Tippu Tip And East African Slave Trade

Tippu Tip was a famous East African slave trader who acted as an agent of interest for the Zanzibar Sultan in expanding his commercial hinterland in Africa.He mediated the relationships between Europeans,Arabs and Africans,it appears in three aspects: providing escorts service for European adventurers and missionaries,opening up commercial routes from the East African coast to the interior of Central Africa and capturing Africans as slaves.East African slavery which influenced by Zanzibar culture has a long history.By the 19 th century,East African slavery was alienated.The clove cultivation industry based on slave labour becoming an important financial source for the Zanzibar Sultanate.Also,the nature of the slave trade also changed,the commercial slave trade and the unlimited pursuit of profit leading to a sharp decline in the East African population.Later,Europeans scrambled for Africa under the banner of abolishing the slave trade by fighting wtih Arabs for their monopoly on African labour groups.It showed in a series of treaties signed by the Zanzibar Sultanate about restricting the slave trade and the Congo-Arab War,Anglo-Zanzibar War,eventually the East African slavery transforming into the forced labour pattern which dominated by Europeans.The European attack on the Arabs,represented by Tippu Tip,for engaging in the slave trade also served the need for overall European imperial hegemony.Behind the evaluation of Tippu Tip and the East African slave trade we can see the intertwining of Western colonial discourse,Arab nationalism and indigenous African voice.The difference between Arabs and Europeans’ evaluations of Tippu Tip,the representative example of the slave trader,was both based on the need to construct "justice" for each.While the former argues for the civilisation of Africans through the glorify and romanticise of East African slavery and recollects the glorious history and colonial attachment to Oman’s former overseas empire,the latter embeds anti-slavery in moral imperialist discourse and expels Arab power from Africa in the process of colonisation.This historical figure should be evaluated both in terms of the destructive nature of the slave trade he engaged in on the local social structure and the lives of the people,and also requires a comprehensive understanding of the objective positive impact Tippu Tip acted as an unconscious instrument of history,bringing about historical and social change in Central and East Africa in the second half of the 19 th century.