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The wretched of East Africa

Friday April 22 2016
BookPicture

The Wretched Africans, by Joe Khamisi. PHOTO | GLORIA MWANIGA

Slavery in East and Central Africa in the 19th century isn’t talked about much. Conversations about slavery generally focus on the trans-Atlantic slave trade from West Africa. Moreover, books by Africans on slavery are hard to come by because back then, the “wretched” African wasn’t allowed to pen his story.

But now, Joe Khamisi, a third generation descendant of slaves, has written about the injustices that befell his ancestors at the hands of Arab and white slavers. The Wretched Africans: A Study of Rabai and Freretown Slave Settlements, was launched at the Goethe Institut in Nairobi on April 7.

Dedicated to victims of slavery the world over, the book begins with testimonies of child slaves captured and sold off, or given to debtors to settle debts.

The book tells of Africans thrown into overcrowded dhows where many suffocated. The few who survived were shipped off to Arabia to become eunuchs, concubines, pearl divers or slaves.

The lucky ones were saved when the British Navy intercepted the dhows; of these, some were sent to India while others, like Khamisi’s grandmothers Pauline and Kalekwa, were rescued by missionaries and settled at Rabai on Kenya’s Coast.

The book is divided into five parts, each dealing with a particular theme. Part one covers the evils of slavery and is a heart-wrenching account of its genesis, the areas where the slaves were captured from, the names of African chiefs who sold off their subjects, and how the slave market in Zanzibar worked.  

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Of the inhumane treatment of the slaves, Khamisi writes: “Their necks galling and jolted almost to dislocation in the prong of the rough branch by which they were secured, with heavy chains on their hands, backs smarting under frequent blows, loins lank with starvation and tongues withered with thirst, with burdens upon their heads and still heavier ones on their hearts…’’

The second part of the book narrates the tales of slaves who went to Muscat and India. This is where he writes about the very learned and sophisticated Bombay Africans. Khamisi also uses this chapter to examine the German missionaries Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann and their work at Rabai.

We are enlightened about the difficulties they encountered trying to convert deeply traditional Mijikendas. Khamisi writes about Rebmann’s racism and disdain of Africans, of David Livingstone’s friendship with notorious slavers like Tippu Tip, and his “sexual adventures” with African women of which he wrote about to a friend, saying that ‘‘he had had so many African women he felt like a famously prolific biblical lover.’’

Khamisi tells of the songs chanted by happy slavers and bruised and battered slaves as they entered Bagamoyo where the caravans stopped briefly before the final sea journey to the Zanzibar slave market.

The book is easy to read as the thematic chapters keep the story flowing. Khamisi includes photographs of the Zanzibar slave market with slaves chained together and displayed as merchandise, and freedom certificates: The images help the reader visualise the events that took place.

The author does an impressive job of exposing 19th century slavery. He takes us on a journey through every aspect of the inhuman trade. Right from its financing by savvy Indian merchants, to the return of the Bombay Africans under the leadership of Reverend William Jones, and into the slave settlements where we encounter a clash of Christian and African cultures and a futile attempt by the missionaries to fully integrate the cultures of the slave returnees — “wamisheni” — and  the local  Rabai community.

In the end, Khamisi leaves us with the question of reparation for the slave descendants to compensate for the many years of slavery and suffering. Even so, one feels that such an eventuality, despite its noble intentions, will neither repair the damage done nor erase the stigma and social exclusion that still follows these children.

In the words of James Juma Mbotela, the only first generation slave descendant to write about 19th century slavery, they were forced to leave behind rich homes of origin of which he writes, ‘‘huge farms so big your eyes cannot see the end and harvests so abundant that the unused produce in storage from the last harvest had to be burned to give way to new crop…’’

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