The Coming of the Europeans
The Europeans who appeared in East Africa in the early and mid-nineteenth century included traders, explorer-adventurers, missionaries, and diplomats representing several European countries but not necessarily their governments. Eventually, however, all managed, whether intentionally or not, to involve those governments in the area.
A variety of traders operated through Zanzibar—European goods reached the mainland interior, and some African goods reached Europe or were carried in European bottoms to West Africa — but European merchants themselves did not work on the mainland until the 1880s. American whalers provisioned their expeditions at East African coastal towns, and a treaty with the Sultan of Zanzibar in 1833 led, in 1837, to the establishment of a United States consulate on the island.
Massachusetts white cloth. later called merikani, came to be valued in the interior and was sometimes used as a currency there. Similar treaties permitting free trade in Zanzibar were signed with France in 1844 and with the Hanseatic Republics in 1859. Even before that German traders had a significant role in Zanzibari commerce. By 1870 they accounted for from a quarter to a third of Zanzibar's trade, second only to the trade with British India.
In the early and mid-nineteenth century, British Indian trade was important, but much of this was carried out not by the British but by Indians. Initially Great Britain's concern with the islands and the coast lay in the enforcement of the Moresby Treaty of 1822 outlawing the sale of slaves to Christians. It was also interested in limiting the influence of the French in the area. In the course of gaining the Sultan of Zanzibar's agreement to the treaty, Great Britain recognized his claims to the East African coast from Cape Delgado just south of the Ruvuma River to the Horn of Africa. In 1845 a second treaty forbade Muslims to move slaves by sea to the Arab peninsula. Coastal trade was still permitted, and slaves continued to he available for the Zanzibari clove plantations.
A British consul was assigned to Zanzibar in 1841 to see to Great Britain's interest with respect to both the abolition of the slave trade and the development of legitimate commerce. In time the British consul (later consul general) came to wield considerable power as adviser to the sultan, but the enforcement of the antislavery treaties was difficult: the British naval force was not large enough to cover all the points at which slaves left the coast, and neither the sultan's subjects nor the Africans of the interior who profited from the slave trade were prepared to stop it.
Sultan Said died in 1856 and was succeeded by Majid, less effective than his predecessor in suppressing the slave trade hut able, nevertheless, to consolidate his power on the coast. Before his death Said had suggested the division of the Omani territories into Arabic and African sections, and this was accomplished in 1861 when the then governor general of India arbitrated rival claims to the Omani throne. A joint British-French treats in 1sfi2 recognized the independence of the Zanzibari ruler's dominion., from Oman.
The final blows to the slave trade (but not to slavery, as such) came in 1873 and 1876 in the form of a treaty prohibiting all exports of slaves and closing all slave markets, two further proclamations forbade conveying slaves up the coast by land or from the interior by caravan. Under threat of a naval blockade of Zanzibar the sultan agreed to the treaty. In fact after the end of the slave trade the value of trade in other goods, including rubber, ivory, and cloves, increased. So did the influence of the British, which had grown during Majid's reign and expanded even further when Sultan Barghash came to power in 1870.
The man primarily responsible for this was John Kirk, a Scottish doctor and former associate of David Livingstone, who became vice consul at Zanzibar in 1866 and general consul in 1873. His primary task was ending the slave trade, but he tried to foster ordinary commerce, and he supported the Zanzibari sultanate's rights as he understood them.
The, European explorers of the interior in the mid-nineteenth century were both laymen and missionaries. Among the latter were the Germans Johann Krapf and Johann Rebmann who carne to the area in the late 1840s as representatives of the British-based Church Missionary Society. They were the first Europeans to see Mount Kilimanjaro, and their reports had some impact on German interest in the area.
In 1857 two British explorers, Richard F. Burton and John Speke, having begun their journey at the coast, reached Lake Tanganyika. Speke later moved north to Lake Victoria. which he claimed was the long sought source of the Nile. Livingstone reached Lint on his last trip, coming north along the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika, and his writings had a substantial effect in generating the Protestant missionary effort in central and eastern Africa.
Livingstone's earlier writings had stimulated the formation of the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UNICA). which arrived in Tanzania in the 1860s and despite setbacks founded mission stations in the Usatnbara Mountains and around Lindi and Masasi. In part UNICA's activity was a response to Livingstone's view that slavery could be successfully ended only if legitimate commerce were introduced and that, in addition to evangelization. missions had the task of educating Africans in practical matters of tradecrafts, and advanced agriculture, a perspective that was to inform the work of many missionaries.
Other Protestant missions established stations in the 1870s: the Church Missionary Society at Mpwapwa and the London Missionary Society at Uhl. These, like the UMCA. were British-based. The Roman Catholics were represented by missions established at Bagainoyo by the Holy Ghost Fathers in 1869 and by the White Fathers at Tabora in 1878, both staffed by French priests. Representatives of German churches did not arrive until after Germany acceded to colonial power in the mid-1880s.
In this period the missions had few converts and tended to operate in a generally hostile environment given their opposition to the slave trade and slavery. Some of them did, however, begin a work that was to be of long-run importance — the systematic study of Swahili and initial attempts to render it in a Latin orthography (it was already written in an Arabic one).
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
