Effects of slavery still present in coast region, new book reveals

What you need to know:

  • He tells the story of the African slave through voices never heard before; voices of African children, men and women who were taken overseas to become concubines, eunuchs, pearl-divers and slaves.
  • Some lucky ones were redeemed by missionaries and settled at Rabai and Freretown. I met up with Joe a few days after the launch of his book in Nairobi.

Journalist, former MP and diplomat Joe Khamisi, a third generation descendant of slaves, recently released a historical book titled The Wretched Africans.

In it, he intensely examines an important yet unexplored topic; slavery in East and Central Africa with a focus on Rabai and Freretown slave settlements along the Kenyan coast.

He tells the story of the African slave through voices never heard before; voices of African children, men and women who were taken overseas to become concubines, eunuchs, pearl-divers and

slaves. Some lucky ones were redeemed by missionaries and settled at Rabai and Freretown. I met up with Joe a few days after the launch of his book in Nairobi.

 

What motivated you to write about the history of slavery?

It came naturally because I’m a descendant of slavery. My great grandparents were slaves from Tanzania and Nyasaland. In my autobiography, I touched on this but decided to expand the story and

deal with 19th Century slavery exhaustively.

 

Was information on 19th Century slavery available?

Yes information was available but scattered. I could hardly get the African perspective on the matter because back then, African slaves were considered sub-human and not allowed to talk about their

experiences. To tackle this, I spoke to slave descendants in Rabai and Freretown and also referred to stories told to me by my father and grandparents.

 

Because of the sensitive nature of your topic of study, did you face lack of cooperation from your sources?

I enjoyed the cooperation of institutions like the National Archives, the National and Rabai museums, Mcmillan Library, Kenya National Libraries and Swahili center. In the USA, I accessed material

from numerous libraries through my local library in Texas. The interviewees in Mombasa were quite cooperative.

 

What challenges did you encounter while researching to write this book?

The main challenge was where to get the scattered information. I went through volumes and volumes in several libraries in search of information.

 

Would it have been possible for you to write this book had you been solely based in Kenya?

Yes, but it would have missed certain information. The USA has more historical information about Africa than we do. Having worked at the national archives and seen the way we store our undigitalised information, I would have definitely missed something. Also, universities in the USA are meticulous when it comes to storage of historical information.

I was appalled by the brutality of Arab slavers, the racism of missionaries like Rebmann and Livingstone’s so called ‘sexual adventures’ with hundreds of African women in this book.

Why was it important for you to tell this dark side of the story?

That side was hidden by European historians who projected explorers and missionaries as saintly and sympathetic to the slaves. When I discovered it, I went ahead and showed the world that there is yet another side to the single story told to us.

 

Are we as a nation uncomfortable with our history?

We don’t pay much attention to history. We tend to forget. Yet history is something that we cannot erase. Recently, a researcher contacted me to say she is tired of listening to slavery stories.

Evidently, the forget-and-move-on attitude exists even among our learned. 

 

The character who stood out as I read the book was the Bombay African William Jones; a man passionate about helping rehabilitate slaves. Sadly, though, such heroic people go unrecognised as we celebrate mashujaa… yes?

Indeed. Jones was a hero because he put his life on the line. A Yao from Nyasaland, he helped convert thousands into Christianity in the slave settlements where Rebmann and Craft failed miserably. Jones embodies the people I regard as heroes of the war against slavery.

 

Tell us some Kenyan authors of books on slavery?

Three Kenyan scholars W.R. Ochieng’, Odhiambo E. and Mohamed Mazrui have written on this. Yet the popular account remains 1st generation slave descendant James Juma Mbotela’s Uhuru wa Watumwa, published in 1934.

 

Are the history books being used to teach children about our country’s history adequately representing our past?

They are not. They have been written from a very narrow western angle the British recommended we do. Sadly, we continue to read these books blindly forgetting there could have been a different side to these stories. We need more books by Africans about these situations. I am throwing it back to professors of history and Kenyan intellectuals to research and write more. I only write as a non-scholar, an observer.

 

The journalist Parselelo Kantai in his essay Death of the Kenyan Dream argues that because western academics are the ones writing Africa’s histories, they are  managing perceptions of what Africa is. He goes ahead to suggest that the repossession of African history is the new frontier for the African intellectual. Have our intellectuals in local universities taken up this role competently?

No. Our university professors aren’t producing enough scholarly papers. Maybe they are too busy or maybe they have no interest, but then isn’t their main duty research? While researching this book, the material I used was mostly from explorers, missionaries and western historians. The African intellectuals have let us down.

 

Were Kenyan university history departments helpful during your research?

No. I didn’t go to them because I didn’t think they’d be helpful. If I had seen some works they had done about slavery and I wanted more information, I would have approached them but I didn’t see anything. In fact, I sent an invitation to UoN’s history department chairman Dr Mary Mwiandi inviting them to the launch of this book but they neither came nor responded.

 

David Ndii recently echoed Professor Bethwell Ogot’s decade-old declaration that nationhood no longer exists and  that the tribe had eaten up Kenya. Do you think so?

He is right. In Kenya, we focus on defending ourselves on tribal basis and not paying attention to our nationalistic ambitions. The foundation of this goes back to Jomo Kenyatta, who, despite being a nationalis, didn’t act it out like Nyerere.

 

During your campaign for the Buhari MP seat, you were branded a ‘foreigner’ even though you were born and bred in Mombasa. Why so?

If you read my autobiography Dash before Dusk, you’ll find that the same scenario befell my father. He was considered an outsider because his opponent was a Mijikenda and he a mmisheni, a slave descendant.

 

Tell us a little about your other works?

My book Politics of Betrayal touched on events that took place from the day Daniel Moi’s Kanu merged with Odinga’s NDP and how eventually Raila moved out of that alliance. It talks about the choice of Uhuru as a president and corruption. I examine the string of betrayals from Kenyatta’s era down to present day.

The book I’m currently working on goes back to 1963. I am trying to look at where the rain began to beat us so that 50 years after independence, we still have abject poverty, poor medical services and high levels of illiteracy.