Part II: The Zanzibar Slave Market

The only thing I had on my to do list when I arrived in Zanzibar was “visit the slave market.”  Mostly because it was the only thing I had been told I must see when I was preparing to travel.  This suggestion, coupled with my recent journey through the saga of Kunta Kinte and his descendants, had me excited for the opportunity to get to experience the memorial.   Maybe “excited” is the wrong word.  I was “excited” in the way I imagine one might get “excited” to visit Auschwitz.  Not joyful excitement, but anxious excitement at viewing this monument to human to suffering.  But no amount of mental preparation could really prepare me for what I encountered. 

During its heyday in the 1800s, Zanzibar was the largest and most profitable slave market in the world.  The Omani sultans who ruled in Zanzibar were the main profiteers, and many of the slaves moved through the market were sent to Oman for labor.  However, around mid-century, feelings about slavery in the world began to shift.  Dr. David Livingstone, whose search for the source of the Nile took him deep into the African continent, famously addressed the scholars at Oxford and Cambridge in 1857 and challenged them to become champions for ending slavery once and for all.  His stories about the horrendous treatment of the abducted Africans shocked and horrified all who heard them, and the abolition movement caught on like wildfire.  In 1873, the reigning Sultan of Zanzibar, under pressure from the British government, abolished slavery and closed the slave market. 

While it was in operation, approximately 60,000 slaved moved through the Zanzibar slave market each year.  Between 1800 and 1873, over 4.3 million souls suffered in the hands of the slavers in Zanzibar.

Most of the market was destroyed in the wake of abolition.  Out of the 15 holding chambers that existed beneath the streets of Stone City, only 2 remain, in memoriam of those whose lives were destroyed by slavery.  It was to these chambers that I was led by our guide, Benjamin, when Sr. Claudia and I arrived at the old Slave Market, just a few hours after I had landed on Zanzibar.  The first chamber we entered had been used to hold women and children.  When the market was in use, about 50 women and children would be crammed into the small space.  The room, if you can even call it that, is dominated by a waist-high cement shelf, 3 or 4 feet deep, that follows the entire perimeter of the room, leaving just a narrow passage open in the center of the floor.  The rough wood beam ceilings hang at a stifling level, no more than 5 and a half feet.  The only light comes from three miniscule windows, slits in the top of the far wall, like the windows you find in ruins of castles, designed to let arrows out but nothing in.  Chains and shackles, replicas of those used less than 140 years ago to restrain imprisoned slaves, are strewn casually around the chamber.  As I sat down on the cement shelf to listen to Benjamin, I was overwhelmed with the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced into this chamber.  Hands that clung to children in the darkness, hope disappearing in the bleak subterranean chamber, the reek of blood and feces and vomit and urine and sweat building into a soul-crushing cloud of defeat.  I sat in that chamber and I wept.  I wept for all of the people yanked from their homes and families and sold into slavery.  I wept for the tortures forced upon them and their children and their children’s children.  I wept for my country’s involvement in the slave trade.  I wept at the thought that any human being could ever justify such unimaginable cruelty to another person. 

We only spent a couple of moments standing at the door of the only other remaining chamber; this one is smaller, with the same cement shelf, this one having been used to accommodate around 35 male slaves.  Benjamin told us that the slaves only spent an average of 3 days in the chambers before they were shipped out on the slaving ships, destined for Oman, India, the West Indies, and America. 

In 1874, the Anglican Cathedral standing on the remains of the slave market was completed.  It was built by Bishop Sheere, a powerful advocate for abolition.  Most of the construction workers were freed slaves, and the materials came from the finest suppliers of sacred accouterments throughout Europe.  The church stands as a memorial of the bloody road to the freedom of the slaves and as a monument to the triumph of abolition.

When the slave market was still in operation, a tree stood in the center of the market.  The Whipping Tree.  Before they were sold to the slavers, the imprisoned Africans were tied to the tree and whipped to a pulp as a test of their physical endurance.  They were tortured to see how well they could hold up to torture, to see who was worth taking up space in the ships’ holds and who wasn’t.  When the market closed, the tree was cut down, but it’s exact location is marked by a white circle of marble laid in the floor directly in front of the altar in the Anglican Cathedral.  It is chilling to reflect on the suffering of those men and women, bound to the tree, whipped beyond consciousness for no crime, no reason, and to reflect on the similar tortures inflicted on an equally innocent man, who was also bound to a tree, and whose sacrifice is daily remembered on that altar.