Alastair Hazell

The Last Slave Market: Dr John Kirk and the Struggle to End the African Slave Trade. By Alastair Hazell. Constable; 352 pages; $9.99 (Kindle).
John Kirk was a medical doctor and botanist to Livingstone’s ill-fated “Zambesi Expedition” from 1858 to 1864. He walked up to the Batoka Plateau in Barotseland, lost his journals and samples when he capsized at the Cabora Basa rapids and spent months hauling a steamer over the sandbanks of the Zambezi and the Shire rivers. Livingstone hoped to establish a new trade in cotton to replace the trade in slaves and complement that in ivory but this never happened. Slaves and ivory were part of the same trading system in Central Africa where the tsetse fly killed oxen and horses and there were no navigable rivers from the coast.
Kirk saw the slave caravans near Lake Malawi (Nyassa) – all headed for the slave market in Zanzibar – and he gained and understanding of the conditions that led local tribes to sell their own people and enslave their neighbours. He was a witness to the futile efforts of naïve British missionaries to attack the slave trade directly – one Bishop leading a thousand followers in armed raids on ‘slaving’ villages. But all villages were involved in slavery – both domestic and commercial – and the mission became so compromised by taking sides in inter-tribal warfare that it had to be withdrawn.
The first part of this book is the most concise and insightful assessment I have read on Livingstone’s “Zambesi Expedition”. Hazell conveys the horrors of Central and East African slavery and shows how it intensified as more ‘trade goods’ were demanded by African societies and at times of drought and famine (climate variability rather than climate change, the culprit!). He also presents a convincing portrait of Livingstone – one that helps to explain Livingstone’s unjust criticism of Kirk, who was at the British Consulate in Zanzibar at the time of his final journey.
The theme of the book is the slave trade and Kirk’s pivotal and poorly recognised role in limiting it over his 20 years in Zanzibar. Kirk spoke Arabic and Swahili. He had, initailly, no support at all from the British and Indian governments who were against the slave trade only in principle. He bided his time, assembling a detailed knowledge of the commerce of Zanzibar and of Zanzibar society. This understanding was critical to his everntual, skilled and opportunistic interventions. The slave trade in Central and East Africa had an entirely different economic character from that in West Africa. It had been going on for hundreds of years. It was largely informal. The traffic in people was just one of many traded commodities. A threatened British blockade of all trade unless the sea-transport of slaves ended was skilfully used to pressurize Zanzibari and Indian business people. The gripping and intrigueing story comes alongside the effects of the Indian Mutiny, the opening of the Suez Canal and Kirk helping a Zanzibari princess to escape family sanction to join her German lover.
Hazell’s book is brilliant, despite the determination of his proof-readers and fact checkers consistently to misspell the surname of “the pugnatious Harry Johnstone” (whose beautiful 1897 book, which recognises Kirk’s huge contribution to documenting the botany and geography of Nyasaland, is not even in the bibliography.)
But it left me with a big worry. “What does this mean for ubuntu”? How do you square ubuntu with the behaviour Kirk witnessed in Central Africa and which is described so graphically by Hazell?
See: Johnston, H.H. (1897) British Central Africa: An Attempt to give Some Account of a Portion of the territories under British Influence north of the Zambezi, London: Methuen & Co. pp. 589 http://www.archive.org/details/britishafrica00johnuoft… (más)