I had a pleasure of representing Amistad America at the 10th Annual International Conference on Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean and Arab Worlds: Global Connections and Disconnections organized by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, on November 7th and 8th.

This conference explored the complexity and importance of the Indian Ocean and Arab slavery and slave trades in terms of their connections to the meaning of slavery and abolition in a world-wide context. In addition, it examined the relation between these trades and the development of 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century global economies. Of particular importance are the legal history of abolition in the Indian Ocean World, and the legacy of slavery and the slave trade in the region today, in terms of cultural memories, patterns of human trafficking and subjugation, stigmatization, and family relationships. 

As Amistad's webmaster, I learned a great deal about the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade during several years of cooperation with Amistad America. However, I was especially interested in the topic of last weekend's conference: it was in the Indian Ocean that I first faced the artifacts of trading in human beings. Many years before I would look through the door of no return on Goree Island in Senegal, or walk through Bunce Island near Freetown, Sierra Leone, I encountered the history of the slave trade in grizzly dungeons of the Slave House in Stone Town. Somehow Zanzibar’s particular involvement in the slave trade failed to make its way into its historic cultural context especially in the USA. In Zanzibar, slavery through the centuries was very much a horror inflicted by Africans and Arabs on Africans and its cessation was very much a European inspired action.

The bicentennial of 1807 Wilberforce Act, abolishing the slave trade prompted the Freedom Schooner Amistad to embark on her historic journey retracing the infamous Atlantic Slave Trade route. The same act was the reason why,  in the later years, the Royal Navy chased Arab dhows trading slaves in the Indian Ocean. Zanzibar's Sultan, Barghash, was forced in 1873, under the threat of a British naval bombardment, to sign an edict which made the sea-borne slave trade illegal, and the slave market in Zanzibar was closed.