A Complementary Slave Trade

Zanzibar has a slavery museum.  It was certainly one of the best kept museums I’ve seen on this trip. Partly because it was focused upon one main narrative and wasn’t trying to trace the progression of an entire nation, the story was clear.  More than this, the images and the lay out were all artfully done and available in English so that everyone could properly confront the profound misery. 

I have visited the slave castles at Elminia in Ghana and in Goree in Senegal and remember them as being like Auschwitz in their potency. And like most Americans I suppose, I think of the trade as an Atlantic experience.  Coastal Bantu people captured other inland Bantu people in places like Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, and all the way down to the Congo.  These people were bought by Europeans and Americans and shipped to South Carolina, Hispanola, Baihia during the trade which lasted for centuries. 

Unfortunately there is was a complementary slave trade on the east side of the continent as well.  In a dynamic that seems sadly similar, coastal Bantu people captured inland Bantu people and sold them, in this case to Arab traders who brought the human cargo to the Arab world and to plantation islands in the Indian Ocean like Reunion.  The building in which the slaves were stored before sale is where the museum is housed.  In the basement one can see the underground chambers where the slaves were jammed in to, awaiting their fate.  The numbers they tell you of fifty men or fifty women and children in one or the chamber cannot be rationally imagined.

In the end of the museum there was a world map suggesting the places of the world where slavery still exists suggesting numbers of people who are still enslaved.  China was featured prominently and both my daughters wanted to know what that meant.  How could there be so many millions of slaves in China?  The map wasn’t clear precisely how things were defined but I did my best to explain that it probably included forced labor, places like sweat shops and perhaps even prison labor.  A quick look at the “global slavery index” suggests that orphaned children who migrate to the cities and migrant workers without resident hukou rights are the bulk of whom they’re talking about.  Perhaps another pervasive metaphor of the museum to consider slavery as existing in places you hadn’t otherwise thought possible.

Thursday, 07/06/17