first half of last year (that is, before the rebellion, and when Mubarak's authority was still unimpaired), out of 486 dhows boarded as suspicious by our cruisers, only six, containing on an average four each, were found to be carrying slaves, is a sufficient proof that the Slave Trade is being effectually killed in Zanzibar and British East African waters. For it must be remembered that once you destroy the dhow traffic, you have gone a long way towards destroying the Trade itself.

No merchant will find it profitable to trade in slaves, especially where his transactions are attended with grave danger, any more than in cattle or in any other article, in small consignments of two or three at a time. To obtain the profits which he requires in order to repay his risk and outlay and the devotion of his main capital and energies to this particular Traffic, he must deal in large cargoes. He can now no longer do so, and, as a consequence, the big wholesale slave merchants of the days when the Trade was unchecked have abandoned their business and left no successors. The Slave Trade is now carried on, not as their main business, but as a secondary and shady branch of it, and therefore only on a small scale, by disreputable men, chiefly Muscat or Hadramaut Arabs, of the same type as the old English smugglers, who have as little scruple about violating the Mahommedan as the European law, and will steal both the legal slaves of their brother Moslems, and even children born free or emancipated by a Mahommedan Court, as readily as they would the outlawed pagan-a proceeding which the old-fashioned slave merchant would have considered just as disgraceful as would an honest horse-dealer in England the stealing of another man's beast.

These low-class Arabs will prowl about the beach on the outskirts of Zanzibar, or of some mainland town, with a canoe keeping close by, and will surprise and pick up, by bribing them with a few pice to carry cocoa-nuts, &c., a girl or two, or a small child here and there, and thrust them into the canoe, lie in wait for a favourable wind or for the darkness, and then slip into some creek in Pemba, where the captives, whom they will represent as their own slaves, will be kept in the bush till a buyer, perhaps of the same class, can be found for them. The Shihiri and Muscat Arab traders, who return to Arabia during the south-west monsoon, will also frequently contrive to take a Zanzibar slave or two each, or perhaps even a free negro (they are not particular as to the "legal status "), on dhows which frequently on their way north, pick up Africans, slave or free in fishing-canoes (the Wali of Lamu lately had some slaves who were out fishing kidnapped in this way). The same applies to the so-called "Kiriboto" Arabs, of whom numbers come here for service as irregular troops or police.

A certain risk, however, attaches to this, since the slaves cannot be shipped at Zanzibar, but must be taken secretly in canoes into the open and transferred to the dhow there, and there is always the danger that the canoes may be swamped outside the channel, or seized by some local police authority within it, before they can reach the dhow.

The above remarks as to the export apply largely to the import of slaves into the East African territories under British rule or influence. It may safely be said, I think, that no slaves to speak of are imported against their will (I am not speaking of unsaleable domestic slaves going to and fro with their masters) into British East Africa, and only a small number in canoes and boats, such as I have described above, chiefly from the mainland opposite, into Zanzibar and Pemba. Sir L. Mathews thinks some 300 or 400 a-year, at most, may still be imported in this way into the islands, of whom a considerable portion do not stay there but are transferred in driblets, by various underhand devices, to dhows proceeding to Arabia. Pemba probably receives the greater number; the want, as yet, of proper control in the interior and the physical configuration of the island rendering it peculiarly suited for any kind of illicit traffic. Mr. Vice-Consul O'Sullivan, however, tells me that, notwithstanding these circumstances, the import of slaves there has been greatly reduced, and is, in his opinion, now insignificant.

Nyasaland at one time imported a considerable number of slaves into the Sultanate, and among the older men one still sees, both here and on the mainland, many Yaos. But the establishment of the British Protectorate there, the overthrow, one after another, of the slave-raiding Chiefs, and the collapse of the dhow traffic (since the importation of Nyasa slaves into Zanzibar from so great a distance as the Zambezi, or even from Kilwa, is not possible in canoes or small boats) have practically put an end to this branch of the Slave Trade, and the local authorities assure me that very few slaves from that part of Africa now come so far north as these Islands.

It may indeed be said that throughout East Africa (including in that expression the whole region between the Zambezi and Cape Guardafui) the establishment of conterminous European Protectorates has put an end to that worst aspect of the Slave Trade, the systematic raids by armed bands of coast traders on the villages in the interior. The horrors common in the time of Livingstone, and which lasted down to a quite recent period, especially when the Arab power established by Tippoo Tib and Rumaliza at Kasongo and the Manyema country was supreme throughout what is now the eastern portion of the Congo Free State, the devastation of whole districts by the slave-raiders, the march of hundreds of fettered

captives, along tracks lined with human skeletons, down to Kilwa and Bagamoyo, have become happily impossible now that all the great coast ports, and the principal up-country markets and centres along the old slave-routes, are occupied by European Government officers.

To sum up, the present condition of the Slave Trade, at any rate in East Africa-I am not, of course, now speaking of Arabia and the Red Sea-may, I think, when we contrast it with what it was only a decade ago, be viewed with the comparative satisfaction with which we regard, in any country, statistics showing a substantial decrease of crime. Both the sources and outlets for the Traffic are being everywhere effectively stopped; it is passing more and more into the hands of the most reckless and criminal class of the population; the great raids and dhow loads of the past are giving place to petty kidnappings of individuals here and there, of which many are detected and punished, and which a better and more costly system of police and coastguard could probably altogether suppress.

The Zanzibar Government is, I anı glad to say, fully alive to the necessity of unremitting vigilance and energy in the attainment of this end, and Sir L. Mathews has now got police at all the smaller ports, as well as at the principal villages in the interior of this island, at which the landing or sale of slaves would be likely to take place, and which in old days were rarely or never visited. Several captures have as a consequence been lately effected, and I trust, especially if the system is extended to Pemba, that the knowledge that the authorities are on the watch may act as a useful deterrent. It cannot, however, be too often repeated that the kidnappings and smugglings described above will not cease at once as a consequence of the abolition of the status of slavery. That change will not render them more illegal or punishable than they are under the existing law, which prohibits, and has effectually diminished, the importation, exportation, and sale of slaves. So long as the Slave Trade exists in Arabia, and, as I have already pointed out, whilst Mecca remains closed to Europeans it will always flourish there, as well as in the remoter Turkish and Persian provinces, there is bound to be a certain demand for negro slaves, and adventurers, prepared to run the risk, from Shehr and Hadramaut, which still kidnap, as they do now, free African children, and even ignorant adults, for the markets of the Hedjaz and Oman. Abolition will check more rapidly, but not much more rapidly than a good system of registration, the import of slaves into these islands, but will not palpably, at any rate for some little time to come, affect illicit export.

I have dealt in this despatch with the Slave Trade rather than [1895-96. LXXXVIII.] 3 Q

with domestic slavery, but there are two or three points in connection with the latter institution to which I may take the opportunity of adverting.

An argument, which has of late been very frequently used is that, but for the fear of being seized here as slaves, large numbers of Wanyika, from Duruma, Giriama, and other mainland districts, who are now said to be deterred by the existence of domestic slavery, would come over to these islands for work.

When I first came here, and before I had any personal knowledge of the Wanyika, this appeared to me the strongest practical argument against slavery; but a more intimate acquaintance with these tribes, with whom the development of the Mazrui rebellion has brought me into close contact in their own country, has convinced me that it is really fallacious.

The Nyika, which some writers, only acquainted with the unpromising portion of it traversed by the Uganda Road, represent as throughout its length and breadth an arid desert inhabited by a low 'race of savages, is in reality a fine country, in some parts highly populous and fertile, and occupied by tribes which, if primitive and indolent, are by no means deficient in intelligence, and are passionately attached to their native soil. Though their villages are often neat and well kept-and for cleanliness they compare most favourably with those of the Swahilis-their wants are few and simple, and I do not believe that there are many-if, indeed, any-among them who, for the sake of increasing their incomes, would leave their beloved uplands, where beyond the waving fields of Indian corn, studded here and there with pine-apples and mango trees, the dome-shaped cottages nestle in the thick bush or behind their "bomas " of thorn or cactus, in order to earn wages as day-labourers in the coast towns, or, worse still, to cross the sea, which they regard with superstitious horror, to Zanzibar. If they really wished for employment as labourers they could get it in abundance at Mombasa and Malindi; and, as a matter of fact, they come there freely, quite undeterred by the existence of slavery. They come, however, not to seek for work as cultivators or labourers, but to barter their produce for cloth and beads, and the few that have been persuaded by the railway contractors to engage as coolies have usually run away to their native land the very moment they received their first advance or instalment of pay. The supposition that these people, whose work in their own homes is done almost entirely by their slaves, and, where they have none, by their women and children, could be relied upon as labourers in the Zanzibar plantations, seems to me entirely fanciful, and every Englishman, at all intimately acquainted with them, to whom I have spoken on the subject, agrees with me in so regarding it. One tribe fairly near the coast, the Wa Teita, who are not pure

Wanyika, and seem to be intellectually a lower race, can be made to work, not, indeed, as regular labourers or agriculturists, but as porters backwards and forwards between Mombasa and their own district; but I think it very unlikely that they could be induced to settle for a length of time away from their own homes or develop any real habits of industry. The most promising element I have seen so far are the freed slaves of Witu, many of whom are Yaos and Nyasa men, and some of these I propose trying in the islands, though I do not feel very hopeful of the result.

Lastly, I would wish to call attention to the assumptions, which have generally passed uncontradicted and have thus got to be received as axioms, that the life of a slave in these islands is generally short, and that the fact that few live to an advanced age is due to the severe and trying labour of the clove plantations. These assumptions have been put forward by the Abolitionists as a ground for stating that the whole of the present slave population has been imported since 1873, and therefore as a reason for confiscating the owner's interest in them without any further ceremony or inquiry. It is probable, indeed, that if the average mortality both of slaves and of free persons in these unhealthy islands, with their fever and bad sanitation, is taken, it will be found to be very high, and also that children and young people under 20 years of age, whether they come from Europe or from the healthier and more bracing parts of the African mainland, will in most cases not long resist without a change, the debilitating influence of the climate. But slaves born in the islands, or imported when over 20 years or so, will generally live to a fair age, and I have seen many grey-haired old men and women among them, of 60 years or more, who may well have been imported over thirty or forty years ago. The assumption, which has found expression in debates in Parliament, that the work in the clove plantations is killing, is another of those sweeping propositions which have been accepted without being examined. As a matter of fact this work is far less severe and far less of a strain on the muscles than most agricultural labour at home, and is more like hop-picking than anything else. All the slave has to do is to weed the ground round the trees to keep it clean, and when the crop is ripe, during two or three months of the year, to sit on a branch or on one of the bars of a ladder, in a wood protected from the sun by the number of clove trees, and pick the fruit which he throws into a basket. He considers this hard work because, as a good many trees have to be picked, it means more or less constant labour, while the harvest is on, for some seven or eight hours a-day, and is thus a greater strain on him than the ordinary agricultural work in the tropics, which here consists chiefly of scraping the ground in a leisurely fashion with a hoe-spades and ploughs being