J 5 6 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
supply the slave market in America incessant civil war was raging amongst the 
coast tribes of West Africa. But the Arabs of East-Central Africa have run us 
hard in the matter of wickedness. I do not need to recapitulate the horrors of 
slave raids and the miseries of slave caravans: they are graphically described 
by Livingstone. 1 
The Arabs of Maskat from the Zanzibar coast and the half-breed Portuguese 
from the Zambezi joined together to devastate what is now called British Central 
Africa. 
The slaves from the Senga and Bisa countries in the Luangwa valley and 
from much of Southern Nyasaland found their way to Tete on the Zambezi, and 
thence to Ouelimane and Mozambique, where 
they were picked up by American ships as 
late as the beginning of the “ sixties.” Some 
of these ships eluded the British gunboats; 
others were captured and taken to Sierra 
Leone. Here, strange to say, many inhabitants 
of Nyasaland and of the countries as far west 
as the Lualaba, were landed in the “ forties ” 
and “ fifties ” of this century, and were ex¬ 
amined as to their languages by Mr. Koelle, 
a German missionary of great learning, who, 
in his Polyglotta Africana , produced one of 
the finest books ever written on the subject 
of African languages. Long before the 
existence of Lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika 
were known to Europe, Mr. Koelle, of Sierra 
Leone, was writing down the vocabularies 
and languages spoken on the shores of those 
lakes, gathered from slaves that had come 
from Mozambique and Ouelimane. 
In between Mozambique and Ouelimane 
the Arabs still retain to this day a hold on 
certain little-known ports, such as Angoche 
and Moma. Lrom these points slaves from Eastern Nyasaland were shipped 
to Madagascar, which until its recent conquest by the Lrench was another 
profitable market for slaves. In addition, the Matabele Zulus, who had surged 
back into South-Central Africa from Zululand at the beginning of this century 
raided across the Zambezi for slaves, and slave-raiding was also carried on by 
the Basuto who, under the name of the Makololo, conquered the Barutse 
kingdom. Prom the middle of the 18th to near the end of the 19th century 
British Central Africa has been devastated by the slave trade. Whole tribes 
have been cut up and scattered ; vast districts depopulated ; arts and crafts 
and useful customs have been forgotten in the flight before the slave-raiders. 
The whole country was kept in a state of incessant turmoil by the attempt 
to supply the slave markets of the Zambezi, of Madagascar, of the United 
States, of Zanzibar, Arabia, Persia, and Turkey. 
A great blow was dealt to this trade by the conclusion of the American 
Civil War and the abolition of slavery. This and the Emancipation of Slaves 
first in the West Indies and subsequently in Brazil, brought the West African 
1 I have attempted also to give descriptions based on a good deal of personal observation as well as 
on much reading in my book, The History of a Slave. 
A SWAHII.I SLAVE-TRADER 
