Why Colonialism Was Actually Good for Africa – Part 2
By Michael Chishala, 30th April 2025
When Europeans began creating colonies in Africa, slavery had already been abolished in Europe. Great Britain abolished slavery in 1807 within its borders and by 1838, all its colonies. At that point, Britain had one African colony, Sierra Leone, which was used to resettle freed slaves and as a military base for their navy’s war against the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The capital city of Sierra Leone was officially founded in 1792 by a thousand free former slaves who sailed from Nova Scotia in modern-day Canada. That is why it is called “Freetown”. The voyage was paid for by British abolitionists and philanthropists who also paid for the surveying and town setting up.
European nations and the USA progressively dismantled slavery mostly during the 19th Century. Brazil, which gained independence from Portugal in 1822, was the last nation in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888. Curiously, Portugal had abolished slavery within its borders earlier in 1761 but not in its colonies. It was pressure from Britain that made Portugal abolish slavery in its colonies in 1869.
Despite all this progress in Europe and the Americas, slavery persisted in Africa. Tribes such as the Ngoni, Lozi, Bemba, Chikunda, Lunda, Zulu, Ndebele and others were actively capturing and selling slaves. There was a large slave trade operation in Angola managed by the Portuguese who were supplied by the Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms. Angola was the largest single source of slaves in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade at around 35% and the vast majority ended up in Brazil.
A man nicknamed “Tippu Tipp” from Zanzibar was one of the biggest African ivory and slave traders of the late 19th Century. He created a de facto kingdom in modern-day North Eastern Congo and had ten thousand slaves on seven of his own plantations. It is estimated that he traded in around a hundred thousand slaves in his lifetime. He did business with the Belgians who even appointed him as their Governor in what was Stanley Falls District (Kisangani). African tribes were happy trading partners with the Europeans and Arabs in the brutal evil slave trade. David Livingstone encountered the Swahili slave traders in his travels into Zambia and wrote about it.
The infamous King Leopold II (known for the many atrocities he committed on Congolese people) sent soldiers to fight against the slave traders, including Tippu Tip and another called “Rumaliza”. Despite doing business earlier with the slave traders, Leopold flipped on them because he wanted to control the Congolese rubber plantations and eliminate competition for labour. He carried out an effective propaganda campaign in Europe to whitewash his evils. Although many slaves were freed, most were forced into working on rubber plantations with low pay, brutal conditions and violence when quotas were not fulfilled. The Belgian Parliament eventually discovered the truth and annexed Congo from Leopold and improved conditions.
British diplomatic efforts in the 1870s followed by military campaigns led to the slave market at Zanzibar to be closed down in 1897 when the British forced the ruling Arab Sultan to sign a treaty, but it was only in 1909 that slavery was officially made illegal in Zanzibar and Pemba. However, the Swahili slave traders still continued selling slaves in the shadows by making slaves walk on land via Somalia where they boarded smaller dhows (boats) to get to Arabia for sale.
Britain decimated the shipping of African slaves on the seas, but it left the internal African slave trade largely intact. As European powers established new African colonies, they began to transplant their governance and legal systems into Africa. Their laws from back home in Europe prohibited slavery, so the colonial administrators tried with great difficulty to dismantle it. They often got into conflicts with the natives who were still keeping and trading in domestic slaves despite coming under their rule.
In the last decade of the 19th century, the French and British fought with the Benin and Dahomey kingdoms, conquered them and freed all slaves. European colonialism and conquest thus had the positively good consequence of brutal chattel slavery being abolished in the whole of Africa. This is the connection between colonialism and slavery that I alluded to earlier.
Britain, USA and France used strong diplomatic and political pressure on Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen and eventually forced them to officially outlaw slavery and close the last open markets for African slaves in the world. Believe it or not, slavery was only officially outlawed in Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, which was just 2 years before Zambian independence, and in Oman it was in 1970! I bet you didn’t know that!!
To be continued… Friday 2nd May 2025
Michael Chishala is a Zambian analyst with interests in Philosophy, Law, Economics and History.
Email: michael@zambia.co.zm
