Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters - The Search For Mecca

APPENDIX. 345
35. "I need hardly ask you wlietlier the
sj^stem of obtaining slaves and exporting them
involves great hardships and misery?"— "In
answer to that question, I cannot do better than
read the beginning of our Report.
'
The slaves
required, as well for the legal as for the
illegal
traffic, are obtained from the interior of Africa.
Formerly they could be procured from the
countries bordering on the coast, but constant
slave-raids have, so depopulated those
districts,
that the slave-dealers are now forced to go far
inland for their supplies.
Year by year further
tracts of country are depopulated and laid waste,
and at the present time it is chiefly from the
neighbourhood of Lake Nyassa and beyond it
that slaves are obtained. The persons by whom
this traffic is carried on are, for the most part,
Arabs, subjects of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
These slave-dealers start for the interior wellarmed,
and provided with articles for the barter
of slaves, such as beads and cotton cloth. On
arriving at the scene of their operations, they
incite and sometimes help the natives of one
tribe to make war upon another.
Their assistance
almost invariably secures victory to the
side which they support, and the captives
become their property, either by right or by
purchase, the price in the latter case being only
a few yards of cotton cloth. In the course of