Slavery in East Africa

 Annamaria on Monday

The second in my Africa series relaunched on May 1 in a beautiful new edition.  In celebration of that, herewith, a past post outlining the background history of that story.  It explains why the British were still dealing with the slave trade a few decades after they had, at great cost, abolished it. Stan Trollip, who figures in this little essay, is the Stanley of Michael Stanley - partner of Michael Sears in authoring the marvelous Kubu series. Yes, slavery was still an issue in British East Africa in 1912.  Vis: 

My British East African series is based on the Ten Commandments.  Each story has a plot thread based on the sin of the commandment.  And another based on a sin that has no commandment.  But that I think should.  In The Idol of Mombasa, the second in the series, the sin of the commandment is idolatry.  The other sin is slavery.

When I first started working on the book a couple of years ago, I mentioned the themes to Stanley Trollip.  He immediately said he thought the slave trade had ended well before 1912, when the book is set.  I figured that—as happens with me—I had chosen a topic so obscure that even a person as knowledgeable as Stan would think my story far-fetched.  I had some work to do to make my plot plausible.

I hit the books again.  My further research bore out what I had already learned: In East Africa, slavery did not disappear abruptly the day the British declared it so.  As one of my characters says, “…like every beast, slavery has a tail, and we are dealing with that tail here.”

Let’s take a look at why it took longer for slavery to be stamped out in East Africa.

The black lines represent slave trade routes in the Middle Ages.

In the late Nineteenth Century, the territory that is now Kenya was a protectorate of the British government—a step on the way to becoming a colony.  That is all of it but a ten-mile swath of the coast, which belonged to the Sultan of Zanzibar.

Arabs had been trading slaves from there since the 700s, long before any European put a foot on that shore.  Over the centuries, the Sultanates of the Middle East took African slaves to work for Persia as sailors, to dive for pearls in the Gulf, to fight as troops for Omani.  And mostly to work in houses as domestics and sex slaves.  Some were shipped as far away as China.

They used Mombasa as their shipping point, and the mixture of genes and cultures between the city’s African population and the Arab traders gave rise to the Swahili people and language.  Africans as well as Arabs traded slaves.

When the Brits arrived in East Africa, slavery was an entrenched way of life.  It might have been against British law everywhere else, but it was an important part of the local culture and sanctioned by Shari'a law. 

Also, when the Protectorate of British East Africa was declared, His Majesty’s administrators had a bitter rival for the goodies available to be plundered from Africa—the Germans in German East Africa (now Tanzania) to their south.  The Sultan still had hegemony over the BEA coast.  If the Brits did not make nice with him, he might favor the Gerries and cut them out.  The Brits’ allies in this matter were Arabs who were themselves slave owners and slave traders.

So the British East African Administration never fully committed to enforcing their own anti-slavery laws.

In the end, they prevailed with the Sultan, if paying him 250,000 pounds sterling for the right to govern the coast in his name can be called prevailing.  At least they won out over the Germans.

Little by little, the Brits tried to cut down on the number of people enslaved—by declaring 1474 existing runaways as free men, by declaring that children born after 1 January 1890 were free.  This gradual approach put the government on the outs with the passionate anti-slavery forces on the home front.

In response the government argued that slavery on Zanzibar and along the British East African coast was far more benign than the well-known horrors of the Caribbean.  They could offer as proof that the Qu’ran instructed good Muslims to be kind to their slaves and set them free when they died.

In 1897, the King’s administrators convinced the Sultan to make slavery illegal.  But nobody told the slaves.  If they found out and wanted to bolt, they had to prove that they had the means to support themselves as freemen by showing a contract of employment.  The police ramped up their enforcement of the vagrancy laws to keep the household slaves in their place.

So slavery continued in this area well into the Twentieth Century.

In my story, I wanted to include some low level slave trading, as well as slave possession.  I gave the British a pragmatic fictional reason for turning a blind eye to slave trafficking on the coast in 1912.  It served my story to imagine this.  Just this past Friday, while boning up on my facts to write this blog, I found a new article on the subject.  Here is quote from “The Windmill of Slavery: The British and Foreign Antislavery Society and Bonded Labor in East Africa” by Opolot Okia. 

  

“Moreover, unlike the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the British efforts against slave trading in these areas were more lethargic and gradual and were conditioned more by specific, local circumstances than some amorphous but inexorable anti slavery logic.” (The Middle Ground Journal: Duluth, 2011)

The institution was not finally abolished by law until the 6^th of July 1909.

The Idol of Mombasa set two and half years later in January of 1912.  I hope you will read the book.  Then you can tell me if my story of slavery in East Africa is in keeping with the actual history of the place.

Guest Post: I haven't been anywhere by G. Miki Hayden

Miki Hayden has a variety of novels ranging in setting and genre. She is also a prolific writer of short stories, one of which won the coveted Edgar Award. She is active in MWA, and teaches writing at Writer’s Digest’s Writers Online Workshops. She has worked in business journalism, and has studied a variety of martial arts. No doubt all of this is grist to the writing mill. On the other hand, although she cares about setting, she's willing to discover it from afar - especially if it's in the past. Or the future! It's a different approach to that of many writers who want to steep themselves in location, but it certainly works for Miki. And, of course, she has been to places... 

Well, I have. But I haven’t been most of the places I use as settings. This winter my characters have been in the mountains in Japan—just starting their annual summer retreat. This is my third novel (Respiration)—in this series—Rebirth—just writing it.

 For sure I haven’t ever been in Japan and certainly not in the mountains there, though I have noted some mountains north of Tokyo on a map. But I’ve seen a lot of Japanese movies and read a lot of Japanese novels, including a novel by Yukio Mishima who kindly (well, posthumously) provided me with a setting on an incredible estate in Spring Snow, Book One in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy. I also inserted an EXTREME weather event from Junichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters into my Rescued (Book One of my series)—an unbelievable flood, which fits very well (I think) into my characters’ mountain retreat where they have few of the comforts of civilization.

 Oh, but my trilogy isn’t crime fiction, though crimes are committed, including the opening, devastating crime of starving a child with the intent to kill. (Don’t worry—the novel is in the form of a memoir from the adult version of the victim, who has been - as the novel is titled - Rescued.)

 But I’ll move on. My subject here is really how I use settings that may be borrowed from literature, history, or maybe simply maps—or just my imagination—with no verifiable landmarks—or to put the idea in the impersonal, I’m writing about how writers can use settings they have no up-close and personal relationship with—and yet that they come to intimately know. (Oppositely, I have an editing client, Walter Sutton, who feels he must go to Kauai every few months to research settings for his Flash Finnegan crime series, which starts with Finders Keepers. Sure, right, the trips are all for research.) 

My next novel out on May 13th, this one from Down and Out Books, is a police procedural, Dry Bones. Holder (Oklahoma) Senior Police Officer Aaron Clement is up to solving a cold case for which he has the bones in his office—while at the same time he is called to a gruesome murder that he discovers was committed by the (no doubt justified) wife. And then soon after, another case comes up in which he’s intimately involved. I’ll leave readers to find out about that one themselves.

 But Oklahoma? I had no idea about the state when I started writing the novel, but I had been told that too many novels were set in my hometown of New York City. Okay…how about…what the hell, Oklahoma. Sure, why not? First I found out that some officers hold the title of ‘senior police officer’ (an SPO). The son of a crooked cop, Clement admits he was, in childhood, a soft momma’s boy, though he contrarily affirms his suspect’s suspicion that he was a bully when young.

Rather, instead of being the hard-ass type, Clement tries to find good representation for the husband-killing battered wife—and as for the remaining crime, he cares for the victim in his own home. And, yes, Oklahoma is a drought-prone Dust Bowl state, and Clement fears the possibility of a summer fire reaching out for his greatly loved ranch house.

 Oklahoma is also a unique state in that after the Civil War groups of former black slaves migrated there and created their own communities, including all-black towns. And, of course, the state is heavily Native American, mostly due to the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminoles, who were all forcibly removed from their homelands in the 1830s though the 1840s—at which time blacks enslaved by the tribes also made the long journey to Indian Territory. (I have a story set in an Indian casino on a reservation in Oklahoma with Clement as the protagonist should anyone care to publish it—I’m waiting to hear.)

 Of course in discussing crime in Oklahoma, we can’t ignore the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. On April 19, 1995, at 9:02 a.m.,

Oklahoma City
Staff Sergeant Mark A. More - DefenseImagery.mil (DF-ST-96-00588)

Timothy McVeigh (executed in 2001) and Terry Nichols (serving multiple life sentences) —motivated by incidents such as the 1993 Waco siege—ignited a truck bomb that killed 168 people and injured 680 others. A third of the building collapsed seconds after the detonation. The building had held a child day care center—19 children were killed. McVeigh claimed he didn’t know children were in the building, but he had previously gone through the site and must have been aware of the day care center where the children of federal workers were cared for. Clement in Dry Bones stops by the replacement building to speak to a federal agent there. 

Frisking a man during the riots
Tulsa City County Library Collection 

I shouldn’t go into the Tulsa Black Wall Street massacre of 1921 now as I don’t refer to it in Dry Bones. (But I will include the two-day white terrorist event in my next police procedural set in Holder.) Yes, the killing of dozens of individuals [from 75 to 300 of both races, primarily blacks] and the destruction of 35 square blocks of the black neighborhood—one of the wealthiest black areas of the United States at the time—didn’t end at the light of day one when people had a chance to come to their senses. No. The white mob picked up on day two where they left off. Seriously? Yes, apparently so.

Now, in 2024, the Oklahoma State Supreme Court is hearing arguments related to the riots, the case brought by two 109-year-old litigants (and other litigants now deceased), suing for reparations. The case had been dismissed by a district judge in Tulsa and was brought up again on appeal. The lawsuit is, as one might imagine, hotly contested. Oklahoma's Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters said in July 2023 that race wasn’t the main factor in what occurred. Oh?

I’ve had a bunch of novels published and stories in print, most in locations where I’ve never set foot. I’ll just mention a few to tell writers not to be afraid of diverse settings.

In novels, my The Protector trilogy includes an executive protection specialist, ex-Army Ranger Eric Ryder working his way across the United States to find his kidnapped protectee. In Industrial Espionage, set mostly in Westchester (nope, I don’t know it), Eric, now employed as a corporate security director, wants to find who has stolen his company’s big money-making secret. And in Uncivil Aviation, Eric’s fiancé and ex-Air Force pilot Helen Robbins steals a job from Eric and winds up in the middle of a South American revolution, following the theft of some private jets and a bit of stolen plutonium.  

Pacific Empire, which the NYTimes put on its Summer Reading List, is an alternate history in which the Japanese win the war and take over Hawaii. The sequel, New Pacific, brings Moritomo Corporation security employee Takashi Tanizaki from Singapore to the Moon, and back to Florida to fight an alligator and the bad guys—his employers. (I have been in orange growing country in Florida and have stared at the Moon).

I’ve had a lot of short stories in print and won an Edgar for “The Maids,” set in Haiti, where the real-life brutally treated slaves on the French-owned estates rebelled by poisoning their masters. This historically verifiable period was inspired by the French Revolution, and though this series of poisoning episodes wasn’t the Haitian Revolution, it led in that direction.

A few of my stories of Miriam Obadah set in Ghana and then in Harlem appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. I don’t know Ghana, but I do know Harlem. In fact, Miriam lives in sort of my apartment with her husband and Miriam’s young co-wife. I guess they speak Twi at home—or often English, the official language of their home country.

And alongside stories in some Mystery Writers of America anthologies, I’ve had a story in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine set in China and the U.S. Here, an American woman is in prison for a crime of revenge committed by a Chinese worker.

I have stories in the Adirondack Mysteries series of anthologies—with the latest just out. Sounds cold up there. I wouldn’t know.

This brings me to one other way I’ve set my stories in unknown (to me) places. That is, I will change a setting to fit any (new) location requirements. If I have a story set in NYC and the background needed is otherwise, no problem. I nip and tuck. I also moved a home invasion and killing of the invaders from the Midwest to the East to place my story. So with just a little research, there you are...

Read Dry Bones, and if I made any mistakes, let me know.

Tomorrow is Greek Easter, and Thursday Launches a Celebration of Crime.

 

 
Saturday––Jeff

 

It's going to be a busy week.  Tuesday, we leave for Bristol UK where we'll hang out for a week at CrimeFest with many of my MIE mates and a host of other folk possessing equivalent criminal tendency minds. 

But first there's Orthodox Easter to celebrate tomorrow.  This year it follows more than a month after "Western" Easter and nearly a week after the conclusion of the Passover Holidays.  An explanation for that unusually broad separation can be found in different calendars at play. 

Over the years I’ve written about the traditions of Greek Easter many times but recently have come to rely upon another's description of those Easter celebrations.  That explanation I found on the Facebook page of the oldest Greek Bakery in Queens--located in the NYC heart of America’s best-known Greek neighborhood, Astoria.  Here’s what the Victory Sweet Shop has to say:

For Greeks worldwide, Easter (May 5th) is the biggest religious holiday of the year.

HOLY WEEK is the week just before Easter that extends from Palm Sunday until Holy Saturday and marks the last week of Lent. It is full of symbolic events, festivities, and traditions followed by Greeks all over the world.

 

On THURSDAY, Greek Easter bread called Tsoureki is baked and the traditional red Easter eggs are dyed. This sweet bread is usually braided with three pieces of dough, which represent the Holy Trinity. The tsoureki symbolizes the Resurrection of Christ and rebirth as the flour is molded into shape and rises and takes on life as it transforms into its final shape. The red-dyed egg which is placed on top of the braid symbolizes the blood of Jesus. Nowadays, most people can easily buy the Easter Tsoureki at a Greek bakery.

 

On GOOD FRIDAY you’ll hear the church bells ring for the funeral of Christ. After the church service, the symbolic body of Christ, fashioned out of bundled sheets, is taken down from a cross and placed in a makeshift tomb called the Epitaphios, which is draped with an ornate tapestry and adorned with many flowers. The Epitaphios is then carried outside the church and paraded through the neighborhood before returning to the church for a closing ceremony. 

 

 

SATURDAY is the last day of lent and it is filled with preparations for the midnight meal, including a traditional lamb offal soup called “Magiritsa” and a red egg cracking tradition called “Tsougrisma”. Just before midnight on Saturday everyone gathers at church with their Easter candles (Lambathes). The liturgy on Holy Saturday night is a truly unique experience. The churches are usually packed, and you will often see people spilling onto the church’s streets with white candles, which will be lit later with the Holy Light brought all the way from Jerusalem.

 

The Resurrection of Christ is celebrated at midnight sharp; the priest proclaims “Christos Anesti” (Christ has risen) with bells ringing and fireworks lighting up the sky outside. People greet each other with a “Christos Anesti” (Christ is Risen) and its reply “Alithos Anesti” (He has truly risen), lighting their candles along the way. Each person carefully carries their lit candle home in order to bless their home by drawing a cross with the flame on the doorway. Afterwards, they enjoy the Magiritsa soup and play the Tsougrisma tradition.

 

On EASTER SUNDAY, family and friends gather for a big Easter meal, which typically includes lambs roasting on a spit, loads of mezedakia, Greek salads, music & dancing. The Easter meal is truly special and a feast of joy and happiness.

 

Kali Anastasi!!! Καλή Ανάσταση!!!

Happy Easter!!! Καλό Πάσχα!!!

Thank you, Victory Sweet Shop

 

––Jeff

Jeff’s Upcoming Events

 

CrimeFest, Bristol UK

 

Panel THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2024 @ 17:00

“Overstepping the Mark: Abuses of Privilege and Power” with

Ajay Chowdhury, Alex North, Kate Ellis, Jeffrey Siger, Sam Holland (Moderator) 

 

Panel FRIDAY, 10 MAY 10 @ 17:10

“What a Thrill: Page-Turners and Cliff Hangers” with
Chris Curran, Antony Dunford, Charles Harris, Christine Poulson, Jeffrey Siger (Moderator)

All things for moderation.

 

Well, well well, it's festival time again with a mixture of panel appearances, moderating and interviewing and all the excitement and uncertainty that can bring.

It never fails to amaze me the spectrum of good and bad panellists… well more the excellent and the completely awful. You can tell, right from the get-go, the people who are well prepared and comfortable doing the job of moderation. (they tend to have notes for one thing)

 And by completely awful (I'm talking as a moderator who once forgot to introduce the 4th member of the panel! I had turned over 2 pages in my notebook instead of one.)

                                                                        Ms LaPlante

Over the years I've noticed, more than once, a very experienced panellist subtly take over the conversation when the moderator had done no work whatsoever and just sat and stared into space, ignoring the huge gaping silences as people stared out windows and scratched their bottoms. The moderator was thinking of the next question to ask, and time went on, so the panellist, quietly intervened. It was done so beautifully that I don't think anybody noticed that the moderator became a panellist. I did congratulate the panellist later on a job well done and he pointed out that one panellist had not said a word and they were fifteen minutes in.

I do tend to read the books of the panellists and I have a good look at their websites see what I can find out about them on social media. One of mine this year lives on a riverboat so he’s getting a question about that!

 I find reading the books on kindle leaves a blank spot in my process because I don't have the visual reference of the cover of the book in my head, and very often I don't have the author’s face in my mind. I have to make a conscious effort to think panellist C wrote book 3. I also try to get to the book room and see the cover beforehand.

And then there's the slightly obtuse way the panels can be brought together, and I totally understand why the organisers might do that. There’s so many people and they can't possibly read every book and think this book suits that subject.  I'm moderating a panel about PLOP which stands for ‘private lives of protagonist’… well it does in my head. From the books I've read only mine, and one other really has the detective having a private life that informs the narration. The others don’t which leads to a good question. And maybe a conversation about having a private life or not. What do readers like?  But then as I look back on the Amazon reviews of the previous books in the series of my panellists, there is a huge back story there and the story arc has reached a conclusion by the time the series gets to the book I’ve been reading.

All interesting stuff

And saying anything in public is a minefield these days. Just one slightly off comment and you could be locked in a cupboard for the rest of your life. There was a famous incident at Crime fest when the moderator, a very funny one, made a humorous wee comment and one of the panellists got offended. The moderator then asked the audience if what she had said was offensive or not. Some of the audience got up and walked out. It was a glib off the cuff comment -one of those things that is both true to some and offensive to others. It caused, what we would call, a huge stooshie. Poor Adrian.

Then I've been on a panel where the topic was totally ignored. It was about the weather. The panellists were from very cold countries, hot countries, wet countries. All of those things determine how bodies found in open air are treated but that conversation didn't happen until someone from the audience asked the question.

 

 She needs no intro!

A good moderator has to be in charge. Panellists that are too chatty have to be kept quiet and panellists that are too quiet have to have their say. And then there's the issue of the participating modulator what is a slightly strange job but if done properly can really be a good way of self-promotion.

Then there’s the me me me me authors who will promote their book no matter what the question is. Somebody might say ‘my character is allergic to shellfish’ and me me me butts in and says, ‘well my character likes to eat burgers and on page 174 of my wonderful new novel blah blah blah.’ This is often accompanied by waving the book above their head.  I don't think it endears them to the audience. There are ways to make the book sound fascinating without actually shoving it down people's throats- although that could be a solution to the over chatty panellist.

The best feeling in the world is being a participating modulator and doing hardly anything because the panellists are all chatting away, keeping on the topic, all being engaging, often being self-effacing and being funny.

I’m on a panel on Thursday – the first one I think- and moderating on Friday at 9 am. So, for my blog next week I think it will just be pictures of me and some panellists looking confused or hungover. Or maybe being wonderfully witty and entertaining. Let’s hope for the latter.

Caro

Aliens in the Desert

Wendall -- every other Thursday

James and I headed to the California desert last week to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary, revisiting one of our favorite places, the Integratron.

 

Me on our first trip to the Integratron in 2011.

You have to love a place with a sign like this.

Although we’ve spent several anniversaries in Palm Springs over the years, this time we headed to the other side of the 10 Freeway to Joshua Tree, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, to stay at the historic Joshua Tree Inn. 

 

Biggest pool in Joshua Tree. . .

One view of the courtyard.

The Inn, which dates back to the late 1940s, is now best known for Room 8, where Alt-country rock legend, Gram Parsons, who played with the Byrds and formed the Flying Burrito Brothers before a promising solo career, died on September 19, 1973 at the age of 26.

 

 

After his death at the Inn, his manager managed to steal his body from an LA Mortuary and tried to cremate it at Parsons’s favorite place in the National Park, Cap Rock. If you want to know more about the singer’s life, death, and connection to Joshua Tree, you can find an excellent LA Times article here: https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2023-04-10/legacy-of-gram-parsons-joshua-tree

 

We didn’t stay in Room 8, but Parsons’s spirit is everywhere on the property. The walls of the lobby and lounge feature memorabilia and a stack of guest books, where fans have written messages to the late rock star over the years. 

 

Shrine to the singer in the courtyard.

Pictures and articles about the singer hang on most of the walls.

The Inn is built like a horseshoe around the gardens and pool area, and we were lucky to have quiet guests and lots of privacy during our stay, not to mention the chance to drink

coffee while we watched the sunrise over the Mojave.

 

Room 8 is at the end of this walkway.

Looking over the valley towards Joshua Tree National Park.

The purpose of our trip, though, was to revisit the Integratron, which was placed on the National Park Services Register of Historic Places in 2019. James has written several articles about this unique place, we’ve visited it twice before, once with family on New Year’s Day, and since it promises spiritual and physical rejuvenation, we thought it would be a good place to start our next twenty years. . .

 

With cousins on a chilly New Year's Day.

It's not near anywhere! And GPS doesn't quite work. . .

 

The property is located deep in the desert, 20 miles north of the Joshua Tree National Forest, and built at the intersection of five ley lines, which some believe are lines to guide alien spacecraft.  According to the website: “The location of the Integratron is an essential part of its functioning. It was built on an intersection of powerful geomagnetic forces that, when focused by the unique geometry of the building, concentrate and amplify the earth’s magnetic field. Magnetometers read a significant spike in the earth’s magnetic field in the center of the Integratron.”

 

The building was conceived of and built by George Van Tassel, an aeronautical engineer who worked for Lockheed Douglas Aircraft and as a test pilot for Howard Hughes. He also helped lead the “UFO Movement” and hosted their annual convention for 25 years. He spent 18 years constructing the building, and credited the design to “Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials.” He claimed the building was “capable of rejuvenation, anti-gravity and time travel.”  It also has extraordinary acoustics, which is why the building is now used for Sound Baths, which include a talk about the history and healing properties of the building and a 45 minute performance on 22 Tibetan sound bowls. 

 

The "sound bowls" are gorgeous.

 

Regardless of your feelings about magnometers or extraterrestrials, it’s hard to resist the pull of the building itself, or its setting. The property includes sculptures and shrines, not to mention a “Hammock Village” where you can rest before or after your Sound Bath. 

 

Hammock Village!

The sculpture garden.

It's a beautiful structure, built entirely of wood—no metal or nails of any kind—with a central column for support in the middle of the first floor. A pull down ladder leads upstairs, where the roof centers on a skylight. 

 

View from the entrance.

 

The central column downstairs.

The ceiling and skylight on the second floor. where the sound baths happen.

The mats are laid out around the room.

All participants lie on covered mats, with their heads pointed towards the center. I’m sure the experience is different for everyone so I won’t try to explain it, except to say that as soon as we had finished, we decided it’s something we should do once a year from now on.

 

We'll be back.

We figure Gram Parsons would approve.

 

---Wendall