Laboratory for the Oral History of Slavery: The Island of Lamu on the Kenya Coast

IN 1907, THE SULTAN OF ZANZIBAR, on orders from his supervisors in the British Foreign Office, outlawed the practice of slavery on the Kenya coast-an action that affected many aspects of coastal societies, especially for the slaves themselves. ' Most slaves on the mainland quickly deserted their owners' plantations. Those who stayed farmed the land as squatters, refusing to labor for their former owners. But on the island of Lamu, and particularly in Lamu town emancipation changed little in the lives of the slaves. Control over island slaves had always been greater than over slaves on the mainland. And Islamic law was more strictly observed among both slaves and their owners on Lamu than elsewhere on the Kenya coast. In the eyes of the Lamu faithful, only masters had the right to free their slaves; here the secular proclamation issued by the sultan and brought to the island by British agents had little effect. There is no way of knowing how many Lamu slaves chose freedom, when British commissioners arrived to compensate their owners and to inform the slaves of their rights under the law. Most who did went elsewhere to seek employment, an option unknown, perhaps, to some who stayed. Perhaps half of the slave populationincluding whole families-remained under a system of defacto, if not de jure, slavery. As Lamu fortunes declined, owing to the loss of mainland revenue, slaves abandoned masters who could no longer support them. But in form and under Islamic law the institution of slavery continued in some measure, and among some families, until Kenya achieved independence in 1963-64. Slavery was continued by collusion among the old Afro-Arab families2 (including relatives of the sultan'),