Introduction: the “second slavery” thesis and East Africa

This paper examines the trajectories of ex-slaves in two formerly slave-rich regions of mainland East Africa, now both part of Tanzania, during the early to mid-twentieth century. It seeks to establish what role exposure to markets under colonial rule—which overall increased, but did so unevenly and in a non-linear fashion—played in shaping former slaves’ options. The aim is to situate East Africa in relation to the “second slavery” thesis, whose core claim is taken to be that, contrary to earlier, Marxist-inspired evolutionary models, expanding industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century did not necessarily undermine slave-based economic regimes.Footnote ¹ Rather, it could even reinforce them, with unfree labour in one location supplying raw materials for paid industrial labour elsewhere (e.g., U.S. cotton for Manchester cotton mills before the U.S. Civil War).Footnote ² In consequence, the end of slavery appears as a drawn-out, ambiguous process in which capitalist enterprise cannot claim a heroic abolitionist role. That said, capitalist economic regimes did gradually adapt to a world without (officially) unfree labour, and the rise of labour markets in formerly slave-owning societies did contribute to the social mobility of former slaves, as was shown clearly for East Africa by the work of Jan-Georg Deutsch.Footnote ³

These claims have been developed above all with the Atlantic world in mind, and within the Atlantic world, the focus has more often been on its Western shores than on Africa.Footnote ⁴ Nevertheless, the history of nineteenth-century West Africa arguably constitutes a clear case in support of the second slavery thesis. The initial consequences of the abolition of slave trading out of West Africa have been studied under the label of the “transition to legitimate commerce,” quoting a term used by nineteenth-century abolitionists. Work by Robin Law and Martin Lynn, in particular, showed that when European demand for slaves for export dwindled after the British abolition of slave trading in 1807, elites in West Africa’s coastal societies shifted to employing enslaved people in situ.Footnote ⁵ They were employed above all in the production of palm oil, for which demand in Europe was soaring, thanks to its suitability for everything from lubricating industrial machinery to margarine production. Further inland in West Africa, too, slave economies expanded in the nineteenth century in the context of jihadist warfare and cotton and peanut production, and by the time European armies showed up at the end of the century, the number of slaves within the region was probably the largest ever.Footnote ⁶

The next chapters in this story were written by Paul Lovejoy, Jan Hogendorn, and Gareth Austin, among others.Footnote ⁷ Lovejoy and Hogendorn’s study, entitled Slow Death for Slavery, makes clear that while colonial intervention destabilized slave regimes in the West African interior, it was very far from comprehensively ending them. Colonial regimes hesitated to aid slaves in pursuit of emancipation, fearing economic crisis and social disorder if slaves’ exploitability and social marginalization were ended. Within slave-owning societies, emancipation was often not legally and socially valid unless performed under very specific, typically Islamically inspired protocols that colonial officials were in no position to practice.Footnote ⁸Gradually expanding access to commodity and labour markets, while helpful for some, did not act as a panacea for ex-slaves’ continuing marginalization and exploitability.

Austin’s work, focused on regions in Ghana adjacent to the coast and starting in the late nineteenth century, provides a contrasting outcome.Footnote ⁹ Foregrounding economic logics, he argues that in the nineteenth century, slavery was the only way to assemble a sizeable agricultural workforce in this region. This was so because there were no agricultural products profitable enough to trade to allow potential employers to pay potential workers a wage that could have enticed said workers away from their own fields. Circumstances changed dramatically, though, with the introduction of cocoa trees to the rural economy, by African farmers, early in the colonial period. The high prices and profits that could be achieved with cocoa led to a process of agro-capitalist development driven by African farmers. It involved complicated ways of mobilizing land and labour within family networks and subsequently the commodification of both.

With viable markets in land and labour, and wealth generated by the cocoa economy, South Ghanaian society did not stop being stratified, but the free/unfree distinction became largely irrelevant to its stratification.Footnote ¹⁰ A similar process occurred in French West Africa’s so-called peanut basin, where Sufi Islam acted as an additional force for the dissolution of old hierarchies.Footnote ¹¹ These, then, are cases where the older assumption that expanding capitalist social relations undermine slave regimes holds. But they did not do so in isolation: the changes described by Austin occurred in the context of the “decapitation” of old (slave-owning) political elites during colonization and the elimination of slavery from official legal regimes.Footnote ¹² Military, political, social, and economic factors acted together, to make slavery-based hierarchies fade or persist, depending on the precise circumstances.

That East Africa so far has figured little in this debate is unsurprising, considering that for the countries typically taken to form the region’s core—Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda—the term second slavery is difficult to make stick. Though some evidence has been emerging that in parts of the region slavery is of long standing, the time period associated with a “second” era of slavery in the Atlantic world is, in East Africa, considered that of a first and last efflorescence of the institution. (Note that the picture is different for southeast Africa, present-day Mozambique, which was connected to the Atlantic system through the Portuguese presence there and had exported slaves to Portuguese possessions for a long time.) The expansion of slave exports and local slavery here was partly a ramification of the decline of slave trading in the Atlantic world, and partly a function of changing patterns of supply and demand in the Western Indian Ocean. These changing patterns were themselves intricately connected to the region’s increasing integration into both colonial spheres of influence and expanding commodity markets.

East Africa nevertheless forms a rewarding site for examining the interplay between expanding markets feeding expanding industrial capitalism on one hand, and persisting or declining slave regimes on the other, because outcomes here are, beneath the cloak of obsolescence, quite varied.Footnote ¹³ But the focus in the discussion that follows is less on the entrenchment of the first-and-last era of slavery in East Africa than on the role of markets—often expansive, but at times rather elusive—in the disintegration of slave regimes here in the twentieth century. It thereby focuses on a specific aspect of the second slavery thesis, namely, the relationship of slave regimes, at a time when they were politically increasingly in peril, to markets in both labour and commodities.

An important difficulty encountered when seeking to bring East Africa into the discussion of second slavery by this route lies with the elusiveness of definitions of (global, colonial, or otherwise apostrophized) capitalism. Political powers, commercial elites and producers, as well as the relations between all these groups were diverse and changeable over regions and time and are hard to squeeze into one linear history of capitalism. Another difficulty lies with the fickleness of markets, whose evolution was clearly crucial in the twentieth-century history of East Africa but not a case of straightforward expansion. The discussion that follows therefore seeks to avoid giving the impression that “capitalism” as such or “markets” on their own did things, and seeks to keep political, environmental, practical, and other constraints in the picture.

The need for such caution is evident already in the foundational work on slavery and its aftermath on the East African coast, done by Frederick Cooper.Footnote ¹⁴ Critical of earlier claims about slavery in Africa being “absorptive” and relatively benign, Cooper’s characterization of coastal slavery chimes with studies of Atlantic slavery in its focus on the exploitative and exclusive nature of the institution. When it comes to the end of slavery, though, Cooper’s analysis emphasizes the role of political factors arising from the relationship between British colonialism, European settlers, and the Zanzibari sultanate, in maintaining the marginalization of former slaves and the privilege of former owners.Footnote ¹⁵ Economic dynamics, then, do not provide an explanation on their own.

Cooper’s account of the aftermath of slavery bears similarities to an Atlantic case, namely, that produced for Jamaica by Charles Holt.Footnote ¹⁶ In both settings, British policymakers sought to end ownership in people while making sure that former slaves remained available as a paid labour force, on sugar plantations in Jamaica, and on rice, clove, and sometimes sugarcane plantations in East Africa. Owners were compensated for their loss of property, and ex-slaves saddled with an onerous regime of restrictions. But in both cases, ex-slaves sought and found alternatives to remaining a docile plantation labour force, albeit paid. Barred by policy and poverty from acquiring land, they shifted into small-scale agriculture as squatters or on marginal land not claimed by plantation owners, or sought urban employment. The result was the coexistence of a class of landowners who lacked the ability to mobilize a labour force for their land, and of landless or land-poor peasants who lacked the capital to intensify and expand their production much beyond subsistence. Economic depression followed.

The outcomes found by Cooper and Holt highlight how much the very different result found by Austin in Ghana was premised on the availability of the right kind of marketable crop and on market access.Footnote ¹⁷ They also contrast with Lovejoy and Hogendorn’s findings from inland West Africa, in that owners’ control over slaves’ movements and labour declined more quickly, even if they retained the ability to marginalize them in local status economies.Footnote ¹⁸ Cooper and Holt describe outcomes that remind us not to take the expansion of industrial capitalism as the default and only form of social change in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They show British colonial governments propping up regimes of quasi-feudal absentee landlordism, more reminiscent of English landowners in Ireland or Scotland than of capitalist entrepreneurs. Moreover, they again show the importance of the policy frameworks imposed by colonial governments, and their not always predictable interaction with the different constituencies making up colonized societies.

The studies mentioned so far present a number of different patterns in the relationship between capitalism and slavery. Before the late-nineteenth century era of imperial expansion, there were slave regimes that provided raw materials for industrial production, above all cotton and palm oil, in a relationship that benefited both sides. Another fundamentally symbiotic relationship between capitalist and slave-based (not only economic) regimes existed on the bandit-capitalist frontiers of nineteenth-century East Africa, where slaves mattered not only economically as producers but also politically and militarily as fighters and followers.Footnote ¹⁹ Samory Toure’s empire could be seen as a West African parallel.Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, after the scramble, under European domination, there were some places where a high-value, well-growing cash crop fed into the obliteration of slave-based labour regimes. Cocoa in Ghana and peanuts in Senegal are the clearest examples.

Elsewhere, the death of slavery was notoriously slow, as limited economic opportunity and colonial support for slave-owning elites combined to keep varying degrees of exploitation of labour, social marginalization, and cultural constraints in place. Much of the French Sahel falls into this pattern.Footnote ²¹ Sahelian Northern Nigeria, a British colony, was similar, though the Muslim elite here got stronger support from the colonial regime and egalitarian Muslim Sufi movements were less prominent. The evolution observable in Jamaica in the 1850s and in Zanzibar and Kenya from the 1900s resembles the Sahelian pattern, but with plantations and production for world markets more prominent. Here, abolition led to the creation of an impoverished land-owning elite unable to mobilize labour, and of a land-poor labour force unwilling to work on plantations and unable to invest in their too-small land holdings.

For continental East Africa, meanwhile, Deutsch’s work has shown that despite the delay in legal abolition in German East Africa (which only occurred after British takeover in 1922), here too slave regimes crumbled in the early twentieth century. Market forces were important in this process in two ways. First, they drove up the value of slaves’ labour, and therefore their bargaining power, once the prohibition on slave trading made them hard to replace. Second, the development of labour markets in the colonial plantation sector and in expanding colonial towns gave slaves options and, again, bargaining power. But the further trajectories of the formerly enslaved here remain unclear. Given the thinness of colonial administration on the ground, colonial officials lacked insight into them. Moreover, since administrators and missionaries alike used the supposed ending of slavery by colonial invasion as justification for their presence, they had little interest in acknowledging that the institution lingered despite their presence.

Some broader conclusions can nevertheless be drawn. First, colonization was a watershed, catalysing a transition from slave- to peasant-based agricultural production regimes in a variety of locations. Since the main effect of colonization was to establish new political and military power balances, it follows that political contexts had a weight of their own in the history of post-slavery. The variety of outcomes in the colonial period, meanwhile, makes clear that the political and economic contexts created by colonialism were not uniformly inimical to slavery. Rather, a limited, formal vision of abolition shared across colonial regimes coexisted with a great variety of different political and economic rationales and practices. As will be seen below, colonization began a process of making slavery unspeakable that in some places only ended around independence. Its effects on the relationships of exploitation, dependence, and economic and status inequality that made up the lived experience of slavery, though, were much more ambiguous.

A second preliminary conclusion is that a unitary, law-like relationship between expanding capitalism and slave labour regimes is not to be found. Rather, there are characteristic co-variations. In particular, the “decapitation” of pre-colonial political hierarchies during colonial conquest tended to facilitate the disintegration of slave regimes. Conversely, colonial-era support for slave-owning elites slowed down the end of slavery. Equally, profitable cash-cropping opportunities contributed to ending slavery; lack of such opportunities helped slavery-based hierarchies survive. But colonial policy could confound such effects, as in Northern Nigeria. “Capitalism” with a capital C, then, is both hero and villain in this story, or you might say, neither. The history of slavery cannot answer the question for us whether capitalism as such is a good or a bad thing. With these points in mind, the discussion turns to East Africa.

Post-Slavery beyond the coast: tracing pathways out of slavery in mainland East Africa

The information discussed below was gathered in the course of a European Research Council–funded collaborative research project that examines the aftermath of slavery in continental East Africa in five different sites (Eastern Congo, Uganda, the hinterland of the Central Kenyan coast, Western and Southern Tanzania).Footnote ²² The discussion focuses on the two Tanzanian cases, where the mixture of similarities and differences enables the tracing of divergent routes towards the common goal of emancipation. The influence of relations to markets, in particular, played out very differently in the two cases, allowing an exploration of the contingencies involved in their role. We use written (mostly archival, some travelogue) and oral sources, and the latter deserve brief exposition. Asking questions about the slave past remains a charged process. Few respondents were willing to acknowledge anything resembling slave ancestry in their own family. Those who did were quick also to explain how their servitude had ended. The most obvious descendant of slave owners, Mataka, was equally unwilling to acknowledge his ancestors’ role. Overall, responses on the history of slavery were inseparable from the interlocutors’ present-day social positionalities and the needs these entailed with regards to protecting their status. Though this means that these sources need careful handling, it does not invalidate them, and we have sought to use them with the circumspection they deserve.Footnote ²³

At first sight, the two regions appeared to be in similar positions at the onset of colonialism: caravan routes were defining features of both. For the Western Tanzanian region of Tabora, it was the much-studied central route ending at Bagamoyo, opposite the Zanzibar archipelago, that served as platform for the further distribution of slaves and ivory.Footnote ²⁴ The Songea/Tunduru regions in the country’s south, meanwhile, had lain along (or for Songea, next to) a caravan route used by Yao big men in Mozambique and Malawi to send slaves to the coast at Kilwa and Lindi on the Southern Tanzanian coast.Footnote ²⁵ Early German-period sources speak of caravans of a thousand persons and more camping out near Lindi. Use of this caravan route was nevertheless more seasonal than was the case for the central route.Footnote ²⁶

There were, however, also important differences. Tunduru was, unlike Tabora region, very sparsely inhabited. It had for some decades been on the raiding frontier created by the Ngoni immigrants in nearby Songea, making life here dangerous.Footnote ²⁷ Tunduru also served as a migration route for elephants that made agriculture precarious by raiding fields.Footnote ²⁸ In the German period, large-scale settlement by Yao immigrants, fleeing Portuguese encroachment in Mozambique and British in Malawi, mitigated this emptiness.Footnote ²⁹ In the biggest act of settlement in 1912, German officials installed the Yao “Sultan” Mataka as the ruler of what they called New Brandenburg, borrowing the name of the region around Berlin (incidentally also characterized by sandy soils of limited fertility). His followers were said to number around 5,000.Footnote ³⁰ Compared to the Tabora region, where at a similar point in time German officials guesstimated the number of slaves in Tabora district alone at 250,000, these numbers were very small.Footnote ³¹ Here, the lively traffic along the central caravan route had led to the intensification of food production for sale to the passing caravans. Both settlers from the coast and local strongmen had expanded their increasingly fortified settlements, notwithstanding periodic outbursts of conflict.Footnote ³²

Despite the different outcomes, the processes that had shaped populations in both locations highlight an important political commonality. Omani settlers and Nyamwezi big men in Tabora, like the Yao sultans of Tunduru, had been creatures of the nineteenth-century trading frontier in Eastern Africa, which was essentially extractive, focused on taking ivory and slaves out of the region.Footnote ³³ Theirs were decentralized, competitive politics where slaves mattered as arms-bearers, muscle, and “mass” behind a leader as much as they did as actual producers.Footnote ³⁴ The balance of these functions varied greatly; slaves in Tabora were closer to plantation slaves while those in Tunduru were closer to retainers. But in both cases, slave ownership was part of political and military as well as economic strategies. These demonstrative and violent political strategies, though, were hard to accommodate into colonial rule, and the elites in question were not useful enough—especially once their slaves were leaving—for colonial officials to make much of an effort to support them.

In this way, both the slave regimes of the nineteenth century and their disintegration in the early twentieth are part of the history of East Africa’s relationship with global capitalism. This is, however, a heavily mediated relationship that interacted with many other processes. Part of what ruined Tabora’s traders, for instance, was an ecological change: the exhaustion of ivory reserves in the region as elephants were hunted to extinction, which prompted colonial states to seek firm control of what ivory was still to be had.Footnote ³⁵ Tunduru’s colonial-era marginalization, meanwhile, was partly driven by another facet of environmental history: the attempt to allow elephant populations to recover at the expense of cultivators.Footnote ³⁶ Another factor of great importance in both settings, but with divergent effects, was infrastructural: the presence of a railway line in Western Tanzania versus its absence in the south. Here, the German government had considered building a Kilwa-Songea line, but after the devastation of the consecutive Maji Maji (1905–7) and First World War (1914–8), the British government saw little promise in it. The importance of these contingencies highlights the necessity of considering economic, environmental, social, and political processes together.

In the course of the colonial period, the economic trajectories of the two regions diverged gradually. Agriculturally, Tabora was less rich than the most favoured regions of the country such as Kilimanjaro, but with consistent access to transport for the cash crops it did produce, it participated in the reorientation of livelihoods towards cash cropping that was characteristic of the mid-colonial period in much of tropical Africa.Footnote ³⁷ Cash cropping underpinned a process of “peasantisation” during which former slaves managed to melt into the wider rural population. And yet, this process was neither thorough nor easy. Oral sources show that leaving slave status behind took a lot of doing; the strategies and struggles involved will be examined further below.

Tunduru, meanwhile, became a case study of a colonial “backwater.” The region had neither rich soils that could have carried high-value cash crops nor surplus population easily mobilized for labour migrancy.Footnote ³⁸ Attempts to introduce cotton cultivation faltered due to problems with transport and labour.Footnote ³⁹ After a famine in 1930, an official sent in to examine the causes pointed the finger at over-enthusiastic labour recruitment, leading to a ban on formal recruitment that remained in place until the 1940s.Footnote ⁴⁰ During the inter-war period, the height of the “cash-crop revolution” elsewhere, then, Tunduru mattered neither as a supplier of cash crops nor as a supplier of labour to the colonial economy. What discussion it elicited among officials was to do with things such as sleeping sickness, or whether to prioritize elephants’ role as prized prey for imperial hunters, or their destructive effects on peasants’ crops.Footnote ⁴¹

And yet, here too, slavery faded away. As in Tabora, the process was fitful, halting and incomplete, with different ex-slaves pursuing diverse strategies and facing different obstacles.Footnote ⁴² The availability of land for subsistence production rather than for production for markets or that of alternative forms of employment appears to have been crucial. While in a cash-starved region, even small gains from cash cropping mattered; the end of slavery here is difficult to attribute to the effects of markets, whether in labour or cash crops. Rather, it was a social and political process, with all the complexity typical of the position of Africans in colonial politics. The next sections examine first Tabora, then Tunduru in greater detail.

Post-Slavery in Tabora

To examine pathways out of slavery in Tabora first: the number of slaves in the region remains largely guesswork. The 250,000 guessed at in Unyanyembe district alone by a German official may be a wild overestimate.Footnote ⁴³ But the wide extent of fields worked by slaves whose produce fed the caravans, and the fact that caravans thousands strong did get fed, make clear that the number must have been well into five digits.Footnote ⁴⁴ The town’s Omani population lived very well off the slave-based economy, though some of them stayed in Tabora following abortive trading ventures, to avoid their creditors on the coast.Footnote ⁴⁵ Administrative and mission records combined with interviews allow us to identify several destinations for slaves seeking to emancipate themselves. Mission stations were one of them, even if the freedom granted by missionaries had limits and population at the stations remained modest.Footnote ⁴⁶ Others walked to German district offices to request Freibriefe, certificates of emancipation, sometimes employing locally devised legal procedures whereby slaves publicly declared their intention to seek their freedom before witnesses, in a manner that necessitated their current owner’s consent.Footnote ⁴⁷

Having severed, or at least considerably loosened, ties with owners, former slaves still faced the question where to go next. While oral history interviews on the aftermath of slavery remain fraught with interlocutors’ reluctance to reveal information seen as potentially offensive or damaging to personal status, an interviewee divulged the phrase “ukatokolele kule,” meaning roughly “go get married over there,” which he said expressed the predicament of low-status, ex-slave suitors.Footnote ⁴⁸ They had to engage in migration over relatively short distances, looking for wives in nearby villages where their previous low status was perhaps guessed at but not fully known. That land “over there” was typically available reflected both the loss of control of the region’s pre-colonial warlords, traders and chiefs, and the disruption and population loss occasioned by the First World War.Footnote ⁴⁹

The catastrophic effects of the war in the region of Ugogo, neighbouring Tabora to the east, appear to have fostered another, longer-distance migration strategy.Footnote ⁵⁰ With the Gogo population decimated by famine, it was possible after the war to become Gogo by joining depleted Gogo lineages. Other ex-slaves set out for town. A distinctive group in Tabora were women who established themselves as commercial beer brewers, serving both the expanding urban workforce and peasants who came to town to sell crops.Footnote ⁵¹ By trading in beer, they commercialised the long-established domestic skill of brewing, which some of them had practiced previously in their owners’ compounds. As in many fast-growing colonial-era African cities, the somewhat disreputable and precarious hospitality sector offered niches to unattached women.Footnote ⁵² Meanwhile, Jan-Georg Deutsch’s work on the early years of emancipation up to 1920 highlights the participation of people from Tabora region in labour migration, engaging in paid work for instance in sisal plantations on the coast.Footnote ⁵³

Those slaves who “went to marry over there” participated in a process of peasantisation in Tabora, as plantations disintegrated and smallholder production became the norm.Footnote ⁵⁴ But unlike in regions where cash-cropping wealth obliterated slavery-derived hierarchies, such as southern Ghana, there was no single cash crop here that presented as clear an opportunity as cocoa, tea, or coffee did elsewhere. The closest thing to it was cotton, which, however, came overwhelmingly not from the Tabora region but from Sukumaland further north. Figures for crop exports from the Tabora district instead show groundnuts as the most voluminous crop exported by the district, followed by cassava and maize.Footnote ⁵⁵ Moreover, the total amounts fluctuated greatly over the period 1929–43, with the highest figure for groundnut exports, in 1937, at 3,805 tons, slightly over three times that at the beginning of the period covered by this record (1,447 tons in 1929). In 1938, though, the figure fell to 725 tons and in 1939 to 332; it had fluctuated downwards similarly in earlier years. The fates of other cash crops were similarly mixed.

This was not, then, a booming region. While ex-slaves were less hemmed in by large-scale landowners than on the coast, they also lacked the wage-earning opportunities provided there by urban economies and sisal plantations, and the option to turn to fishing.Footnote ⁵⁶ The limited dynamism as well as the (nevertheless) importance of crop markets can be gauged by the choices of those Omani families of Tabora who remain traceable in the region today. In the course of the 1930s, they moved from the town to villages where they established themselves as somewhat-larger-than-average cultivators who employed paid labour on their fields, and intermediary crop traders.Footnote ⁵⁷ Speaking to descendants of these Omanis in a village tellingly known by the name Maskati (Muscat), Salvatory Nyanto found that they practiced a complex mix of endogamous marriages and marriages with Nyamwezi women that cemented local alliances.Footnote ⁵⁸ Their role as crop traders—mediators of market access for smaller African cultivators—was central to their efforts to maintain a status above that of African villagers. Their strongly expressed resentment against Indian moneylenders makes clear that this strategy was precarious. Nevertheless, we see here that access to markets provided some opportunity in the aftermath of slavery, to both ex-owners and the formerly enslaved.

Overall, slavery as an economic practice did end. Further, the modest economic niches offered by cultivation for markets and subsistence, often in connection with short- to mid-range migration, and by the expanding colonial town, did offer livelihoods for former slaves. Compared with the coast, where the plantation economy had been more dominant and colonial intervention on behalf of formerly slave-owning elites more forceful, the heritage of slavery sat more lightly on society here: former slaves did not, at least, become “squatters.” In fact, some few individuals with probable or attested-to slave antecedents parlayed their work as beer brewers, positions of respect as urban traders, and landlords.Footnote ⁵⁹ The economic transition out of slavery, in other words, was shaped by market access, colonial policy, and, as importantly, by the efforts and initiative of the formerly enslaved, who sought out the often-elusive niches available to them.

That said, slave antecedents remained associated with persistent social vulnerability. This is evident particularly in the uneasy status contests of colonial Tabora, where respondents remembered Nyamwezi residents denigrating others as “just slaves.” Manyema identity in particular, named after a region in Eastern Congo, carried a whiff of slave origins, and Manyema Muslims felt compelled to build a mosque of their own to escape Nyamwezi snobbery.Footnote ⁶⁰ The advice to “go get married elsewhere,” meanwhile, points to persisting status insecurity also in the villages. A particularly important, and frustrating, issue in this regard is the problem of hierarchies within households. By all accounts, women had made up at least half of the enslaved population in Tabora, and for them, the extent of intra-household inequality was crucial. Oral sources attest that some women continued to be looked upon as “just slaves” within family settings and that work in the urban informal economy could be precarious and dangerous, while one elderly female respondents deplored the emotional toll of being without a descent network.Footnote ⁶¹

Nevertheless, this woman had advanced through decades of hardship to the status of family matriarch, with her most conspicuously successful descendant a former secretary in the president’s office. Her case shows the importance of change over a lifetime and of intergenerational mobility. Alongside the precarity of cultivators and most brewers and the success of some of the latter, it shows a wide spread of possible outcomes for the formerly enslaved. Compared with the brutal hierarchies of many post-slavery societies, often politically engineered and protected, this variation passes as relatively benign.

Post-Slavery in Tunduru

Following up on the aftermath of slavery in Tunduru, Nives Kinunda, too, found that oral history interviews often failed to acknowledge the region’s history with slavery, or else produced partial and partisan accounts that reflected the narrator’s or their ancestry’s relationship to the institution and their bids for status. For instance, the current holder of the Mataka title, whose ancestors had put on the march the one-thousand-strong caravans noted in German sources from the first decade of the twentieth century, tended to assert that, rather than capture and sell slaves, their ancestors had sheltered refugees from late nineteenth-century wars.Footnote ⁶² Slaves, in this telling, became dependents, voluntary or prompted by circumstance, but not by enslavement.

A serendipitous mix of sources nevertheless allows us to trace out the dynamics of self-emancipation in this region. Among written sources, they comprise the enthusiastic reports of German officials on the settlement of Mataka and his followers in the region in 1912 and earlier observations on an earlier holder of the Mataka title by David Livingstone; the travel account written by Kolumba Msigala, an eminent proselytizer on behalf of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) who visited Tunduru in the early 1920s; the already mentioned report on the causes of the 1930 famine by district officer at large E. K. Lumley and his discussion of events around the famine in his memoirs; the mission logbooks of Tunduru stations of the UMCA; and administrative records.Footnote ⁶³ Oral records were collected by Nives Kinunda in 2021–2 and are supplemented by comments from earlier interviews conducted by Felicitas Becker in 2000.

When Mataka arrived in Tunduru in 1912, German observers portrayed him as an unchallenged leader of people. Their characterization chimes with Livingstone’s description of Mataka’s earlier settlement further south as large and teeming with free and unfree followers.Footnote ⁶⁴ Three years after the end of the First World War, in 1921, Kolumba Msigala still describes some very large villages in Tunduru, with rectangular houses set in rows on the pattern of coastal Swahili towns.Footnote ⁶⁵ But he also observed that the ritual authority of elders in these settlements was being challenged by young men, who were spearheading conversion to Islam. Less than a decade later, in 1930, Lumley blamed an incautious announcement by a district officer in the intervening years, to the effect that everyone was free to choose their own place of residence, for the break-up of large settlements and the departure of numerous residents to found small settlements of their own, often just a handful of families strong.Footnote ⁶⁶

This form of out-migration was remembered by informants as a means of self-emancipation, and it is confirmed indirectly by Lumley, who blamed the decline in the authority of Mataka and other chiefly figures on naively liberal approaches to populations used to enslavement.Footnote ⁶⁷ Mention of complaints by Mataka and his fellow Yao chiefs in Tunduru about their curtailed authority and small salaries is made in administrative correspondence.Footnote ⁶⁸ Evidently, the former slave-owning elites lacked both the means of enforcement and those of patronage required to hold on to their followers. Nives Kinunda’s interviews, though, suggest that their complaints were perhaps somewhat overblown. According to her informants, chiefs had some success in the attempt to extract ground rent, payable in a share of their harvest, from new settlers.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nevertheless, these efforts to act as landlords evidently offered limited compensation to the former big men for the direct control over people that they had lost, and did not extend far beyond the chiefs’ settlements. A telling measure of the decline of the Mataka dynasty lies in the fact that according to interviews, the first two Matakas who died in Tunduru “were buried with people,” that is, had human sacrifice performed at their funerals. For later holders of the title, this practice stopped.Footnote ⁷⁰

The 1930 famine that accidentally provided written sources on self-emancipation in Tunduru also highlights the precariousness of the smallholder agriculture that ex-slaves went on to practice. The region was still beset by wild animals, with agricultural land of low fertility and vulnerable to flash floods. Nevertheless, these precarious livelihoods, with little connection to cash crop or labour markets, appear to have been the main destination of ex-slaves here. There were probably other planks to livelihoods that are hard to trace, including cross-border trade across the Ruvuma and migrant labour in the absence of organized recruitment. The only such source of support known from written sources is short-distance migration to more secure neighbouring districts in hungry years, to work for food.Footnote ⁷¹ As in Tabora, the ex-slaves’ newfound autonomy did not efface their marginality. One Tunduru-born interviewee who had come to live near the coast asserted that his parents had arrived there on Mataka’s orders, and that slavery had only ended with independence.Footnote ⁷²

The persistence of memories of slavery can also be gauged by the ironic effects of the labour shortage caused by Tanzania’s post-war boom. When the region was again opened to formal labour recruitment, officials turned to the current holder of the Mataka title for practical support.Footnote ⁷³ Children of some of those sent to plantations in Lindi region at that time recalled their parents’ experience in terms of unfreedom: their parents had been “sent” (in Swahili, walitumwa) by Mataka to labour in the plantations; they were watumwa (“those sent,” but also Swahili for “slaves”).Footnote ⁷⁴ In a faint echo of the reception given to a previous Mataka by German officials, British ones greeted the post-war Mataka with pomp and circumstance when he visited the plantations, and a labourer’s descendants described him as having received part of their parents’ wages—whether directly from them or from their employers is unclear, and was to the narrator immaterial.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the era of modernizing colonialism, then, with independence on the horizon, Mataka’s actions as a labour exporter reeked of government-sanctioned enslavement to the workers targeted.

As concerns the variation in ex-slaves’ trajectories here, and particularly gendered variations, a useful starting point is again offered by Lumley, who attributed the food crisis of 1930 partly to “young men living off their wives.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In other words, women formed their own farming households near the banks of the Ruvuma River, and their polygynous husbands would pass from homestead to homestead—a practice drawing on the matrilineal tradition of the Yao that made uxorilocal marriage unremarkable.Footnote ⁷⁷ Some scholars have suggested that breaking this matrilineal pattern was part of the reason why ambitious men in matrilineal societies were keen to own slaves.Footnote ⁷⁸ The presence of these uxorilocal households at a time when Mataka’s authority was still in the process of fracturing suggests that women were quick to avail themselves of options offered by matriliny, and used spatial mobility as a means to emancipate themselves, despite the attendant risks. Latham describes the women-headed households as located near the Ruvuma River, in an area that was relatively fertile but also prone to floods and crocodile-ridden, thus precarious. One interviewee recalled how his mother, Mama Pili, self-emancipated by leaving Mataka’s settlement in response to sustained predatory behaviour by neighbours who destroyed her crops and burned her hut in a bid to force her into a quasi-marital relationship.Footnote ⁷⁹ She left with a friend who had to leave several children behind, a pattern also found in reminiscences of women who had walked away from enslavement in Malawi.Footnote ⁸⁰ Mama Pili found land and a husband within the Tunduru district and, her son recalled, took pride in furnishing her home according to her own tastes, using goods that became available when transport improved in the late colonial period.

These narratives highlight the persistence of social disadvantages deriving from unfree backgrounds, but also the fact that women left by choice despite the attendant risks, and sometimes at the expense of contact with their children.Footnote ⁸¹ For men, this form of self-emancipation can safely be taken to have been, if anything, easier. It appears that slavery here largely ended because people walked away from it onto unoccupied land, with market access a bonus, but not essential to the process. What remains unclear is why not everybody did—why some people remained sufficiently dependent on or loyal to Mataka to end up being “sent” to coastal plantations.Footnote ⁸² Given the challenges involved in autonomous cultivation, one likely aspect here is something hard to trace for historians: individual disposition, in particular attitude to risk and physical resilience.

Conclusion: the role of colonial capitalism in the ending of slavery in mainland East Africa

This article has examined the aftermath of the era of second slavery in a region, East Africa, where expanding networks of commercial exchange in the nineteenth century had caused slavery to expand dramatically, albeit for the first, not the second, time. The decline of slavery here offers the opportunity to revisit, in the twentieth century and in the context of much more advanced industrialization, the argument about the role of capitalism in obliterating slave-based economies. The main findings are that market access helped, but was not reliably either a necessary or a sufficient condition for the dissolution of slave labour regimes. Rather, its precise role varied over time and place. There was no linear evolution towards greater participation in markets in the regions studied here. Rather, every aspect of what constituted markets changed: the goods exchanged, the manner of their production and the identity of the producers, the intermediate traders, financing networks, forms of transportation and regulatory regimes, and ultimately the beneficiaries of trading.

These changes, though, formed part of profound political shifts, brought on by the swift disempowerment and gradual socio-political marginalization of pre-colonial elites, but also by technological change. They entailed the democratization of access to trade through the breaking of the nexus of trade and violence and, less dramatically, through expanded transport networks that facilitated trade in agricultural goods. Thus, while the end and aftermath of slavery constantly interacted with the non-linear history of market access, it was shaped also by related but distinct dynamics, especially the reshaping of politics and social hierarchies in the colonial period. Moreover, the dynamics of politics and those of market access could combine in divergent and ambiguous ways. Both the Matakas in Tunduru and the Arabs of Tabora derived some advantage in the colonial period from their ability to position themselves as intermediaries with colonial-era markets (crop ones in Tabora, labour ones in Tunduru). Nevertheless, both lost out compared to the pre-colonial period from the collapse of markets in slaves and arms. While the elites of Tabora lost out more from the loss of slave labour, in the case of Tunduru, the region’s irrelevance to the colonial economy compounded the political decline of the Matakas and made sure that land remained accessible for predominantly subsistence cultivation.

The political nature of the aftermath of slavery is evident also from the importance of the end of colonialism to the attenuation of slavery-derived hierarchies. There was no great economic shift at this point; little changed in market access, but the changeover of elites and political dispensation supported the efforts of the marginal to emerge from the shadow of slavery. This could take very different forms. For the female elder who deplored her marginal origins in Tabora, independence opened up opportunities to her progeny that ultimately made her the grandmother of a respected and economically comfortable urbanite.Footnote ⁸³ In the recollections of a descendant of a couple who had been compelled to labour near the coast by Mataka, the role of independence was more political and concerned with recovering status. In the village where he lived, a former plantation owner was forced to apologize publicly (at the local office of TANU, the party that campaigned for Tanzania’s independence) after being accused of calling a villager “a slave.” This narrator praised Julius Nyerere, TANU’s leader, for ending slavery.Footnote ⁸⁴

Of the two cases above, Tabora can be thought of as a stunted, limited version of the Ghanaian or Senegalese transition: a “cash crop revolution” stalled by the lack of sufficiently profitable crops. Rather than burying slavery-era social hierarchies under new forms of wealth and achievement, peasantisation here created fairly precarious households whose inhabitants still drew on memories of slavery to construct social distinctions. Nevertheless, market participation, such as it was, was an important element in ex-slaves’ multipronged efforts to claim belonging and status. The outcomes in Tunduru, meanwhile, show Yao big men’s control over their slaves disintegrating amid very limited production for markets and limited participation in labour markets until the late colonial period, and with market access severely curtailed by the lack of transport links. Rather than a geographic and economic reorientation towards agricultural commodity markets, the main process of slaves’ self-emancipation here was one of dispersal, away from the relatively accessible settlements established by immigrant big men. They sought autonomy in isolated hamlets threatened by crop-raiding animals and floods. Markets mattered to this process in an indirect way, mediated by colonial policy and politics. Specifically, Tunduru’s lack of promise regarding marketable crops induced British officials to ignore the declining big men’s pleas for support. The local elites were expendable because they had nothing to offer the colonial economy, and their former slaves were quick to take advantage of this expendability.

A further broad observation arising from the case studies concerns the tension between slavery as a labour regime and slavery as a status regime. As a strategy for sustained, larger-than-household-scale production, enslavement became unviable very quickly in early twentieth-century mainland East Africa. But diverse forms of unfreedom, marginalization, slavery-derived hierarchies, and status anxieties lingered over decades. Interviewees articulated them gingerly, such as in the context of post-war labour recruitment, which reeked of a recrudescence of enslavement in Tunduru. But they leave their mark on the evidence to the present day, in the shape of the unease, avoidance, and circumlocutions widespread in the context of oral history research on the topic.

This persistence of slavery as a productive category in economies of status despite its economic obsolescence deserves further consideration. As a best guess, it reflects two factors. One is the fact that even very limited economic advantages and perfunctory support by colonial authorities made some difference in contexts as deprived as Tunduru or post–First World War Tabora. The other is that the assertion of established hierarchies can serve as a means to seek to compensate for the loss of economic advantage. Rather than following from economic dominance, claims to elevated status can serve as its substitute. This is particularly noticeable in the complaints of scions of “old” coastal families, that “in the past, people had respect, but now they only value money,” which elides the fact that in the past, the families claiming respect tended to also have money.Footnote ⁸⁵ With the scope for the assertion of social dominance through conspicuous consumption and largesse diminished, fine, sometimes very place-specific gradations of indigeneity, privileged knowledge, and respectability gained in importance.

Another important contributing factor to the persistence of slavery-derived hierarchy lies in the importance of households as a site of both slave and ex-slave labour and of struggles over hierarchy—in this context, inevitably highly gendered. Briefly put, men in post-slavery societies had little motivation to support assertions of autonomy by women.Footnote ⁸⁶ Conversely, for most ex-slave women, a life “free” from the double burden of agricultural and domestic work, and from the subordination that came with marriage, was beyond the horizon of possibilities. Slavery-derived hierarchies, then, shaded into gendered domestic ones. The economic, particularly labour, pressures, deprivations, and social competition of village life made women persistently vulnerable to denigration with reference to slave origins. They provided reasons for both husbands and competitive wives to marginalize women susceptible, for whatever reason, to such treatment. Echoes of this vulnerability are audible in the gendered politics of oral sources on slavery: the widespread reluctance of women to engage with the topic, the tendency to stick with formulaic tropes, and the way personal, affectively charged stories emerge when narrators set their reluctance aside.Footnote ⁸⁷

This observation serves as a reminder that all systematic treatments of the historical development of capitalism struggle to make sense of the interaction between capitalist regimes on one hand and households and families on the other. Given that households form the setting for most of female ex-slaves’ labour and status negotiations, this difficulty hampers the understanding of their trajectories. In effect, understanding post-slavery in the twentieth century in a way that includes female ex-slaves requires examination of households as sites of labour, not recreation, and of the place of unpaid household labour in economies shaped, one way or another, by global capitalism. If we start from the position advocated by feminist economists that household labour is productive labour, and its failure to command a wage reflects women’s continuing unequal status, then households become comprehensible as sites where struggles kindred to those of the era of slavery continued beyond it.Footnote ⁸⁸ The case studies considered here make clear that women could not automatically expect to be better off for no longer being enslaved. But they also make clear that significant improvements in autonomy and status were possible. They could occur in a number of ways, but the clearest examples, such as Mama Pili in Tunduru, involved a good deal of proactiveness, risk, and defiance.Footnote ⁸⁹

The anxieties around speaking about slavery, moreover, also hint at the importance of both silence and rhetoric on the topic in ex-slaves’ emergence from slavery, and the present-day accommodation of the slave past. Both the explicit denigration of ex-slaves as “just slaves” and a myriad of oblique ways of alluding to such origins were clearly crucial means to maintain slavery-derived social distinctions. Conversely, the gradual silencing of such speech—difficult to place in time, but with an important phase around independence—was an important step towards integration (it is tempting to say “victory”) for ex-slaves. But the increasing unspeakability of slavery coexists among oral history narrators with a blunt acknowledgement of the inescapability of toil and dependence for a great many people, in the colonial period and into the present. While the name of slavery has been banished into the past, structural positions of raw exploitability and social debasement remain very much thinkable. The end of slavery as an acceptable legal and political as well as systematic and widespread social position is no mean thing, but it is not to be confused with an end to exploitation and unfreedom.