Trade route
In the 19th century caravans of thousands of porters walked inland from the coast opposite Zanzibar to buy ivory, taking about 90 days to reach Lake Tanganyika. Cloth, beads, wire and guns went inland; ivory and enslaved captives came to the coast. Railways ended the trade by about 1912.
The interregional caravan trade in East Africa was a system of long-distance trade networks connecting various regions of East Africa, primarily for the transport of ivory. It began in the 19th century, fueled by rapidly growing demand for ivory on the world market. In a period of about 70 years, the ivory trade by caravans and the struggles for its enormous profits spread across the entire territory that today includes Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi, the eastern part of Congo, and the northern part of Mozambique.
The rapidly increasing demand for ivory originated in Europe and America; the Zanzibar archipelago became the hub for the exchange of goods. Merchants from the Swahili coast and the interior organized caravans with several thousand people to purchase ivory and transport it to the coast. As there was no other available means of transport, goods were carried exclusively on human backs. Whereas previously various regional trade networks intersected, a long-distance trade network was established that reached as far as the Congo, the Great Lakes region, Buganda, and extended to the coast.
People from all regions participated in trade, either benefiting from its profits or enduring its effects. The constantly increasing importation of firearms as a commodity exchanged for ivory led, in some regions, to fundamental changes in social relations, and the struggles for control of caravan traffic affected many parts of East Africa.
Alongside commerce, a caravan culture developed, based on the long-standing trading traditions of Africans in the interior. With the intense caravan traffic, an extensive transfer and exchange of cultures took place, which, for example, favored the spread inland of Islam, written culture, and other cultural elements from the coastal regions.
Interregional caravan trade is regarded as the entry of East Africa into global capitalist trade and as a significant marker for the colonization of Tanganyika, which was established at the end of the 19th century. Even when the caravan trade based on ivory collapsed abruptly at the end of the century, the essential structures of the commercial system endured and determined future developments.
While the East African coast had been known for centuries under the name of the Coast of Ajan and incorporated into the Indian Ocean trade network, there are very few written sources providing information about the societies of the East African interior before the 19th century. It is clear, however, that this was a small and flexible social model in which political power was organized in a decentralized manner, distributed among councils of elders, ritual leaders, and warriors. Slavery and personal dependency were widespread, but this was a form of slavery that allowed a relative degree of economic independence for slaves and the possibility of rising to higher social ranks. Alongside political and family relations, trade and long-distance trading journeys created a network that fostered contact between various societies and largely shaped their mutual knowledge. Ethnic identities played almost no role in commercial relations, because societies were not structured along ethnic borders but were multiethnic due to slavery and high political flexibility.
It is not well known how far the trade networks extended inland or how they overlapped. Coastal towns had long maintained close trading relations with territories in the immediate hinterland of the coastal strip. These relations were dominated by inland merchants and elephant hunters, who used various strategies to prevent coastal traders from traveling inland. Through attacks on coastal travelers or spreading rumors of cannibalism and monsters, they managed, until the beginning of the 19th century, to maintain their position as intermediaries for the exchange of goods between the interior and the coast and to control prices. Until that time, goods from the interior reached the coast exclusively through these intermediary merchants. Coastal merchants did not make the journeys themselves.
Further inland, in central Tanganyika, trade networks also developed, maintaining relations with the merchants of the coastal hinterland and creating connections as far as the Congo, Bunyoro, and Buganda. For trading journeys, several merchants would gather to form a caravan. Goods were transported exclusively by human porters. Items sold included natron, iron, copper, cattle, hides, cereals, and pottery.
Ivory was considered a lesser category of merchandise, reaching the coast via intermediary merchants. The main buyers were Indian traders. In India, ivory was valued as jewelry, which women received upon marriage as a symbol of marital status. Since such jewelry was also buried upon a woman’s death, there was a constant, virtually unchanging demand for ivory from East Africa.
Another export product from East Africa was slaves, who were transported from the East African coast to many states bordering the Indian Ocean. Toward the end of the 18th century, demand increased due to labor needs on the sugar plantations of Mauritius and Réunion, leading to intensified trade. By this period, the southern Swahili coast exported anywhere from several hundred to several thousand slaves per year.
The expansion of trade led to a substantial extension of various networks toward the end of the 18th century, as merchants sought new markets and opportunities for profit. Around 1800, two elephant hunters from central Tanzania, in search of new trading partners, arrived on the East African coast opposite Zanzibar. In this way, the trade networks of the coast and the interior became connected.
The towns of the East African coast had cultivated contacts for centuries not only with societies of the interior but also with territories bordering the Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. Particularly close ties existed with the Arab states of the Near East. Influential dynasties from Oman had, since the 17th century, played an important role along the East African coast. The center of their power there was the city of Mombasa.
Since the beginning of the 19th century, Omani landowners had successfully cultivated clove trees and sugarcane on Zanzibar, and the corresponding need for labor strongly stimulated an additional slave trade. After the export of ivory, which had gone mainly to India, was redirected toward the ports of Mozambique, the ivory trade took place primarily on the northern parts of the East African coast, in the regions opposite the islands of Mafia, Zanzibar, and Pemba. The concentration of trade on the coastal area between Mombasa and Kilwa thus coincided with the connection of trade networks deep into the interior of East Africa.
Eventually, these developments met with a growing demand for ivory. In addition, world market prices rose for oils, which were produced in East Africa in the form of coconuts and sesame, as well as for copal, used in the production of paints. Cloves, sugar, oils, copal, and ivory promised large profits, but until the early decades of the 19th century, these products continued to be brought to the coast by inland merchants, who controlled the trade.
A crucial political—and consequently economic—change occurred between 1830 and 1850. Zanzibar, the center of an economic boom then emerging, gradually attracted the interest of Asian and European powers. The United Kingdom and France viewed the island as an important strategic foothold to assert their influence in the western Indian Ocean. Trading houses from Bombay with substantial capital, which had long maintained relations with the royal house of Oman and were involved in the East African ivory trade, opened branches, and many Indian merchants willing to take risks settled in the city. In the 1830s and 1840s, trading houses from Europe and America also established branches, notably the Hamburg firms Hansing & Co. and O'swald & Co.
In 1832, the royal house of Oman took account of this development: the ruling dynasty of the Sa‘id of Oman moved its seat from Muscat to Zanzibar, thus taking the place of the dynasties seated in Mombasa, which until then had represented Omani influence on the East African coast. Zanzibar became, under the authority of the Imam of Muscat, Sultan Sa‘id bin Sultan al-Busa‘id, the political, economic, and cultural center of East Africa.
With the relocation of the regent, many other wealthy families from regions bordering the Indian Ocean also moved, both to the islands and to the coastal strips of the mainland, establishing themselves as plantation owners. Sultan Sa‘id himself owned large clove plantations on Zanzibar and Pemba, whose maintenance depended on slave labor, and he supported the creation of additional clove fields on the islands. Alongside cloves, there were also large sugarcane plantations. The demand for plantation workers, and therefore for slaves, increased enormously. Spices, slaves, sugar, and ivory promised great profits. By around 1850, approximately 200,000 inhabitants of Zanzibar were slaves, probably more than half of the population.
The power of the Sultan of Oman was not limited to the islands of Zanzibar, Mafia, and Pemba. The ruler of Oman extended his influence over the coastal strips between Tanga and Kilwa, and a tax-collection administration emerged, through which the sultan enabled merchants within his sphere of influence to benefit from trade. The limits of his influence, however, were not clearly defined, and the loyalty of the coastal towns was constantly subject to negotiation. The sultan did not possess military means to extend his authority inland.
The population of Zanzibar reflected the diverse influences on the island and the varied relations of its inhabitants. Arabs from Oman and Hadramawt, Indians, Comorians, and Africans from various interior regions lived there, primarily engaged in caravan trade. In addition, there were slaves from the interior, who also had a significant influence on coastal developments.
Immigrants also brought their religions and cultural practices with them. Indian merchants were mostly Hindus. Islam experienced a renewal, attributable to immigrants from Hadramawt and the Comoros. Among them were numerous Muslim scholars, who made Zanzibar a center of Islamic learning. Whereas on the coast Islam had been defined by orality, status, and religious purity, the new Islam was based on writing, ties to the global Islamic world that was in the process of modernizing, and a largely egalitarian social model.
A rapidly expanding urban center, with multi-story stone houses, pushed the typical Swahili houses of the time to the edge of the city. Zanzibar became a cosmopolitan melting pot, exerting strong attraction and substantially shaping cultural and religious trends.
The decisive impetus for the ivory trade was the rapidly increasing price of ivory on the world market. The growing prosperity of bourgeois households in Europe and America increased the demand for ivory, which was used to manufacture musical instruments, billiard balls, false teeth, chess pieces, cane handles, devotional objects, jewelry, and other luxury items. A frasil (about 36 pounds) of ivory cost 21 Indian rupees, about 23 dollars, in 1825; by the 1870s, the price had tripled.
At the same time, industrialization stabilized the prices of cotton textiles, brass wire, and muskets imported from Europe into East Africa, and in some cases even lowered them. For this reason, the profits from ivory exports rose steadily, and from around 1825 ivory became East Africa’s most valuable export product, a status it retained until the end of the century.
The profits promised by the ivory and slave trades profoundly changed traditional trade structures. Coastal merchants then aspired to monopolize and control profits. This was best achieved by bypassing inland intermediaries and traveling inland themselves to bring back to the coast the precious ivory and slaves.
The sultans of Zanzibar contributed decisively to this development, striving to provide the best possible infrastructure for trade. Sultan Sa‘id saw commerce as a dynamic social force and said of himself that he “was nothing more than a merchant.” Trade, alongside the plantation economy, was the most important source of revenue for the State of Zanzibar. The sultans pursued an active tax policy and created incentives for the immigration of new Arab merchants.
By appointing Indian merchants as tax collectors, they directly linked Indian capital to the State of Zanzibar. In this way, financially powerful financiers were placed at the disposal of merchants.
However, the sultan did not have military means to secure caravan routes inland for coastal merchants. Instead, he equipped them with letters of recommendation for their journeys inland. Reactions to these letters varied greatly, ranging from the granting of requested support to complete disregard.
Above all, what mattered was the connection of Zanzibar merchants to the trade networks of the Indian Ocean, America, and Europe. Zanzibar became the center of an East African trade network and a logistical hub for caravan trade: imports from Arabia and India were transshipped in Zanzibar before reaching the various ports of East Africa, while ivory and slave exports were brought to Zanzibar, from where they were resold to India, Arabia, the ivory markets of London and Antwerp, and the islands of the Indian Ocean.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Interregional caravan trade in East Africa”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.