Introduction

The genesis for this special issue of Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim was a conference organized in June 2023 by the Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE, titled “Legacies of Race and Slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans,” which was held in Stone Town, Zanzibar, Tanzania, in honor of Professor Abdul Sheriff. Following welcoming remarks by Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi, president of the Africa Institute, and Professor Salah M. Hassan, director of the Africa Institute, opening remarks were delivered by Professor Engseng Ho. This critical tribute to Sheriff's major works is included in slightly revised form in this issue of the journal. Ho's comments on Sheriff's exceptional contributions to Indian Ocean studies suggest the relevance of a tension between different concepts of plural society in Sheriff's life experience and scholarship as exemplified in his two major books, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar (1987) and Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean (2010). He notes further how each book helps us to distinguish between Atlantic and Indian Ocean systems of slavery. Ho's remarks were followed by Sheriff's keynote lecture, “The Tyranny of the Atlantic Slavery, and an Agenda for the Study of Slavery in the Indian Ocean.”¹ Although his lecture is not included here, in that presentation he began by reminding the audience of the long history of quantification of the Atlantic slave trade that began as a response to W. E. B. Du Bois's estimate of seventeen million with the pioneering work of Philip D. Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969) and continues today with the SlaveVoyages website. Considering the expansion of quantification to include Indian Ocean slavery he cautioned against becoming trapped by the analytical categories of Atlantic slavery. In the second half of his talk, he focused on the definition of slavery in the Qur'an, where it refers to war captives and is rendered by the phrase “those whom your right hand possesses” (Sūrat l'aḥzāb 50:33). He contrasts this nuanced characterization with the single word abd, which in modern Arabic indicates “slave” but in the Qur'an means “servant,” implying “servant of God.” The implication of his analysis is the need for scholars to pay close attention to the language of our sources available for studying slavery. The distinction he suggested is especially important in an Indian Ocean context, so different from the Atlantic, while the ambiguities of how slavery is defined apply equally to other systems of slavery in the Indian Ocean world.

Sheriff's call for close, critical readings of our sources can be seen in each of the papers that are included in this issue of Monsoon. The contributions by Jane Hooper, Preben Kaarsholm, Hideaki Suzuki, and Richard B. Allen et al. were originally presented at the Zanzibar conference; the article by Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi was originally delivered to the “Reimagining Mobilities/Immobilities in the Indian Ocean” conference held at the Africa Institute, Sharjah, on December 15–17, 2022—the inaugural symposium for the “Thinking the Archipelago: Africa's Indian Ocean Islands” series; the essay by Edward A. Alpers is a later addition. Taken together, they all address critical issues in Indian Ocean slavery while revealing both historical and methodological links with the Atlantic world.

The first three contributions to the journal share a focus on close reading of a singular piece or body of evidence, but the goal of each writer is to illustrate larger themes of diaspora, community building, and identity. As we shall see, they build on one another by the expanding chronological scope of each successive paper. Jane Hooper examines the Reports of Protectors of Slaves that are housed in the Colonial Office records at the National Archives of the United Kingdom at Kew in the years immediately preceding emancipation (1833–35) to give voice to the enslaved complainants who presented their cases for freedom at Port Louis, Mauritius. Her analysis emphasizes the value of this rich source for suppressed memories of enslavement, the creation of diasporic identities, and the importance of social bonds among shipmates during the traumatic experience of oceanic voyage from capture to disembarkation. Notwithstanding the bureaucratic format of the British documentation, the details of these petitions give voice to the personal accounts of the illegally enslaved complainants. They also reveal both similarities to and differences from those of enslaved Africans in the British Caribbean. She also suggests that such community building, whether on shipboard or in encampments in the Seychelles before final transportation to Mauritius parallels similar experiences reported for the Atlantic traffic.² Hooper is equally careful to query the ethnic labels like “Mozambique” attached by British administrators to individual complainants and comments further on the frequency of name-changing that accompanied passages from their ports of embarkation to final arrival in Mauritius. Her research enriches previous studies of the Indian Ocean slave trade by providing details of the challenges faced by the complainants to create stable “communities in diaspora.” Although most of her examples focus on African and Malagasy individual petitioners, this invaluable source also includes Malays, which again reminds us of the ethnic complexity of Indian Ocean slavery. Her focus on the shared experiences of enslavement and transshipment of these individuals enables us to see beyond quantification to their humanity.

As with Hooper's skepticism about generic ethnic labeling by British authorities, Hideaki Suzuki draws upon testimonies of the enslaved recorded in British colonial manumission records for the Persian Gulf housed in the British Library to untangle several problematic concepts that emerge from these sources. He first lays out how these records were prepared and the details included in them before organizing them into a dataset. By organizing his data quantitatively, he calls into question such “vague terminology” as “Africa” and “African” in these records and asks instead to consider how these individuals self-identified in their testimonies. One unusual element of his analysis is a section on how “African” appearance influenced identification by colonial authorities, whatever the birthplace of the person in question, and even including people who self-identified as Baluchi. Because his data cover testimonies over a six-decade period (1887–1949), Suzuki is also able to consider both individuals who were born in Africa and those who were born in the Gulf region, as well as to construct one family tree. Although his database is limited, he is still able to offer some suggestive information about place and year of birth, and age distribution. In his discussion of marriage and family ties among those enslaved who were born in the Gulf, he challenges European notions of “mild slavery” that derived from simplistic comparison with the Atlantic world. Suzuki also laments the absence of contemporary records “written from the perspective of the enslaved” and the consequent reliance on Western accounts of slavery in the Gulf. Here it is worth mentioning the fictionalized story of an enslaved woman named Zarifa by Omani writer Jokha Alharthi as one way to imagine the plight of otherwise voiceless subalterns.³ He ends by addressing the status of muwallad, which he defines as “individuals deeply integrated into the host society, and treated as members of the master's family,” which may be identified “as representing ‘mild slavery.’ ” But Suzuki demonstrates that being muwallad did not always protect individuals or enslaved families from being sold or otherwise abused. Nevertheless, that a significant proportion of his sample of muwallad-formed families over generations reveals the commitment to community formation that Hooper suggests was at play in the very different circumstances of immediate pre-emancipation Mauritius.

These issues of diasporic community building are reiterated in the article by Preben Kaarsholm, who also tackles the question of how memories of origins change and develop over time. Kaarsholm explicitly focuses on the methodological challenges of historical reconstruction from the perspective of the so-called Zanzibaris of Durban, South Africa, and connects these important questions to calls for reparations. He begins with a close reading of the 1877 “Return of Liberated Africans” that is now located in the KwaZulu-Natal Archives in Pietermaritzburg, which covers a four-year period of some 502 arrivals from the western Indian Ocean and enables him to dig beyond the sources available to Sheriff in an earlier paper on the origins of this community. This register also connects Kaarsholm's study with the larger Indian Ocean slaving database project presented later in this issue. In pursuing this history, and the more recent shifting identity of Zanzibaris to Amakhuwa, he highlights “the openings and closures that have been involved in different strategies of diaspora and identity construction from the 1870s to the present.” As do both Hooper and Suzuki for their key sources, Kaarsholm carefully explains the organization of this valuable document and presents a detailed breakdown of its entries, which enable him to interrogate the origins of the “liberated Africans.” His analysis of how British assignment of slave origins can be confronted with details of shipment to reveal a more complex picture of origins reminds one of Sue Peabody's work on the two voyages of the French slaver Succès to Réunion in 1820 and 1821.⁴ Recalling the pieces by both Hooper and Suzuki, he builds a convincing case for “active strategies of identity construction” among the Zanzibaris/Amakhuwa of Durban. Combining archival and library research with field observation and interviews, he brings this dynamic and still evolving story up to the present, thereby linking it to current South African issues, global themes of diaspora and reparation, and not least to Indian Ocean history.

Two poignant poems by noted South African poet Gabeba Baderoon speak to the memory of enslavement and flight in the Western Cape. Each offers the reader an opportunity “to look through the door of time” in a way that makes it possible to imagine “the place across the ocean from which the slaves come.”

The next two research articles by Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi and Edward A. Alpers share an interest in Indian Ocean knowledge networks and the agency of enslaved persons within those networks. Based on a close reading of Arabic and Swahili sources, the centerpiece of AlMaazmi's article is a microhistory of how Omani jurist Nāşir b. Abī Nabhān engaged with the occult knowledge shared by various enslaved East Africans in both Oman and Zanzibar in the process of composing his two principal works on East African esoteric knowledge and environment in the 1840s. Although the Omani writer was previously well-known for his judicial contributions, AlMaazmi's meticulous analysis of this aspect of Nāşir's work expands our understanding of the Omani Empire beyond the legal aspects of its maritime commercial enterprise. He argues persuasively that Omani intellectuals were open to the knowledge of the natural and supernatural worlds that enslaved individuals possessed and were willing to share. After Nāşir's relocation from Oman to Zanzibar in 1834, AlMaazmi contends that Nāşir was deeply involved in Seyyid Said's political project and the developing agricultural economy of Zanzibar by “charting out the environmental and cultural terrains of East Africa” and “seeking new forms of knowledge among the populations of East Africa.” He emphasizes the very different environment that Omanis, like Nāşir, encountered in tropical Zanzibar and, therefore, sought to understand how “the locals were interacting with their trees, shrubs, bushes, animals, and the ocean” by turning to those individuals who were known to possess specialized knowledge. Encouraged by the high regard in which Nāşir and other practitioners of occult knowledge were held by the sultan, AlMaazmi demonstrates the significance “in which we find the enslaved acting as co-creators of a valued body of knowledge about the natural world and its supernatural properties.” He also suggests the “historical implications of thinking about slavery not only on the plantations of Zanzibar but also in the other overlooked domains in which East African intellectual labor has gone unnoticed.” More broadly, he points to the wider role that East African enslaved intellectuals played through transmission networks “as sources of oceanic environmental knowledge and occult sciences.” Finally, while AlMaazmi acknowledges the erasure of the identities of these enslaved bearers of exceptional knowledge by Nāşir, in contrast to the way in which contemporary Westerners dismissed such knowledge as superstition, he recognizes that his books represent one element in “the Omani project of knowing East Africa,” a process that involved all members of the Omani elite in East Africa.

Rather than a microhistory of occult knowledge, Edward A. Alpers explores the acquisition and possible transmission of agricultural and botanical knowledge for the acclimatization of vanilla and cloves by enslaved individuals working on colonial plantations in the Mascarene Islands and Unguja, Zanzibar. His broad narrative of imperial rivalry to control economically valuable crops ranges from insular Southeast Asia to the British Caribbean, Mexico, and Europe through the islands of the western Indian Ocean. What is striking about these crop histories is the often overlooked role played by three named enslaved persons, two of whom were Indian, the other being of probable Afro-Malagasy origin. The first half of the paper centers on the transmission of vanilla, a plant indigenous to Mesoamerica that did not yield fruit until in 1841 a young, enslaved Black man named Edmond—through observation and experimentation—figured out how to manipulate the hermaphroditic orchid so that it could become fertilized. Although the final steps required for making vanilla commercially viable were developed by Europeans, it was Edmond's discovery that was the necessary first step. Alpers next turns to cloves from their roots in the Maluku Islands of Southeast Asia to Mauritius, the struggle by French colonialists to domesticate the plant into an economically viable crop, and the role of enslaved gardeners from India and Mozambique in its domestication. The final leg of this crop movement involved its transportation to and acclimatization in Zanzibar in the early decades of the nineteenth century, which Alpers hypothesizes may have owed at least partial success to the agricultural knowledge of enslaved individuals from the Mascarenes. To be clear, while this proposal lacks direct evidence, the openness of Omani elites to slave knowledge described by AlMaazmi suggests an intellectual context for such speculation. By joining these two stories of imperial rivalry to control economically lucrative plantation crops through the very specific roles played by enslaved persons into a single narrative, Alpers illustrates an important global dimension of Indian Ocean history.

The next article reports on the creation of a public database for slaving voyages in the Indian Ocean and Asia. It was initially presented at the Zanzibar conference by Matthew S. Hopper, though its collective authorship represents the work of the team members who lead this project. It describes why such a database is necessary, what is its funding history, who are the team leaders and associated members, how it is organized for comparative purposes, what its progress has been to date, and how to get involved by sharing data. It is important to note that through its incorporation into the SlaveVoyages website, this evolving database will serve to complicate and expand the almost exclusively Atlantic focus of its host. It provides a promising bookend to the opening focus on quantification and “the tyranny of the Atlantic” discussed by Sheriff in his keynote to the conference.

The last item in this issue involves two distinguished Indian Ocean historians, Eric Jennings and Gwyn Campbell, in a Q and A interview that begins by asking Campbell about his recent book The Madagascar Youths, a fascinating microhistory that connects Madagascar, Great Britain, and Mauritius, and the shifting fortunes of the approximately one hundred Malagasy youth who were involved in this program. Subsequent questions allow Campbell to discuss briefly his broader ideas about Indian Ocean studies.

Notes

References