and flourishing in his teacher-training, which would, if all went well, lead to priesthood. Weston was, therefore, horrified to hear his student admit that he had ‘fallen again’ to ‘the sin of Sodom’. He immediately coordinated a man-hunt for the other guilty party. Weston narrated the events of the evening as follows:

There was I until 11.30pm trying to get this second boy to confess, and then both to repent. […] [T]he repentance of the first boy was beautiful. He told me all I asked without a lie, accepted a flogging which hurt him very much, and prayed with me afterwards for a long time. The tears that he shed when we spoke and prayed were more than he shed over his own whipping, which was severe. That was a compensation.

Weston despaired for his students, lamenting the need to monitor their sexual conduct so closely. The significance of this anecdote to this chapter is not in the fact that same sex intimacy existed between students at mission schools, but in the way Weston explains its existence. He, along with other missionaries, strongly believed that this behaviour was the result of the combined influences of city life and slavery. Weston claimed that: ‘It is not a mainland sin, it belongs to this sink of sin – Zanzibar. And my particular boys are nearly all the city type.’

Corporal punishment was not uncommon on the mission, and Weston was well known for his use of it. For Weston, as the leader of his church, his preferred approach was autocracy. He wrote once in a private letter that ‘epoch-making smackings have a wonderful effect! I do not pretend to feel traumatised by using the cane, nor do I find that it hurts me more than the boy’. He did not reserve physical discipline for ex-slaves and children, adult teachers on the mainland were also targeted, but Weston's disciplining of the ex-slave students reflects a broader history of conflict between missionaries and Africans regarding Kiungani students’ ties to the city.