| Lay Down your Heart |
|
The East African Coast has a history of slave trade and slavery as old as the coast itself. The external agents in the trade consisted mostly of Arabs and Persians. Europeans began to take their share of the slave trade from the beginning of the 15th century when the Portuguese stopped along the coast on their way to India. The East African slave trade peaked during the 19th century and Zanzibar took a special position in the trade. Tanzania We are in Tanzania searching for remains of the slave trade to facilitate the work of the teachers at the 20 Danish ASP schools working with the transatlantic slave trade (TST). The last seven years one of the flagship projects of UNESCO’s ASP school network has been the transatlantic slave trade. However recently UNESCO decided to include the Indian Ocean in the work and so did the Danish network.  Our journey began 70 km north of Dar Es Salaam in Bagamoyo, which in Swahili means “lay down your heart”. This was the end of one of the caravan routes and it was here that captured slaves arrived and often died after an exhausting march usually well over 1000 km from their homelands, carrying ivory and rhino horn to the coast. The march to Bagamoyo took three to six month and slaves too weak to accomplish the journey were killed. Of those who survived most were sold in Zanzibar to work in the clove plantations or exported to Mauritius, Persia, Arabia and India. In 1860 a Catholic mission was established in Bagamoyo. The missionaries bought slaves liberated them and settled them in a Christian Freedom Village. Today the Catholic Mission houses a museum which tells the story of slavery. There are also some interesting buildings e.g. the Old Fort whose original function was to hold slaves awaiting shipment to Zanzibar.  Zanzibar A small five seater plane carried us from Pangani - another point of disembarkation further north – in the wake of the slaveships to Zanzibar. Our first destination in Stonetown was the national archives, which contains a lot of interesting pictures, photographs and texts. By the aid of a recommendation from the Danish National Commission of UNESCO we obtained permission to visit the archives and copy some of the pictures, texts and references. Next stop was the House of Wonders, a palace which was originally designed for ceremonial purposes for Sultan Barghas. Today it houses a very beautiful and interesting museum. In the foyer we were lucky enough to meet professor Abdul Sheriff who accepted to give a video interview. In Stonetown and its surroundings there are quite a number of significant, historic buildings and ruins like the Arab Fort, the Slave Market, the house of the Slave Trader Tibu Tip, the underground slave chambers at Mangapwani Beach etc., but nothing as outstanding as the old forts and castles on the West Coast of Africa in Ghana. Billeder og ord All in all we managed to collect a lot of old materials and describe the present state of affairs by camera. An introduction or appetizer to the history of slave trade and colonization in the Indian Ocean findes på www.unesco-asp.dk med titlen : Østafrika – negernes land (Land of Zandj) |