On Monday October 24th, Chapurukha M. Kusimba gave a presentation titled “The History and Archaeology of Slavery in East Africa.” Dr. Kusimba is now Professor of Anthropology at American University, after 19 years at the University of Illinois, Chicago. The talk focused on the international slave trade as it affected East Africa and the types of artifacts that provide evidence of the slave trade’s great impact.
Dr. Kusimba’s talk opened with a comparison of the estimated number of people taken out of West and East Africa as slaves. The approximate total of individuals taken out of Sub-Saharan Africa is at 11.2 million from West Africa (1600-1900 CE) and 11.5 million from East Africa (500-1900 CE). The slave trade out of East Africa occurred over a longer time period, meaning it may have been less drastic or sudden a change as in West Africa but still would have had a great impact on societies. To get at the root of the types of archeological evidence that would demonstrate the presence of a disruptive trade in slave, Dr. Kusimba first discusses the high demand for slaves early in Islam, including the types of roles slaves would have occupied (e.g. military service, agriculture, mining, domestic service, etc.) in different parts of the Middle East and Asia. Dr. Kusimba also theorizes about the ways societies in East Africa functioned at the time, summarized in a concept referred to as the ‘Mosaic Model’. The Mosaic Model is a symbiotic style of life where pastoralists, merchants and urbanites, hunters, and agropastorialist all come together to contribute to communal needs during the day but return to their separate villages at night.
As the East African trade in slaves disrupted communities, the Mosaic Model was significantly affected. Kusimba and co-researches have uncovered archaeological evidence pointing to a number of these effects, including: site abandonment; moving to resource poor areas, such as rock shelters and caves; decline and cessation of pastoralism; decline in habitat diversity and productivity; changes in the types of goods traded, such as raw ivory to cut and worked ivory; and so on.
For more on the subject, see “Fifty years in the archaeology of the eastern African coast: a methodological history”, by Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Jeffrey Fleisher, in which Dr. Kusimba’s work is heavily featured.
CAS News Bulletin: Week of October 31st, 2016