East African Semester: Canadian Field Studies in Africa

Professor Gwyn Campbell will not be participating in this course in 2011

This research option is designed to give students an understanding of the historical relations between eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean World (IOW), and the impact of those relations upon eastern African history and society.

The course consists of two parts:

• a historical survey of East Africa’s links to the IOW
• an examination of the east African slave trade

East Africa and the IOW

Traditional accounts of African history followed colonial conventions in which the African continent was divided regionally into North and sub-Saharan Africa, subdivided further into West, Central, East and Southern Africa, and along political lines into British, French, Portuguese, Italian and German Africa.

These arbitrary divisions ignored both natural geographical linkages and pre-colonial human polities. Trading networks and migrations in eastern Africa were not only overland but also maritime, linking eastern Africa to the wider IOW. The first part of this course surveys the extent, structure and impact on eastern African history and society of these linkages.

East Africa and the Slave Trade

The structure and impact of the east African slave trade in light of current research: beginning with an examination of conventional views of the east African slave trade, this part of the course will compare and contrast the Atlantic and IOW slavery models, clarifying the distinctive features of the latter, and the part played by East Africa. Subsequently, it will examine particular features of eastern African slavery, historical, modern and contemporary, as well as the roles of enslaved men, women and children.

The course consists of lectures, discussions, exercises and field excursions. Some of these may be in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) and IOWC Associate, Professor Abdul Sheriff. The BIEA is a Nairobi-based institute which promotes research into the archaeology, history, linguistics and anthropology of Eastern Africa. It is active throughout the region, having conducted projects in Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe. The Institute maintains in Nairobi a research
and reference library, unparalleled in the region, with holdings of books, journals, off-prints, theses, and grey literature covering African (and especially Eastern African) history, archaeology, ethnography and related subjects. Professor Abdul Sheriff, who helped establish the Zanzibar section of the CFSIA trip in 2006, and held the prestigious McGill Faculty of Arts Distinguished Lecturer Award (2007), is an internationally renowned prize-winning historian of Eastern Africa and will give students a historical tour of Stone Town, Zanzibar and selected lectures.

Key Readings

• 1995 Background chapters from Philip Curtin et al, African History from Earliest Times to Independence (Harlow: Longman, 1995)
• 1974 J.E.G. Sutton, ‘The East African Coast. An Historical and Archaeological Review’ Historical Association of Tanzania Paper No. 1 (1974)
• 1974 J.E.G. Sutton, ‘Early Trade in Eastern Africa’ Historical Association of Tanzania Paper No. 11
• 1967 E.A. Alpers, ‘The East African Slave Trade’, Historical Association of Tanzania Paper No. 3 (1967)
• 2007 Gwyn Campbell, ‘Slave Trades and the issue of an African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World’ to be published in John Hawley (ed.), In India, India in Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007)
• 2005 Gwyn Campbell, ‘The Slave Trade, 1820-1895’ from idem, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750-1895’ (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2005), 213-42.
• 1989 William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ‘The Economics of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea Trades in the 19th Century: An Overview’ in idem (ed.), The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass, 1989), 1-20

Assessment

• Participation - discussion (10%)
• 4 Field Trip and/or Exercise assessments (10% each; total 40%)
• Final Essay (50%)