Invaluable quantitative analyses have provided innovative models and base grids not only for our better understanding of the middle passages in both the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean slave trades, but also in elucidating the first passage of the Horn of Africa and Red Sea slave enterprise. Philip Curtin broke new ground with his quantification of the Atlantic slave trade as well as his attempt to create a first census. However, he also provided an invaluable model for the calculation of the time slaves spent on the first passage—the journey from capture to the coast—which helps illuminate that recondite and underresearched slave experience.35 Fred Cooper, Jon R. Edwards, Abdussamad H. Ahmad, W. G. Clarence-Smith, Timothy Fernyhough, Ralph Austen, and Patrick Manning have all contributed informed analyses that have advanced our empirical knowledge of the first passage as experienced by captives entrapped in the slave trade of the Horn of Africa, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean regions.36 These studies have, variously, modeled the slave trade, estimated slave numbers, analyzed prices paid, compared routes taken from the scant data available, and also calculated the slave sex ratio on the Indian Ocean side of the African continent.
This study demonstrates the considerable divergence in the Horn of Africa from the Atlantic slave trade norm, not only because of the starkly different target population for slave traders (the trade of the Horn of Africa was a trade primarily of children rather than strong young men to work the transatlantic plantations), but also because the middle passage, which primarily informs our knowledge of the Atlantic trade, was virtually absent in the Red Sea trade. The Oromo children endured no middle passage of any duration. The period they were held aboard the dhows amounted to a matter of a few hours before they were liberated. What this study uniquely contributes in the literature is the probability that deaths on board the slave ships of the Atlantic were not the result of the harsh middle-passage experience alone but primarily the consequence of the lengthy and grueling first-passage ordeal.
When the Oromo children were liberated in the Red Sea through the interventions of the Royal Navy, they technically became “prize slaves.” The British Admiralty instituted a reward system after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 that called for the Royal Navy to intercept vessels believed to be carrying slaves, seize the vessels, capture the slavers, and liberate the slaves. The Admiralty paid “prize” money for every slave liberated, and, all too often, the crews aboard Britain’s naval vessels regarded slave dhow hunting and the liberating of “prize slaves” as something of a sport. As Lindsay Doulton has pointed out, the prize money, which was distributed among the crew proportionately to rank, was an incentive not only to sign up for naval service but also to track and secure as many slave vessels and their slave cargo as possible, regardless of the levels of violence used in their apprehension. Prize money, albeit at a lower rate, was paid out on the corpses of slaves as well, victims of “collateral damage” in the inevitable skirmishes between navy and slavers.37 Fortunately, British naval officials were required to document their activities minutely, so the primary documentation of the naval interventions during which the Oromo children were liberated is substantial.38 Christopher Saunders, Richard Watson, and Patrick Harries are among those who have contributed substantially to what we know about the impact of “prize slaves” at the Cape of Good Hope.39
This study takes its place within the literature as a unique, comprehensive analysis shining twin spotlights on two issues for which scholarly sources of information are woefully scarce. The first shines further light on the history of an underresearched geographic area of Africa. The second spotlight, most significantly, illuminates the scarcely documented first-passage experience through analyses of experiential narratives of the period not only from capture, but from cradle to the coast, told by a group of enslaved children themselves.
South African Missionary Efforts
Nineteenth-century missionary education at the Cape has long been the subject of vigorous debate. Critics have questioned the motives and intentions of the missionary establishment, categorizing all missionaries as agents of colonization, conquest, and capitalism, as well as destroyers of autochthonous culture. Others, like the husband-and-wife team of John and Jean Comaroff, while examining the influences of culture, symbolism, and ideology, have nonetheless drawn sweeping generalizations from too small a base of specific empirical evidence, regarding missionaries as “the human vehicles of a hegemonic worldview.”40 Still others have examined the impact of the missionaries primarily through studies of African converts (the kholwa) and the linkages between mission stations and the rise of South African Black Nationalism. Norman Etherington has contributed an impressive personal canon of publications on southern African missions over the last thirty or more years. His scholarly significance runs deeply within the genre and leaves a substantial imprint on broader southern African issues.41
Individual missionaries approached their spiritual and temporal tasks in the Eastern Cape in different ways. The humanitarian Dr. John Philip presented an illuminating counterposition to the Comaroff motif. Philip committed his missionary and personal life to relentless and outspoken opposition to the injustices perpetrated by the colonial government in the dispossession and dehumanization of the amaXhosa. His battle for justice and human rights brought him into conflict not only with the colonial powers but also with the white settlers of the Eastern Cape and with the majority of his fellow missionaries.42
The Reverend Tiyo Soga, on the other hand, conveyed a more ambivalent picture of the missionaries’ role. On the one hand, suspicion and resentment bred hostility against the intruding Christianizing force in the midst of the amaXhosa. This was matched, on the other hand, by a desire for education and the material benefits enjoyed by the invading strangers.43
Lovedale Mission, begun in 1823 through the efforts of the Glasgow Missionary Society, spawned the leading missionary institution in the Eastern Cape—arguably in the country—which opened its doors nearly twenty years later in 1841. The primary focus of the Scottish missionaries on the Eastern Cape frontier was education. They imparted their belief in equality and Christian brotherhood along with some useful secular teaching. However, working within the context of colonial influence and controls meant that they could not always match their ideals with their actions. They raised African hopes and expectations that could not be met in the context of the Cape political environment. Nonetheless, they offered Africans at their institutions the opportunity for a new, common identity that could transcend both clan rivalries and national divides.44
Countering this interpretation is the postmodernist view of missionary discourse and African response, which suggests, inter alia, that Victorian Christians (like James Stewart at Lovedale) spearheaded “a narrative in which Africans are metaphorically characterised as an ‘infant’ race in the more general march of ‘civilisation’ worldwide.”45
Gender issues in the mission context have prompted considerable discussion on subjects including missionary education that reinforced the stereotypes of women’s roles in home, classroom, and workplace. Nineteenth-century missionaries and educators never quite lost sight of the gendered, domestic, and largely inferior role of young African women.46 A feminist subset of critics suggest that the missionaries wanted to turn young African girls into Victorian women, with their place firmly rooted in the home. However, placing women in the home released them from agricultural labor. In defense of the missionaries’ more complex motives, they wished to emancipate women from the