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Many Middle Passages

University of California Press

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..................................................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION Marcus Rediker, Cassandra Pybus, and Emma Christopher..............................................................................................11 / THE OTHER MIDDLE PASSAGE: THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE IN THE INDIAN OCEAN Edward A. Alpers......................................................................202 / THE EAST AFRICAN MIDDLE PASSAGE: DAVID LIVINGSTONE, THE ZAMBESI EXPEDITION, AND LAKE NYASSA, 1858-1866 Iain McCalman........................................393 / THE IRANUN AND BALANGINGI SLAVING VOYAGE: MIDDLE PASSAGES IN THE SULU ZONE James Warren.....................................................................524 / THE VOYAGE OUT: PETER KOLB AND VOC VOYAGES TO THE CAPE Nigel Penn...........................................................................................725 / BOUND FOR BOTANY BAY: JOHN MARTIN'S VOYAGE TO AUSTRALIA Cassandra Pybus.....................................................................................926 / "THE SLAVE TRADE IS MERCIFUL COMPARED TO [THIS]": SLAVE TRADERS, CONVICT TRANSPORTATION, AND THE ABOLITIONISTS Emma Christopher.............................1097 / CONVICT PASSAGES IN THE INDIAN OCEAN, C. 1790-1860 Clare Anderson...........................................................................................1298 / AFTER SLAVERY: FORCED DRAFTS OF IRISH AND CHINESE LABOR IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, OR THE SEARCH FOR LIQUID LABOR Scott Reynolds Nelson.....................1509 / LA TRATA AMARILLA: THE "YELLOW TRADE" AND THE MIDDLE PASSAGE, 1847-1884 Evelyn Hu-DeHart....................................................................16610 / "A MOST IRREGULAR TRAFFIC": THE OCEANIC PASSAGES OF THE MELANESIAN LABOR TRADE Laurence Brown..............................................................18411 / LA TRAITE DES JAUNES: TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN AND CHILDREN ACROSS THE CHINA SEA Julia Martnez................................................................204AFTERWORD: "ALL OF IT IS NOW" Kevin Bales and ZoeTrodd..........................................................................................................222POSTSCRIPT: GUN-SLAVE CYCLE Marcus Rediker......................................................................................................................235APPENDIX.........................................................................................................................................................237CONTRIBUTORS.....................................................................................................................................................245INDEX............................................................................................................................................................249

Chapter One

EDWARD A. ALPERS

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE, traditionally presented as the most traumatic moment in the entire slave trade, has assumed iconographic significance for many diasporic Africans in the Black Atlantic. As Colin Palmer concludes:

The Middle Passage was more than just a shared physical experience for those who survived it. It was and is a metaphor for the suffering of African peoples born of their enslavement, of severed ties, of longing for a lost homeland, of a forced exile.... It is a living and wrenching aspect of the history of the peoples of the African diaspora, an inescapable part of their present impossible to erase or exorcise. A gruesome reminder of things past, it is simultaneously a signifier of a people's capacity to survive and to refuse to be vanquished.

As in the larger historiography of the African slave trade, the Atlantic dominates both the evidence for and the literature of the middle passage. However, there is no evidence that the middle passage in the Indian Ocean occupies the kind of central role in collective memory that Palmer describes for the African diaspora, although persistent recollections bear witness that Africa is still a presence in many of these communities.

My intention is to bring a measure of balance to this historiography by examining evidence from eastern Africa in order to shed some light on the middle passage in the Indian Ocean. In addition, I contend that the sea voyage from Africa west to the Americas or east across the Indian Ocean wasonlyonelegofthetraumaticjourneythatforciblyremovedfreeAfricans from their homes in Africa to their ultimate destinations. Indeed, I believe that it is a mistake to restrict analyses of the middle passage only to oceanic passages, assuming that enslaved Africans embarked from the African coast as though they were leaving their native country, when in fact their passage from freedom into slavery actually began with the moment in which they were swept up by the economic forces that drove the slave trade deep into the African interior.

I also seek to demonstrate that the middle passage encompasses a much more complex set of forced migrations than is usually assumed. From the moment they were seized and began their movement to the coast, captive Africans had to begin the process of personal survival and cultural adjustment associated with the diaspora. They learned new languages, received new names, ate new foods, and forged new bonds among themselves before they ever had to adjust fully to the work of slavery or the conditions of liberation. I will illustrate how some of these processes worked by presenting an album of individual experiences-of capture, enslavement, and movement to the coast and then across the water-from nineteenth-century eastern Africa. All these accounts refer to events at the height of the slave trade intheeighteenthandnineteenthcenturiesandmustbeunderstoodasproducts of the abolitionist movement.

The earliest of these published freed-slave narratives is the story of Swema, a Yao girl from northwestern Mozambique. In 1865, when she was perhaps ten years of age, Swema was given as a pawn to her mother's creditor, because Swema's mother was unable to repay a debt. The creditor then sold Swema to a passing "Arab" slave caravan. During the caravan to the coast, Swema and the other captives were usually fed a diet of millet or bean porridge, sometimes even roasted bananas or sweet potatoes. According to Swema, "To prevent desertion and at the same time husband the strength of the porters of the merchandise, the leaders take care during the march to feed the slaves well who are under their command." But soon the caravan left the fertile country of Yaoland and entered the dry steppe between the Ruvuma River and Kilwa. Despondent at the failing strength of her mother, who had been allowed to accompany her, Swema had to be force-fed by her captor. In the end, Swema's mother was literally worked to death and left to die by the road. After a long, harrowing journey, Swema finally reached the coast at Kilwa, the principal slaving port for all of East Africa, where, after resting and recuperating for several days, "one beautiful morning" she was loaded aboard a slaving dhow bound for the principal Indian Ocean...