Early Kenya - The Omani Hegemony
After the capture of Fort Jesus and the subsequent expulsion of the Portuguese from Zanzibar, the imam of Oman was able to claim suzerainty over the entire coast of East Africa. His authority there was largely nominal, however, and actual control lay in the hands of the Arab families who ruled the coastal towns. The strongest of these families was the Mazrui, who in 1727 had come to power in Mombasa. In 1741 the incumbent imam was overthrown in Oman and replaced by Said al Busaidi, who also took the secular title of sayyid (lord) and established a dynasty. The Mazrui took advantage of the change of rulers in Oman and renounced their allegiance to the imam, establishing at Mombasa an independent shaykhdom that eventually dominated much of the coast from Pate in the north to Pemba Island.
In 1806 a strong figure of the Busaidi line, Said bin Sultan, became sayyid in Oman and set about to reassert Omani authority in East Africa. His rise to power coincided, however, with British efforts to curb the slave trade and combat piracy in the Persian Gulf, which caused Britain to exercise a dominating influence over the actions of Said and his successors throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.
In 1823, for example, British representatives persuaded Said to consent to an agreement restricting his involvement in the slave trade to his own possessions. The treaty had little impact on the existing slave trade inasmuch as the main movement of slaves in the region ran through territory claimed by Oman or in its coastal waters, but it was intended rather to prevent the expansion of the trade to new markets. Of larger significance at the time was the treaty's recognition of Omani sovereignty from the Benadir Coast southward to Portuguese Mozambique.
By 1824 Said's forces had ousted the Mazrui from the Lamu Archipelago and were poised to attack their stronghold at Mombasa. When the townspeople petitioned the captain of a British naval vessel to guarantee their security, the officer proclaimed a protectorate over Mombasa, considering it an opportunity to stop slaving through the port, although he lacked authorization for such an action. The British government repudiated the arrangement made in its name, as did the Mazrui, who claimed the town. Mombasa fell to the Omani in 1828, although Mazrui held out against them in Fort Jesus for another nine years.
In 1840 Said moved his court from Oman to Zanzibar, where he assumed the title of sultan, but British influence followed him there. Zanzibar was the main entrepot for the slave trade along the East African coast, prompting the British to impose another treaty on Said in 1845 that limited the trading to the coastal area from Kilwa to Lamu.
The trade in the unrestricted area continued to flourish, however. Reports of the horrors of the slave trade made by British naval officers and by European travelers shocked the British public and brought support for the permanent stationing of an antislaving patrol in the western Indian Ocean. British pressure was also increased on the sultan to agree to a further restriction of the trade. Gradually, concessions were made, and in 1873 the reigning sultan, Barghash, agreed to stop the sale of slaves and all slave shipments between ports in his domain.
Movement of slaves continued overland behind the coast, but in 1877 the sultan ordered this halted as well. The entry of slave caravans from the interior to the coastal area was also prohibited. To enforce these decrees an armed force led by a British officar was recruited. The measures were far from popular, and in Kenya in 1880 Swahili slave traders at Mombasa attacked a British missionary-operated center for freed slaves, which the traders associated with the sultan's ban on slaving. Discontent over slaving restrictions continued on the Kenyan coast until the end of the century.
Zanzibar became a center of legitimate trade as Said developed the clove industry on the island and actively encouraged trade from the interior. Kenya was largely bypassed—the main interior trade routes ran south of it—but Mombasa was reported to have been prosperous at mid-century, largely because of the ivory and other items collected in quantity by Kamba traders in the interior and directed to the port town.
In the following decades elephants in the Kamba and other areas were hunted out, and caravan operations were also disrupted by tribal warfare. The decline in trade that resulted (and the rise of Zanzibar as a commercial center) brought an exodus of merchants and artisans from Mombasa that, together with British antislaving operations, reduced the town to comparatively minor importance. Mombasa did not recover from the decline until the early 1900s, after it had become the starting point for the construction of the railroad to Uganda.
European activities on the mainland were confined largely to missionary work and exploration from the 1840s to near the end of the century, although a few trading concessions conducted limited operations at a number of coastal points. In Kenya the first Christian mission was established in 1846 near Mombasa by Johann Krapf and Johann Rebmann, Swiss serving with the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS). In 1862 Krapf, then associated with the Methodist Missionary Society, founded another mission also in the vicinity of Mombasa. Both missions conducted schools that were the first such Western institutions in Kenya.
Efforts to extend mission activities to the interior were frustrated by the local hostilities that kept large areas unsettled. On the coast, after the banning of the slave trade in 1873, the CMS established a settlement for freed slaves at Frere Town outside Mombasa. But little else could be done because the indigenous Muslim population was strongly opposed to the teaching of Christianity and otherwise resentful of the missionaries, whom they considered leaders of the antislavery movement. In the years that followed, however, mission stations for freed slaves were also established by Roman Catholic and Scottish Presbyterian missionaries. Most of the Europeans — estimated to number 300 in the region by 1885 — were involved in missionary work.
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