Slavery in Africa.
Its funny how things happen. We sell beads, buttons and baskets for a living, traveling around the world to the centers of production to find our unique products which we import into the U.S. and then travel the country selling. Sometimes we stumble upon something that catches our attention and we just have to react.
So it was this year in Tucson at the big Tucson Gem Show. A friend I had met earlier in the year while traveling around the midwest, an ex Rhodesian who imports African art sculptures, was set up in the African Art Village at my suggestion. He had not heard of the Tucson show nor the African Village, and it was a revelation to him. While helping him set up, (actually while getting in his way looking at all his stuff while he set up) I found a file on his desk filled with photo's for sale. One of the photos was of a 1890s era Slave Trade. The picture blew my mind. It was of eight men shackled together at the ankle with their arms linked together. According to my friend, he had obtained the original photo from Government archives in Harare, Zimbabwe while searching for old photographs to print. Besides knowing the approximate age of the photo, he also knew that it was taken in Northern Rhodesia from around the border region of Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo.
What he does not know is the context of the photo. I would like to offer this interpretation.
What we do know is that while England was one of the largest slave trading countries of Europe during the 18th century it abolished the slave trade in 1807. This meant that buying slaves and importing them into England was against the law, but owning slaves was still legal. It was not until 1833 that ownership of slaves in England was illegal. However, it was still legal in other parts of the world, such as the U.S.
We also know that many British leaders and missionaries were against the slave trade, and people such as David Livingston worked hard to abolish it at its source. By the 1890s the British Colonial Office would have been hard at work stopping and preventing such activities in its colonies. Maybe this photo was taken during or immediately after the capture of slave traders and the rescue of these slaves, who would have used the large rivers running from the interior of Africa to the coast of the Indian ocean for loading into ships destined for the New World.
We also know that slave trading was never a part of colonial life in the Rhodesias. Northern and Southern Rhodesia were founded in 1890 by British adventurers such as Cecil John Rhodes and exploited for its minerals and later for agriculture as these colonies became more settled, but by then almost 60 years had passed since the abolition of slavery in England so that industry never happened in Rhodesia.
I also know from personal experience (having lived amongst the Batonga tribe of Western Zimbabwe) whose territory bordered along the Zambezi River north of the Victoria Falls, that slavery was a common occurrence before the coming of the British. I personally saw the results of the tribe attempting to prevent slave traders from capturing their members by scarring their faces, knocking out their front teeth and other mutilations to discourage the traders from selecting them as slaves based on their unattractiveness. I lived amongst the Batonga during the late 1970s,( obviously long after arrival of the British and the stopping of the slave trade by marauding Arabs from Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, who came up the Zambezi River), but the practice continued up until that time. I left in 1980 after the war of black independence (Chimurenga) and the country became Zimbabwe, and when I returned in 1993 there was no sign of the self mutilation continuing amongst this tribe. Hopefully the capture of tribal members by slave traders has been erased from the collective tribal memory forever, never to be repeated.
This photograph is a significant historical picture, definitely open to interpretation, contextually very sad, but worth recording and discussing.
J- Me and Guy are the owners of Wild Things Beads, a small family run import business specializing in Czech glass beads and buttons and finding the unusual to bring to their warehouse. They also run working bead tours to Jablonec and Hong Kong. Their warehouse is located deep in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California, and can be reached by phone at (530)743 1339 or on the web at
www.wildthingsbeads.com. They are also open by appointment at their warehouse.
