1822, 1873: (Anti-Slave-Trade Pressure on Zanzibar — The 1822 Moresby Treaty, British Indian Ocean Patrols, the 1873 Agreement Ending Legal Export, and Kabak…

1822, 1873: (Anti-Slave-Trade Pressure on Zanzibar — The 1822 Moresby Treaty, British Indian Ocean Patrols, the 1873 Agreement Ending Legal Export, and Kabaka Mutesa’s Strikingly Familiar Lament That the Slave Dealers Really Rule His People): The Sultan of Zanzibar became the focus of anti-slave-trade pressure, notably from the British. In 1822, the Moresby Treaty was signed by which Oman undertook to stop taking slaves from East Africa, with Britain assuming the right to patrol the Indian Ocean using anti-slavery squadrons. But the export of slaves for use on Zanzibar and Pemba remained legal until 1873, when the Zanzibari authorities finally agreed to end it — the trade continued furtively in some areas until the early twentieth century. In Buganda in the 1880s, Kabaka Mutesa made remarks strikingly reminiscent of those made by King Gezo of Dahomey more than thirty years earlier — he reportedly told missionaries around 1881 that if the Queen of England would help him as she helped the Sultan of Zanzibar, he would abolish slavery, but that the power of his chiefs and people depended on the traffic and he had no right to hinder it. By 1883, he lamented that the slave dealers really ruled his people and the trade had assumed dimensions that could not be stopped. The rapid escalation of the slave trade meant increased warfare in the interior, with slaving violence destabilizing societies, firearms traded by coastal merchants for slaves, and the export of potential labor profoundly damaging in societal and economic terms.