Slavery in Kenya

Early Medieval and Portuguese period

In the 12th century, Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi described how Arab traders lured children on the coast of present-day Kenya with dates in order to capture and enslave them.^[2] Scholars Henry Codjoe, John Alembillah Azumah, and Ronald Segal believe that Kenyans were among the Zanj slaves that led a slave-revolt in 9th century Iraq.^[3][4][5]

Historian and archaeologist Stéphane Pradines notes that the oldest slave markets in East Africa were in Kenya and Somalia. The trade in enslaved people was a highly valued African export to Arab markets, with most slaves before the 15th century originating from Kenya and the Horn of Africa. Relatively few Portuguese sources document the sale and export of slaves between the 16th and 17th centuries, however, in 1505 when the Sultan of Mombasa refused to submit to the Portuguese, Francisco d’Almeida sacked and burned the city, enslaving and carrying off around a thousand of the most beautiful women with him.^[6]

In the early 16th century, the cities of Malindi and Mombasa welcomed Arab slave traders. As early as 1506, traders from Mombasa and Malindi, some of them Yemenis, imported slaves into the coastal cities. In 1518, a ship sailing from Malindi to Cambay carried enslaved people. The use of slave-girls as concubines was certainly widespread in the coastal areas. The mother of one of the sons of the king of Malindi in 1528 was a slave of “Cafre” origins. John Gordon Lorimer recounts that in 1515 the Portuguese employed hundreds of enslaved Oromos from the Swahili Coast as transport laborers.^[7]

The Portuguese living in Mombasa around 1630 also owned many slaves.^[8]

Coastal slavery during the Omani period

During the Omani period and the later Sultanate of Zanzibar, the slave trade expanded. Along the Kenyan coast, the Zanzibari Arabs set up a prosperous plantation economy dependent on slave labor.^[9] According to Swahili scholars, the number of enslaved people before the 19th century was relatively small and largely limited to individuals purchased from Madagascar or the Cape Delgado region for domestic use, compared to later periods when it became more extensive.^[8] Traditional power relations changed during the early decades of the 19th century as Zanzibar rose to regional prominence in East-Africa after the Busaidi rulers of Oman moved their capital from Muscat to Zanzibar in the 1830s. Following years of resistance, they brought Mombasa and the sultanates of the Pate and Lamu archipelago under their control. The Busaidi then developed clove plantations, whose returns soon exceeded those of ivory and other exports. Enslaved labour became more valuable than the profits gained from exporting slaves abroad, and this Omani-driven slave economy flourished between 1840 and 1880.^[10]

In the 19th century, Lamu and Mombasa were the main slave importers in Kenya, with most slaves being imported from Zanzibar by sea, and later overland due to the ban of the slave trade by the British.^[11][12]

Even though Lamu did not play an active role in the slave trade until the early 19th century, its merchant elite nevertheless owned slaves. Domestic slaves were typically housed in the ground-floor galleries of merchant mansions, while those working on elite farms lived in daub-and-wattle huts on the outskirts of Lamu, in an area later known as Langoni.^[13] Following their victory in the Battle of Shela in 1812 against Pate and Mombasa, the Swahili city-state of Lamu sought protection from the Sultan of Oman to secure their dominance. In 1821, the Omanis built and garrisoned the Lamu fort.^[14] As the Omanis arrived, plantation-style slavery emerged along the Kenyan coast, and within a few decades enslaved people accounted for nearly a quarter of the population. By 1887, out of roughly 168,000 inhabitants between the Tana river and the Lamu archipelago, just over 40,000 were enslaved. As the Zanzibar slave market expanded in the early 19th century, coastal Kenya developed into a slave-importing region, where coastal communities (Arab, Swahili, and Somali) all relied on enslaved labor. Enslaved people carried out a wide range of roles, including artisanal work, military service, and domestic duties, though most laboured as agricultural workers along the coast, forming the backbone of a profitable grain export economy. The majority lived in fertile zones suited to plantation agriculture. During the 1860s, the Malindi hinterland was developed by the Zanzibari successors of Sultan Said as a key grain-producing region for the coastal Sultanate. Beyond Lamu, Takaungu, and Malindi, smaller concentrations of agricultural slaves were also found in the rural outskirts of Mombasa and the southern coastal interior.^[15]

Throughout the 19th century, the Omanis and Zanzibaris relied on Kilwa Kisiwani as a major source of slaves, drawing captives from a wide area in South-East Africa, particularly the Lake Nyasa region and northern Mozambique. Populations living inland from the Kenyan coast such as the Mijikenda of Kenya were generally not targeted, possibly because slave traders avoided antagonizing populations living in close proximity.^[16]

Inland slavery

Sir Arthur Henry Hardinge, British Consul-General in Zanzibar and the first Commissioner of the British East Africa Protectorate from 1895 to 1900, believed there was no connection between the slavery produced by inland inter-tribal warfare and the Zanzibari coastal slave system. Writing in 1896, he stated:

The conditions existing in these two African regions, separated from one another by 800 miles of wild country, are entirely different... whatever may have been the case in the past, there is now no connection between the local slave-trading resulting from inter-tribal wars among the natives of Ukamba and Kikuyu, and the existence of domestic slavery in the Sultanate of Zanzibar.^[17]

In the second half of the 19th century, Reuters was informed of considerable slave-dealing among the Kikuyu. The victims were mainly women and children raided from small Masai tribes.^[18] Due to the great famine of the 1890s, hundreds of Masai women were sold to the Kikuyu.^[19] In 1894, Kikuyus were reportedly selling Kamba and Masai girls at Mount Kenya in exchange for brasswire and beads.^[20] According to American explorer William Astor Chanler (1896), slaves originating from the Kikuyu region were sold to the Kamba in exchange for cattle. The Kamba employed these slaves in their plantations. The price of a good-looking Kikuyu or Masai girl was three goats. The Kamba also had a few Oromo slaves.^[21] On 18 April 1894, eight Masai slaves were freed from Funzi Island.^[22] Some captives from Kenya were taken through slave trade networks that could've reached as far as the Americas. One example is Thornton Williams, a Masai man who was captured in Kenya and sold in Texas to the O’Connor Ranches.^[23] According to Ainslee's Magazine of August 1900:

The favorite girls are those captured from the Masai and the Boran Gallas, whose charms appeal to Arabian Moslems somewhat as those of the Circassian women do to the Turks. The Boran are particularly renowned for their beauty, and a slave thief will risk his life to obtain one.. Masai girls are easier to capture, and are therefore more common. The tribe was formerly celebrated for its vast flocks and herds, but a devastating famine some years ago left it almost destitute. The warriors thereupon began a system of raiding on all sides, and another fierce tribe, the Wakikuyu, took advantage of their absence to descend on the Masai, kill off the old men and steal all the women and girls. These are now being disposed of at comparatively low rates to local Arab or Swahili middle-men, who retail them at a big profit. It will be only a generation or two, how- ever, when slavery shall have disappeared in British East Africa, for one can no longer legally buy a slave. This may be done only in German territory where the purchase is made subject to approval by a government officer.^[24]

In the 19th century, Somalis raided Oromo settlements, killing most men and taking women and children as slaves. The captives were incorporated into household life while remaining subjects. Oromo women, valued for their beauty, were kept as concubines, used as domestic servants, or married to other slaves.^[25][26][27] Scholar Catherine Besteman observed that: "The Somalis dominated in warfare during the 19th century, conquering and enslaving Oroma and Boran."^[28]

Somali raids on the Tana River Oromo and the Pokomo Bantus appear to have begun in the 1850s and 1860s, reaching a peak in the 1870s.^[29] By the 1870s, the steadily increasing number of Oromo captives being transported from Kenya was estimated at 10,000 annually crossing the Juba River into the Kismayo area. Demand for slaves increased to the point that a new overland caravan route from Lamu was established in September 1871. Within two years, it had become the principal route for transporting slaves from Kenya to the Benadir region in Somalia. During this period, it was reported that southern Somalis were importing as many as 4,000 slaves annually from the Lamu area. Those who carried out slave raids and those who traded in slaves were often distinct, belonging to different Somali clans. Contemporary accounts described Somali slave raiders as particularly feared, with reports that even rumors of their approach could prompt entire villages to flee or attempt negotiations with Somali elders. In at least one case, town gates were deliberately reinforced in response to the threat of such raids. There were also reports of Somali attacks on entire settlements to obtain captives.^[30] According to the colonial administrator Charles William Hobley, the Somalis attacked the Oromo in 1842 but were repelled. Peace was concluded in 1845, though fighting resumed in 1848, when the Somalis eventually gained the upper hand, killing about 2,000 Oromo elders and chiefs and capturing about 80,000 women and children.^[31] British explorer Harald George Carlos Swayne (1900) described a Somali raiding party of around 1,000 men near the Oromo settlement of Golbanti on the Tana.^[32]

The Somalis would also launch raids the Pokomo people during this period. British reports in 1894 described how the Somalis would come to the Pokomo country nearly every year during the dry season, carrying off women and children into slavery, while the Pokomo reportedly "never dreamed of offering any resistance."^[33] By 1898, the Pokomo began building new villages in inaccessible jungle areas due to frequent Somali slave-raids. ^[34] The Somalis also enslaved the Kore and Laikipiak Masai in the 19th century, they were sent to the city of Kismayo to be sold to Somali traders. Portuguese missionary Leon des Avanchers mentioned seeing Masai among the Harti Somali when he visited the southern coastal area of Somalia in 1858. These Masai were freed by the British in the 1890s.^[35] During the famine of 1884-85, some Mijikenda families sold relatives into slavery in exchange for grain, and Somali traders in Lamu purchased Mijikenda slaves in the hundreds. Slaves were also sold to the Somalis at Wituland, and sometimes the Somalis raided the area for slaves.^[36]

In 1912, a French explorer claimed that repeated Somali slave-raids had severely depopulated parts of the Pokomo region:

If the Ndura was so sparsely inhabited, it was because the Somalis had ravaged it in every way, stealing, pillaging, kidnapping women and children as slaves, and killing those who defended themselves.^[37]