Conville & Walsh
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The Last Slave Market
Dr John Kirk and the Struggle to end the Zanzibar Slave Trade
- Author: Alastair Hazell
- Category: Non-fiction Narrative
- Publisher: Constable & Robinson
- Pub date: 23 June 2011
- Length: 320 pages
About The Last Slave Market
This is a humdinger of a tale… Alastair Hazell’s genius has been to… tell a tale from an entirely new perspective
- SPECTATOR
On 15 June 1873, the Zanzibar slave market – where thousands of men, women and children had been bought and sold annually – was finally closed.
This astonishing story is in part the account of a non-European colonization of Africa – long before the Scramble for Africa – when the Sultan of Oman decided, in the 1820s, to move his court from the Arabian Gulf to Zanzibar, in order ruthlessly to exploit the East African slave trade. An extraordinary move, given that the Sultan, and his successors, then brought money-changers and taxation officials in from India and struck wholesale deals with slave raiders far into the African interior, decimating entire tribes and shipping tens of thousands into captivity.
The unknown story here is that of a young British doctor, John Kirk, who spent the majority of his working life trying to end the Zanzibar slave trade at a time when the British had no particular interest in East Africa and often refused militarily to back his efforts. Perhaps more amazingly, Kirk was neither an explorer nor a soldier. He was in fact a botanist, a classifier of plants, and a medical doctor.
In THE LAST SLAVE MARKET, Alastair Hazell interweaves four years’ research of personal and national histories into a compelling and resonant chronicle, at the centre of which lies the intersection of Islam and slavery.
About the Author
Alastair Hazell spent his childhood in Malawi during the early 1960s. The country had been founded as a protectorate by Christian missionaries in the early nineteenth century as a bulwark against slave traders, and even in the nineteen seventies, the dhows built by the slavers were still being used to sail across Lake Malawi. Following university Alastair spent ten years living and traveling in East and Central Africa, before taking up a career in financial information in London. In 2002 he retired, and decided to research the origins of those inland dhows and the people who built them. The Last Slave Market is his first book.