He returned to Basra and made his way to the workshops where masons prepared materials for restoring and enlarging the canals, and to the sugar plantations in the surrounding marshes. Before him was carried a banner, embroidered with a Qur’ānic verse, calling on the faithful to ‘fight on the road of Allah’. He proclaimed a ‘war to the knife’. His first recruits were 15,000 slave labourers, men condemned to work in heat and dust until death, flogged at the whim of their masters. They had little to lose.
Their new leader boldly went around the camps, ordering the black slaves to rise and beat their masters. They obeyed, giving them 500 lashes each. The Arab historian al-Tabari, living at the time of the revolt, even names some of the black lieutenants gathered around Ali, whom he piously vilifies as the ‘Wicked One’: al-Bulaliya, Abu Hudayd, Zurayq, Abu al-Layth. The greatest of the Zanj commanders was Mohallabi, who would fight to the very end.
For some years the uprising was to threaten the very heartland of Islamic power and ranks as one of the greatest slave uprisings in history, comparable with that led by Spartacus against imperial Rome. Today the event can only be re-created from obscure Arabic chronicles, but parts of it have a remarkably familiar ring after more than ten centuries, for at the same time as rebellion broke out in the marshes around the mouth of the Tigris river, the Kurds were also waging war.
Battle was soon joined by the makeshift army of slaves, against government troops equipped with swords, bows and arrows, and lances. No quarter was given on either side, all captives being put to death. The slaves’ leader himself was a prime executioner, setting the example by decapitating one man just as he was pleading for mercy. The heads of the defeated were borne as trophies from the battlefield on the backs of mules. Once a whole boatload of heads was floated down the river to Basra.
As the slaves advanced through the swamps towards the great city, Ali maintained the trappings of a holy man. He rode a horse with palm leaves as a saddle and a piece of cord as a bridle. Before the battles he made stirring speeches to the Zanj, urging them on to victory. They put their faith in his magical powers.
There were setbacks: after one battle, Ali was forced to flee into the swamps and found himself with only 1,000 remaining followers, men and women. Although this might have seemed like the end of the revolt, the rebels were to win their next fight, with only stones as their weapons. Ali declared that supernatural powers had saved them, and recruits flowed in once more to sustain the revolt. Soon the slave armies became irresistible, spreading out through the whole region at the mouth of the Gulf. They pillaged the homes of the rich, auctioned off thousands of high-born Arab and Persian women as concubines, and cut all links between Baghdad and the Indian Ocean.
Leaders of the ruling Abbasid dynasty now saw that the black Zanj might represent a direct threat to Islam, because they were gathering support from other dissident groups, including Persians, Jews and Christians. It was fortunate for the caliphs that the rebels never formed any effective military alliance with the Kurds or the heretical Carmathians, but by the year 871 the Zanj were strong enough on their own to mount a direct assault on Basra, obeying Ali’s plan for a three-pronged attack. It was led by the general Mohallabi. Two years earlier the citizens had beaten back the Zanj, but now the city was overrun and everybody unable to escape was killed. Some leading citizens were put to the sword as they prayed in the main mosque.
The caliph at Mu’tadid sent south a more powerful army than had ever been assembled, with the aim of dealing out merciless punishment to the Zanj. But once again Ali was victorious. His followers paraded before him, each one holding in his teeth, by the hair, the head of a victim. The slaves had now decisively turned the tables on their masters in Baghdad and Samarra, a new capital higher up the Tigris.
After this, the defeated Arabs decided that for the time being they had had enough. They withdrew northwards, making it their aim to contain the rebels within the two provinces encompassing the marshes and canals. It was the signal for Ali to create his own administration, to build himself a capital and – the ultimate show of treason in Islam – to mint his own coinage. Already famous as the ‘Lord of the Zanj’ or ‘Prince of the Negroes’, he now went on to declare himself to be the Mahdi, the new leader sent by Allah. He became known as al-Burku, the ‘Veiled One’. For ten years he ran his kingdom unchecked, even spreading his revolutionary message right across Arabia to Mecca. In 880 a detachment of Zanj briefly seized control of the holy city. A year earlier they had been within seventy miles of Baghdad.
Then the title of the revolution began to ebb. After three years of preparation an army of overwhelming strength was despatched from Baghdad under the leadership of the regent al-Muwaffaq. The Zanj were smashed in battle after battle, until at last they retreated into Ali’s capital of al-Mukhtara, ‘city of the elect’, north of Basra. From one town abandoned by the rebels 5,000 women were freed and sent home to their families.
All prisoners taken by the government army were decapitated, just as the rebels’ captives had been. One day, the heads of Zanj captives were paraded in boats in front of the besieged citadel. When Ali insisted that the heads were not real, but only the product of witchcraft, the general commanding the army ordered that the heads should be catapulted into the citadel by night. One black leader, cryptically described in contemporary accounts as ‘the son of the king of the Zanj’, was put to death by Ali after rumours that he planned to defect to the enemy.
In the end, in 883, the great slave uprising was finally crushed, although the most resolute of the Zanj fought to the last. Ali had refused an absolute pardon, probably doubting that the promises made to him would be honoured. His head was borne on a flagstaff back to Baghdad by the son of al-Muwaffaq, who had vanquished the Zanj. It became the centrepiece of celebrations. Two years later, when the slaves tried to rise again, five of their leaders held in prison were instantly beheaded.
One consequence of the revolt was an upsurge of fear and anger against the Zanj among the people of Baghdad. During a time of tumult the Arab cavalry in the army took the opportunity to massacre the caliph’s black spear-carriers and bowmen, with the help of the citizens. However, it was not merely hatred of Africans which led to a fall in the numbers of black slaves being transported across the Indian Ocean; the decline of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities meant there was less need for labour to work on grandiose building projects.
After about A.D. 1000, Africa’s ivory and gold became more sought-after than its people. Prisoners taken in wars with the Christians of Abyssinia met most of the needs of the slave trade. Nevertheless, the continent was still cast in a subservient role. The interior remained sealed off, dealing with the outside world through the Muslim intermediaries. Africans came to the coast, to live in the towns or to cross the ocean, usually against their will. They did not go back, to take inland the ideas which could have stimulated change.
The clearest contrast was with India, where coastal cities gave allegiance to powerful inland states whose culture and religion they shared. Watered by the monsoon rains, India grew enough crops on its fertile lands to feed a vast population as well as spices for export and cotton to be made into cloth. Its manufactures were sold throughout the Indian Ocean and beyond, just as the tales from its literature were translated and adapted all across the known world.
In the same way that the Sea of China ends with the land of Japan, the Sea of Zanj ends with the land of Sofala and the Waqwaq, which produces gold and many other wonderful things. It has a warm climate and is fertile.
—Al-Mas’udi (893–957), The Meadows of Gold
AS OLD AS the monsoon trade between Arabia and East Africa, the contacts across the eastern expanse of the Indian Ocean date back to the time when Buddhism held sway over much of Asia. Two thousand years ago ships were taking merchandise from the powerful Satavahana kingdom of southern India to Sumatra, Java and Bali. It was a two-way trade, with bronze ware from Indonesia being exported to India. These contacts had been known to the Romans