Slavery: Writer traces suffering and ruin of the trade on Africa

The story of the enslavement of Africans is well known. But most of it is known from the perspective of the enslavers.

Africans themselves have been slow in writing about this historic and historical tragedy that robbed Africa of its people — men, women and children — many of them the best of the available labour

then.

There is enough research that shows that slave trade contributed to economic development of the continent.

Joe Khamisi adds a very significant voice to such stories in his new book, The Wretched Africans: A Study of Rabai and Freretown Slave Settlements (Jodey Book Publishers, 2016).

This is Khamisi’s third book after Politics of Betrayal: Diary of a Kenyan Legislator and Dash Before Dusk: A Slave Descendant’s Journey in Freedom. 

Khamisi calls his book “A tribute to slaves and descendants of the 19th century slave trade in Eastern Africa.” And this is pretty much what the book is about. Following several sources, Khamisi

weaves a tale of his own origins as a descendant of slaves, showing how the trade in Africans by Arabs and Europeans shattered lives in the interior of what is today central Africa (Malawi, Zambia

and Zimbabwe) and the coastal regions of eastern Africa.

So, to a large extent the history he invokes in this book is an account of the unmaking and remaking of Africa in the 19th century.

Khamisi leaves no doubts in the mind of the reader that this book is as much about him as it is about his ancestors – strewn across Africa and the African diaspora — his community today in Kilifi County, and about Kenya.

He says this of himself in the preface: “I am a third generation slave descendant, a great grandson of freed slaves of the 19th Century slavery in eastern Africa. I was born in 1944 — thirty seven

years after Britain abolished slavery in Kenya in 1907.

My roots are at Rabai, a historical rustic village 25 kilometres north-west of the coastal town of Mombasa. It is also the home of the largest ex-slaves’ settlement in East Africa.

It was at Rabai that Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebman, the two German missionaries of the London-based Church Missionary Society (CMS) built the first Christian Church in Kenya in 1846.”

As the preface note above suggests, Khamisi’s book is quite interested in the role that the European Christian missionaries played in stopping the slave trade and how they subsequently dealt with the

freed Africans. Consequently a fair amount of the narration is dedicated to showing how trade in African slaves began and grew; why it became big business along the coast of eastern Africa, India,

the Middle East, Europe, all the way to America; its major consequences — the deaths of thousands of Africans in captivity, shipment of more thousands to foreign lands; depopulation of large parts

of Africa; the establishment of an African diaspora all over the world; its abolition; and the eventual settlement of thousands of Africans in ‘other’ lands away from their native homes.

TALE TOLD FRESHLY

Indeed Khamisi retells the slave trade tale freshly, often debunking myths that have circulated for so long, such as the presumed goodness of the European Christians, showing — from sources that

are rarely discussed in Africa — how even some of the celebrated abolitionists were racist.

He also does a good job of reminding the reader of the complicity of Africans themselves in the slave trade.

If one considers that global trafficking in Africans today is largely dependent on African recruiters, one wonders if slave trade had ever been abolished or it simply wore new and different clothes.

But what makes The Wretched Africans: A Study of Rabai and Freretown Slave Settlements stand out is how it invokes the ideas of ‘cultural transformation’ – to which he dedicates chapter 14 — and ‘reparation’ — which he discusses in chapter 17.

If there is anything that the forced movement of Africans bequeathed the continent it is the spread of cultures from one place to another.

The immigrants, such as the ones at Rabai had arrived with traditions and cultures from their own communities, or from as far away as Bombay, which often clashed with the cultures of the locals but in many cases were assimilated.

Khamisi talks of the tension between wamisheni (the Christian church mission people including former slaves) and the local Rabai.

For instance, he notes that “The immigrants from Southern Africa and Tanzania brought with them rich and diverse collection of traditions.” But these rites on “birth, circumcision and death … were alien to the local people.”

How difficult must it have been for ‘locals’ to accommodate the ‘strangers?’

Yet, friendship and tolerance overcame the fear and suspicion and it is that cultural encounter more than a century ago that today accounts for the richness of the coastal culture in music, dance,

food, literature etc.

It is what gave the region its cosmopolitanism, most signified in Kiswahili, a language that today is spoken through much of eastern and central Africa. Indeed, this ‘cultural transformation’ offers

significant lessons to Kenyans today when claims of autochthony and nativisim threaten interethnic and intercultural coexistence.

As for reparations, it is a shame that many African governments today don’t even speak of slave trade. The call for compensation to the descendants of Africans forced to leave their homes and settle

in new and strange lands thousands of miles away from their familiar homes hardly registers in the imagination of many Africanists today.

A few West Africans and Africans in the diaspora often speak about it. East Africans hardly bother.

Yet, Khamisi argues, integration of the slave descendants remains a sore issue in many of the places where they settled as beneficiaries of missionary benevolence. In other words, many of these

former slaves never achieved true freedom.

In many cases, as Khamisi argues, they continue to live as squatters on landholdings owned by their (absent) ex-masters, as is the case for thousands of families in the Coast region.

The Wretched Africans: A Study of Rabai and Freretown Slave Settlements was launched at the Goethe-Institut on April 7, 2016 and is available in bookshops.

The writer teaches literature.