Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone by Martin Dugard Page A

things looked their worst, Livingstone’s life was saved by the people he despised most. On 1 February 1867, he encountered a band of Arab slave traders. They took pity on the destitute, failing traveller, and gave Livingstone food to restore his strength. He accepted it, in spite of the compromise he was making. Before the Arabs could leave, Livingstone wrote to the British Consulate in Zanzibar, begging that a second packet of relief supplies be sent to Ujiji, where he would meet them. Livingstone’s supply list read like a starving man’s fantasy: coffee, French meats, cheeses, a bottle of port. With his original supplies so depleted, this additional shipment would be vital. The Arabs accepted his letters and promised to deliver them.
    Livingstone’s compromise seemed relatively minor — accepting food for himself and his starving men,entrusting his mail to their care — but showed how greatly the search consumed him. Few men of his era spoke out as passionately against slavery as Livingstone. To eat food that was paid for with money earned from slavery was against everything for which he stood.
    In his journal, there was no attempt at rationalization, just a matter-of-fact admittance that he’d come across a caravan led by a slaver named Magaru Mafupi. The slaver was a ‘black Arab’, born of an Arab father and an African mother.
    The lineage might have confused the outside world, but Livingstone knew well the symbiotic relationship between Africans and Arabs. Although Europeans perceived the African continent to be an uncharted land populated by indigenous cultures, the truth was that Arabs had lived alongside Africans for over a thousand years. It was the seventh century AD when Arabian ships began trading beads for ivory with Bantu tribes along the East African coast. A mingling of their cultures began: the Arabs brought Islam; Swahili, meaning ‘coastal’, was formed by merging Arabic and Bantu; the financiers of India and Persia set up shop in Zanzibar to outfit caravans; African men found work hauling ivory, giving birth to the occupation of pagazi — porter. Little boys of the Nyamwezi tribe even carried small tusks around their village, training for the great day when they would join the mighty caravans.
    That relationship between Arab and African had been corrupted, though, as slavery became lucrative in the sixteenth century. Losers in war were routinely enslaved, and children were often kidnapped as their parents worked the fields. But more than any other segment of the African populace, tribes residing below the equator suffered. As early as the seventh century, men, women and children from sub-equatorial Africa were being captured by other African tribes and spirited north across the Sahara’s hot sands. Two-thirds of those surviving the epic walk were women and children about to become concubines or servants in North Africa or Turkey. The malescomprising the remaining third were often pressed into military service.
    That slave trade route — known as the Trans-Saharan — was augmented by the opening of the East African slave trade a century later. Instead of Africans, it was the Arabs driving this new market, focused mainly along the easily accessible coastal villages. They found that slaves were a more lucrative business than gold and ivory, and began capturing clusters of men and women for work as servants and concubines in India, Persia and Arabia. Even with the second slave route open, however, slavery was not a defining aspect of African life, but a gruesome daily footnote.
    When the Portuguese came to East Africa in 1498, however, and as other European colonial powers settled the Americas during the following century, that changed. Slavery became the continent’s pivotal force. By the end of the sixteenth century, England, Denmark, Holland, Sweden and France had followed Portugal’s initial example, and pursued slavery as a source of cheap labour and greater national wealth. A third