Book Review: Unbroken Chains – A 5,000 Year History of African Enslavement

Key stages 3 and 4 of the National Curriculum requires 11- to 14-year-old pupils to be taught about “ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain 1745-1901” by studying (by way of example) “Britain’s transatlantic slave trade; its effects and eventual abolition”.  The danger of focussing attention on any specific aspect of history is that context becomes lost and the wrong lessons learned.  This is particularly true of slavery, which has been part of the human condition for thousands of years. Any narrative that suggests it was confined to white people capturing and shipping black people from their peaceful villages in Africa to work under brutal conditions in the Americas is dangerously wrong.  This emphasis on white men as privileged aggressors and black people as history’s perpetual victims appears to be quite deliberate. Despite much of the argument being built on false premises and misunderstandings, there can be little doubt that demands for slavery reparations, and the Black Lives Matter movement, have created deep social division and polarised opinion.

Whatever the reasons behind the spread of misinformation, it needs correcting and Martin Plaut, previously Africa editor for the BBC World Service, is the latest author to have stepped up to the plate in his book Unbroken Chains, a courageous attempt to dispel some of the myths around slavery in Africa.  I would say he has done an excellent job of it too, leaving little room for those who embrace and deploy historical ignorance. He takes readers by the hand and, with great skill and sensitivity, guides them through a huge range of academic research, shocking statistics and accumulated knowledge towards a better understanding of this vastly complex and difficult subject.  He stays within self-imposed boundaries: the book does not pretend to be a general world history of slavery but is confined to enslavement within Africa itself, so what became of the slaves after they left the continent is omitted, as are the trades carried out in China, India, Europe and the Slavic nations.

All this is perfectly understandable, but even within the broad scope of his ambition there is still a great deal of work to be done.  Chattel slavery in its absolute form is defined by people being treated as property, to be traded or forced to work.  It manifested itself it different ways  at every stage in the enslavement process and in different parts of Africa.  A galley slave’s experience was different from one working on a clove or cotton plantation, and that of a native woman forced to provide sexual favours in the household of an Arab slave trader was different again.  There is no underlying pattern to the infinite variety of abuses suffered by the enslaved.

By looking broadly across his subject, Martin Plaut could not devote space to specific aspects of the practice that might have merited more analysis.  The traffic in slaves across East Africa in the second half of the 19th century was, for example, mostly driven by the exponential growth in the international market for ivory rather than a labour market. The only way to get heavy elephant tusks to the coast was on the heads of natives captured in the central lakes region.  Once they reached the coast both the ivory and the surviving captives were sold for profit.

Plaut’s sources are not always reliable, as for example in the chapter on Omani hegemony. Here he suggests that Tippu Tib from Zanzibar, one of the wealthiest Muslim slave and ivory traders, whose real name was Ḥamad ibn Muḥammad ibn Jumʿah ibn Rajab ibn Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd al Murjabī, broke faith with Leopold II of the Belgians over the collection of slaves following their agreement in 1887 to install him as Governor at Stanley Falls.  The bad faith was all on King Leopold’s side as H M Stanley, who negotiated that agreement on his behalf, reveals in his private papers:

I had to explain [to the King] that we should utilise Tippu Tib until the state was of such strength that we should throw off the mask of compromise and boldly take the offensive…until the time came when we could do away with the system and abolish Tippu Tib and his Arabs at one stroke”.[1]

King Leopold’s war with Tippu Tib’s kinsmen between 1892-4 was intended to eliminate commercial competition over ivory, not to bring slavery to an end.

Indeed the very relationship between slave and owner in East Africa was not binary in the way that underpins many of the assumptions made about the practice elsewhere, but was complicated by cultural influences: it has been said that the ambition of every slave in East Africa was not to be freed, but to own slaves of his own.  This is well attested, as one of the explorers who witnessed this at first hand explained:

I asked Salem if he had any idea how many people there are here [in Tippu Tib’s trading capital].  He said it was impossible to know, for they had no system like ours, which I explained to him.  Supposing one man, he said, bought twenty slaves of the first class (the number could be bought for a single load of cloth), these in short time would each have slaves of their own, and others – ad infinitum.[2]

Staying a little longer in East Africa in the second half of the 19th century. none of the author’s sources explain the extent to which the many European expeditions into the interior were compromised by their use of slave porterage at a time when slavery was illegal. It might be thought to deserve a mention. Explorers convinced themselves that these porters were free men by referring to them as Wa-ngwana, as do Martin Plaut’s sources, but there was considerable irony in the term even then, since they were almost invariably hired through Arab middlemen/owners rather than directly, under a system that was widely abused right up to the dawn of the 20th century.  Stanley himself bought several slave children and acknowledged that the 600 porters hired on his last expedition in 1887 were mostly slaves. Even the practice of Catholic missionaries buying the broken bodies left at the slave markets at the end of auction day was controversial, as it was said to legitimise the trade.

As I say, the subject is hugely complicated and far more work is needed before we have a complete understanding of the extent of the terrible trafficking in human misery, but Unbroken Chains will probably be, for many years to come, the most important place for both academics and interested amateurs to start their own explorations of discrete aspects of the African slave trade.