In recent years, the study of slavery and the slave trade has developed much more sophisticated and comprehensive quantitative data than were previously available, while at the same time re-focusing attention on the experiences of enslaved Africans. One aspect of this latter effort has been to identify sources that give voice to those Africans caught up by the slave trade and to draw upon them to humanize our understanding of this terrible traffic. In approaching the topic of this chapter, I adopt this methodology and seek to place these African voices in the wider context of the extant historiography on slavery in East Africa.

One of these voices was that of Swema, a young Yao girl from northern Mozambique who was born in about 1855, a time when the demand for slaves in Zanzibar was approaching its height and Kilwa Kivinje had emerged as the principal slave-trading port in eastern Africa. The death of her father in a hunting accident and the absence of any matrilineal kinsmen to protect Swema and her mother left these two women in an especially vulnerable position. Forced to borrow millet seed (mtama) to consume and sow from a neighbour in the village to which they relocated, Swema's mother found herself unable to repay her debt at the end of a poor season. After several delayed attempts to collect his debt, the neighbour decided to redeem his investment by selling Swema to a coastal slave caravan.