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  • Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability by Elisabeth McMahon
  • Chris Conte (bio)
Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability, by Elisabeth McMahonCambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013; pp. 265. $95.00 cloth.

Pemba Island lies about 30 miles off of the northern Tanzanian coast. It is a small place, roughly 300 square miles of moist hilly country and open coral flats covered in sandy soil. Mangrove forests cover many of Pemba’s estuaries, and fruit trees of many sorts grow on the undulating part of the landscape. These agroforests contain clove trees, reminders that clove production and export have dominated the island’s economy for almost 200 years. In 1821, when the Omanis established their sultanate in Zanzibar and confiscated Pemba’s agricultural lands, they imported slaves to work on their tree plantations, following a pattern established by France in its Indian Ocean possessions. By the 1890s, when the British had established a protectorate over Zanzibar, perhaps 40,000 slaves lived on Pemba Island, a majority of whom were women. The 1897 decree ending slavery in Pemba initiated a generation of social change during which ex-slaves integrated themselves into island social and cultural life. Pemba’s history suggests that people peacefully negotiated the end of slavery, an institution based in violence. [End Page 149]

Over the last few years, sustained scholarly studies of Pemba’s historical, social, and cultural life have begun to appear, and Elizabeth McMahon has produced an admirable addition to these important investigations.1 In Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa, she has painstakingly crafted a study of Pemba’s social and cultural history during the era when slavery ended and new forms of community emerged. The chief sources for her study of emancipation are Pemba’s colonial court documents. She argues that over the course of the nineteenth century, slaves had so embedded themselves in Pemban social life that they had garnered enough power to negotiate favorable labor and residence terms. In the court cases, McMahon discovered a particular linguistic metaphor for social change in the semantic transformation of the Swahili term heshima, which means honor, or respect. It had once been conferred exclusively upon Arab landowners whose station automatically earned them heshima, but slaves adopted the term and bent its meaning toward the concept of the respect that one earned as a community member.

Individual women populate McMahon’s stories, very much in the tradition of Marcia Wright’s life histories of Moravian converts in Strategies of Slaves and Women.2 In chapter 2’s story of Mzuri Kwao, readers will learn about a well-traveled woman keenly aware of Swahili social structure and Pemba’s social ladder. McMahon’s reading of Mzuri’s life illustrates the East African slave trade’s broad geography. Mzuri had been enslaved as a child in Central Africa and then shunted through the Indian Ocean littoral towns of Kilwa, Bagamoyo, and Zanzibar. She had walked the caravan routes to Ujiji, the commercial center of Lake Tanganyika, near her birthplace, and eventually landed in the clove plantations on Pemba. When she learned that she was to be sold to a slave, thus becoming the slave of a slave, she approached the British consul in order to negate the sale and to argue for her rights as a concubine under the emancipation statute.

In 1897, the Zanzibari sultan proclaimed an end to slavery on the islands of Unguja and Pemba. McMahon’s story of Binti Mabrooki is particularly illustrative of the limits of the manumission proclamation. Bi Mabrooki sought freedom for freedom’s sake alone, a grave error despite the new legal statutes abolishing slavery on Pemba Island. Precisely because she sought freedom through the Zanzibari courts, her master deemed her untrustworthy and therefore unworthy of heshima, because he had not mistreated her. Soon after the conclusion of her court proceedings, [End Page 150] Bi Mabrooki turned up dead, probably murdered. McMahon argues that the murder, very likely carried out by an assassin, constituted a warning to other slaves contemplating a similar move.

No study of social life in Pemba would be complete without a mention of uchawi, or witchcraft...

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