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It may have been the search for ivory which brought the first ships around Cape Guardafui, and then southwards along the East African coast.

uring the Portuguese domination of the coast

By the second century A.D. the coast, as far as 10° S., was 'subject under some ancient right to the sovereignty of the power which held the primacy in Arabia', and Arab merchants were exporting ivory from it in great quantit

from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, ivory continued to be an important export;

it receives more mention in Portuguese records than does the slave trade.

East African ivory is soft ivory and is ideal for carving. It was in keen demand in the Orient because of its superior quality and because it was less expensive than that from south-east Asia. But in addition to the markets of the East, East African ivory was much sought after in Europe for the large ivory carving centres which had grown up in southern Germany and in the Low Countries during the Middle Ages, and which supplied large numbers of religious reliquaries and artistic novelties for Christian Europe.

An

increased demand for ivory in America and Europe coincided with the opening up of East Africa by Arab traders and European explorers, and this led to the intensive exploitation of the ivory resources of the interior. Throughout the nineteenth century, East Africa ranked as the foremost source of ivory in the world; ivory over-topped all rivals, even slaves, in export value, and it

retained this position right up until the end of the century.

East African ivory is soft ivory and is ideal for carving. It was in keen demand in the Orient because of its superior quality and because it was less expensive than that from

The two great inland markets for ivory were Unyanyembe (Tabora) in what is now central Tanzania, and Ujiji on the east coast of Lake Tanganyi

and in preference to his left, so an elephant works with a particular tusk'. One tusk is usually more worn and lighter than the other; and it is frequently broken owing to its use as a lever to tear up small trees, hence the term el hamid-'the servant'-given to this tusk by the ivory trad

lb.).16 In the southern Sudan and some parts of East Africa-for example, in Karagweivory was valued in terms of cattle, and this was one of the causes of the cattle raids carried out by ivory dealers. With the cattle they looted, they could trade for more ivory.

ing, although in the interior the price might fluctuate in terms of trade goods. It rose from io lb. of ivory for I lb. of beads in 1848, to almost weight for weight in 1859; then at the time of the Franco-Prussian War there was another rise, and then the price levelled o

ury. In 1960-61 not only did the entire export of East African ivory-I50,ooo lb.-pass through this port, but also 200,000 lb. from the Con

Tlic Christian element in Abyssinian Cliristianity is chiefly to be traced among tlic Cliurchmcn, in their extraordinary fondness for scliisms and theological clisputings, and among all classes, in the number- less saints, whose names are continually in tho mouths of tlie people.

Nile, became an important centre at about the same time that Tabora, in central Tanganyika, came into prominence as a great meeting place for Arab ivory and slave hunters from the East Coast.

The popular measurement of cloth in East Africa was the 'piece' or shukkah which, although varying in breadth, was always four cubits in lengt

Although there was a rise in the price of ivory at the time of the Franco-Prussian War from ?39 to ?68 per cwt., ivory exports remained around 400,000 lb., despite the price rise, and continued at this level almost to the end of the century, except for a poor year in 1885, when they dropped to 260,000 l

The ivory trader had to know his ivory, which varies from hard to soft.

Various figures have been put forth to show the number of elephants killed to supply the above ivory exports. Baker's estimate that 3,000 elephants were killed annually, to supply the ivory transported down the Nile during the i86os, may not be far off the m

ivory was used for piano and organ keys, musical instruments, billiard and bagatelle balls, not to mention the ivory inlaid butts of six-shooters for the American west.

Arabia

ships around

John Petherick

uropean demand for ivory and plantation labor affected communities as far as Central Africa and set in motion human and elephant depopulation (Alpers, 1975; Beachey, 1986; Newitt, 1987; Ringrose, 2001; Schweinfurth, 1874; Thorbahn, 1979). As early as AD 1770 slaves destined for the French plantation in their colonies were being procured from Nyasaland [Malawi] (Alpers, 1975; Nwulia, 1975; Sheriff, 1987, p. 159). Although Europeans initially confined their presence in Africa to coastal regions between the sixteenth to mid-nineteenth cen turies, their slave trading enterprise affected all African communities. Interestingly, Thornton (1992, p. 125) downplays the European impact by stating that the de velopment of slavery in its most repugnant forms was more a product of active African participation and desires for economic expansion because Europeans pos sessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves

hemselves into professional ivory and slave hunters, raiders, and traders (Alpers, 1969,1975; Klein and Robertson, 1983; Lovejoy, 2000; Mutoro, 1998; Robertson, 1997). Ivory trade with overseas markets introduced guns to African societies that helped facilitate slave raids as well as "trade goods that sometimes sharpened the appetite of Africans for additional slave raiding and tradin

ad occurred in Taita in the 1880s reported by Hobley (1895) is a case in point. Starving Taita emigrated to Taveta, Chagga, Pare, and Ukambani, only to find their residents similarly afflicted. Parents reportedly sold children into slavery for food. People starved to death in houses, on roadsides, in gardens, everywhere and were left unburied for no one had strength to dig graves; the number of bodies was too numerous to be disposed by hyena or other scavengers. Sagala area in Tsavo was one of the earliest and hardest hit areas. People killed one another in competition for food and many Sagala emigrated to Giriama for relief. Abandoned settlements reverted to wilderness. At the end of the famine, after the rains returned, only 1000 of the estimated 10,000 Taita people survived (Merritt,

Admittedly, the final estimates for the Saharan slave trade are very poor. This is also true for the Red Sea slave trade. However, it will be shown that all of the statistical results are completely robust with or without the estimates of slaves shipped during these two slave trades. That is, the statistical findings remain even if the Red Sea and Saharan slave trades are completely ignored because of the poor quality of their data. Combining the ethnicity data with the shipping data, estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in Africa are constructed. 26 The construction procedure follows the following logic. Using the shipping data, the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country in Africa is first calculated. As mentioned, the problem with these numbers is that slaves shipped from the ports of a coastal country may not have come from that country, but from inland countries that lie landlocked behind the coastal country. To estimate the number of slaves shipped from the coast that would have come from these inland countries, the sample of slaves from the ethnicity data is used. Each ethnicity is first mapped to modern country boundaries. This step relies on a great amount of past research by African historians. The authors of the secondary sources, from which the data were taken, generally also provide a detailed analysis of the meaning and locations of the ethnicities appearing in the historical records. In many of the publications, the authors created maps showing the locations of the ethnic groups recorded in the documents. For example, detailed maps are provided in Higman’s samples from the British Caribbean, Koelle’s linguistic inventory of free slaves in Sierra Leone, Mary Karasch’s samples from Rio de Janeiro, Aguirre Beltran’s sample from plantation and sales records from Mexico, Adam Jones’ sample of liberated child slaves from Sierra Leone, and David Pavy’s sample of slaves from Colombia. 27 Other sources also provide excellent summaries of the most common ethnic designations used during the slave trades. These include Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, ethnographer George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s

Admittedly, the final estimates for the Saharan slave trade are very poor. This is also true for the Red Sea slave trade. However, it will be shown that all of the statistical results are completely robust with or without the estimates of slaves shipped during these two slave trades. That is, the statistical findings remain even if the Red Sea and Saharan slave trades are completely ignored because of the poor quality of their data. Combining the ethnicity data with the shipping data, estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in Africa are constructed.The construction procedure follows the following logic. Using the shipping data, the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country in Africa is first calculated. As mentioned, the problem with these numbers is that slaves shipped from the ports of a coastal country may not have come from that country, but from inland countries that lie landlocked behind the coastal country. To estimate the number of slaves shipped from the coast that would have come from these inland countries, the sample of slaves from the ethnicity data is used. Each ethnicity is first mapped to modern country boundaries. This step relies on a great amount of past research by African historians. The authors of the secondary sources, from which the data were taken, generally also provide a detailed analysis of the meaning and locations of the ethnicities appearing in the historical records. In many of the publications, the authors created maps showing the locations of the ethnic groups recorded in the documents. For example, detailed maps are provided in Higman’s samples from the British Caribbean, Koelle’s linguistic inventory of free slaves in Sierra Leone, Mary Karasch’s samples from Rio de Janeiro, Aguirre Beltran’s sample from plantation and sales records from Mexico, Adam Jones’ sample of liberated child slaves from Sierra Leone, and David Pavy’s sample of slaves from Colombia.Other sources also provide excellent summaries of the most common ethnic designations used during the slave trades. These include Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, ethnographer George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Many of the ethnic groups in the ethnicity sample do not map cleanly into one country. The quantitatively most important ethnic groups that fall into this category include: the Ana, Ewe, Fon, Kabre, and Popo, who occupied land in modern Benin and Togo; the Kongo, who resided in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola; the Makonde, localized within Mozambique and Tanzania; the Malinke, who occupied lived within Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Guinea Bissau; the Nalu, from Guinea Bissau and Guinea; the Teke, living in land within Gabon, Congo, and Democratic Republic of Congo; and the Yao from Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania. In cases such as these, the total number of slaves from each ethnic group was divided between the countries using information from George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History. Ethnic groups were first mapped to his classification of over 800 ethnic groups for Africa. Using a digitized version of a map provided in his book and GIS software, the proportion of land area in each country occupied by the ethnic group was calculated. These proportions were then used as weights to disaggregate the total number of slaves of an ethnicity between the countries. Using the ethnicity sample, an estimate of the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country that would have come from each inland country is calculated. Using these figures, the number of slaves that came from all countries in Africa, both coastal and inland, is then calculated. Because over time, slaves were increasingly being taken from further inland, the estimation procedure is performed separately for each of the following four time periods: 14001599, 1600-1699, 1700-1799, 1800-1900. In other words, for each time period, the shipping data and ethnicity data from that time period only is used in the calculations. In the end, the procedure yields estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in each of the four slave trades for each of the four time periods listed above.