Whenever I happen upon a bookstore in Malawi, I just can’t help but wander in “just in case”. Usually, I leave the same way I went in, disappointed at the lack of new reading material that catches my eye. But since 2010, I couldn’t help but notice a title that appeals to both my interest in the early days of the British Protectorate of Nyasaland as well as my desire to learn more about the slave trade.
“Mlozi of Central Africa / Trader, Slaver and self-styled Sultan / The End of the Slaver” by David Stuart-Mogg, published by Central Africana, goes into my “must-read” category for anyone researching the slave trade of the 1800s. In this attractively printed, 157-page book, Stuart-Mogg scours historical documents to reproduce for us a picture of what it looked like to bring an end to slavers Mlozi bin Kazbadema, Kopa-Kopa bin Bareka and Mselema bin Ali in the waning years of the 19th century.
As someone most interested in accounts that detail events involving the “Yao” people (using this well-known spelling in this article because this is how it appears in the book), I was happy to find a number of references. Naturally, the bulk of asides fall in references to the famous Yao slavers based in Mponda (near present-day Mangochi town) and Makanjila.
As one would expect, the book’s climax focuses on the eventual battle that occurs at Mlozi’s town in far northern Nyasaland, near Karonga, brought about by the British government and logistically assisted by the German government’s steamer Hermann von Wissman (the same boat that would later be fired upon by the British as a first-shot maneuver when the Great War breaks out several years later). Highly trained Sikh soldiers were also an instrumental part in the capture of Mlozi, as were many more local soldiers garnered from the Atonga, Makua, Yao and Swahili tribes.
The end of the slave trade was good. Would anyone disprove such a statement? The British were a force to be reckoned with on a global scale in the day and, once they finally took up their resolve to end slavery, the impact of their efforts still resound today. Yet I appreciate greatly the tone that the British author takes in his recognition (p 100) that “…in freeing Africans from the Yao slaver’s yoke and Zulu’s assegai — how would this had-won supremacy over the natives of Nyasaland stand up subsequently to the enigma of subjecting these same, indigenous Nyasalanders to the harsh realities of a capitalist, market-driven economy? Essentially, it shaped a transition from bound slaves to wage slaves in one generation. It was not until 1966 that the people of Nyasaland finally became at least the theoretical masters of their own destiny within the new Republic of Malawi, under Life President Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda.”
While it has been many years since I was forced in school to endure a very basic education in poetry, I found the inclusion of a Rudyard Kipling poem a fitting feature to this work as in “The Supplication of Kerr Cross, Missionary” one is forced to think about the collision of Christianity, Commerce and Culture as it pertains to the physical, often overwhelming subduement of the local populace who run contrary to the values of the Queen and the cross. Apparently, a copy of the poem is included in “Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879-1889″, published by Oxford University Press in 1986.
A number of other written works come to light I was previously unaware of which could shed light on some historical insight for the Yao tribe, though naturally works penned by foreigners. “What We Do in Nyasaland”, by missionary Dora Yarnton Mills (published in London by the UMCA in 1911), mentions the Yao Chief Kalanji of Unangu in present-day Mozambique, a site still well-known and situated an hour north of Lichinga. At that time, it was a UMCA mission station.
More popular by far, due to the fame he would gain as Her Majesty’s Imperial Commissioner to Nyasaland, would be Harry Hamilton Johnston’s “British Central Africa”. Perhaps it was from these memoirs that the fascinating one-page account of an 1891 attack on Makanjila’s village comes from, detailed on pages 80-81. The British lost, that time, with Makanjila’s army exultant in their mistaken belief that they had executed every white man present.
As the book draws to a close, we are left to mull over the mystery of what has happened to the skull of the famous slaver. The most common belief gives us the story that the volunteer Captain Walter Gordon Cumming, a colorful Scottish pioneer, took the skull back home. The skull (missing the jaw, forehead and facial bones) is still know of today and efforts were undertaken in order to match the DNA from the skull with a known descendant of Mlozi. But due to the significant cost of a DNA test (8,000 GBP), work has been delayed until such funds can be raised. An understandable, though regrettable disappointment.
