Slavery
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Magomero and The Nasik Boys
The Black Explorers This is not the story of famous white explorers, it is the story of some of the black African men, boys and women, many of whom were freed slaves, who walked with them. It is often suggested… Continue reading
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Rigby, Livingstone & The UMCA
Introduction Between 1808 and 1900 tens of thousands of liberated slaves, African men, women and children, predominantly from central and eastern Africa, were disembarked by the Royal Navy at Aden, Bombay, Cape Town, the Seychelles, Mauritius and Freretown in Kenya.… Continue reading
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The Royal Navy & The East African Slave Trade – 1808 to 1853
Introduction Between 1640 and 1807 approximately 12 million Africans were transported from the west coast of Africa to the Americas; around 3.4 million of those were transported on British Ships. In May 1787 the first meeting of the Society for… Continue reading
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The East African Maritime Slave Trade
Sometime between 30 and 40 AD, when Tiberius or his nephew Caligula was the emperor of Rome, an unknown Greek or Roman merchant wrote a trader’s guide, a “periplus”, to the Indian Ocean. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea covers… Continue reading
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Magomero and The East African Slave Trade
The slave trade in Africa was buyer driven. It was complex and fragmented trade but generally the Europeans took enslaved people from the west coast and from south of the Zambezi River in the east while the trade on the… Continue reading
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An Image of Slavery
This photograph was taken in Stone Town, Zanzibar by an unknown missionary around 1890. The original is a lantern slide measuring just 83 x 83 mm, the width of a credit card, yet in that tiny space, it exemplifies the… Continue reading
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The Demise of Malawi’s Elephants: Part 2 – The Nightmare Years
We are watching a breeding herd of elephants at a muddy wallow, babies frolicking in the mud, tumbling over each other as they spray muddy water in all directions. Their aunts are just behind and often standing over them as… Continue reading
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The Demise of Malawi’s Elephants: Part 1 – Before the Slaughter
Malawi was once famous for its huge herds of elephants, described in the 18th century as an “elephant rich country” with the land between lake Malawi and the Luangwa River in Zambia “teeming with elephants”. A country where, in 1859,… Continue reading
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Sowing the Seeds of Extinction
Where Did all the Lions Go? We are all too aware that the demise of wild life in Africa is as a result of human activity and it is well recognised that this started in the colonial era but, naively… Continue reading
Travelogues and Other Memories 