The Bedouin Wife

Preface

Preface

FOR COUNTLESS CENTURIES the African continent was home to one of the most infamous human activities that have been carried out in history: the slave trade. Though the unfortunates were abducted in various parts of Africa, most of them came from a wide strip around the Equator extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Indian Ocean in the east, or approximately what today are part of the Republic Democratic of Congo, Zaire and Tanzania.

Often the slaves’ hunters were Arab merchants and warriors in collusion with native chiefs who captured and sold residents of neighboring villages with which they were permanently at war although they sometimes sold even their own people. Then the Arabs used to arrange the transportation of their victims in caravans that crossed hundreds and even thousands of miles along predetermined paths in which many of the slaves died since they were forced to walk those endless routes on foot and heavily chained to prevent them from escaping. Although there are no credible figures of the magnitude of this traffic over the centuries there is no doubt that millions of Africans suffered this sad fate.

Arab traders brought their caravans to the Indian Ocean ports that lie off the coast of the island of Zanzibar, powerful trading center which was also one of the major slave markets. From there the slaves were sold and directed towards Arab countries, Persia and even India, where they would work as cheap labor in agricultural plantations in these countries and even serve as cannon fodder in the armies of their employers whilst women were used to work in housework or were used as concubines or prostitutes. Other routes of these caravans extended to North Africa to supply labor to the plantations of the same continent.

Later befell the expansion of the European empires around the world and in Africa in particular, so that the powers of the continent joined the infamous traffic which fed labor to their farms in the Americas and later in their own colonies in Africa, that in the late nineteenth century covered more than 10 million square miles, or a fifth of the planet's land.

One of the main routes used by caravans of slavers began in a kind of assembly center in Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, and ran 750 miles to Bagamoyo, on the shores of the Indian Ocean off the island of Zanzibar; a large number of secondary routes to the same destination converged in the main path. Along this road can still be recognized ruins of strongholds and stations used by the Arabs in their activities.

The current population of the coastal area is an ethnic cocktail of the thousands of people who transited the route coming from across the whole African hinterland.

Eventually the slave trade was banned in most of the world in 1873, under the influence of several western nations including the British Empire, but in practice it continued to exist as an underground activity for decades and we cannot ensure it has been completely eradicated at present times. However the economic equation of slavery suffered due to the persecution and the importance of it in the world began to shrink. Merchants should then seek alternative sources of income.

During the nineteenth century ivory trade began to occupy the economic space left free by the slave trade and acquired a greater magnitude than it. Ivory in East Africa is softer than other regions, which makes it more suitable for carving and with the finding of new uses for that material Europe and America were added to the traditional ivory markets in Asia, including India and China. These two activities constitute the economic background of the events that take place in this novel.

There is also a political context in which these actions are developed. Although there were intermittent colonies of European nations in North Africa since the Roman Empire, a fast process began to develop in the nineteenth century, culminating as expressed before in the occupation of almost the entire so-called Dark Continent by the main powers of Europe. Indeed, at the end of this process in 1914, only the Ethiopian Empire and the tiny Liberia were independent nations and the rest of the vast continent was colonized by England, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain and Germany.

The Berlin Conference in 1884 had the purpose to establish guidelines for the occupation of territories in Africa by the European powers, so as to limit the conflicts between them caused by the expansion of their empires. From there was born the Belgian Congo and the delimitation of the colonial areas particularly belonging to England, France and Germany.

Germany consolidated its possessions in Cameroon, German South West Africa and German East Africa.

The area where most of this novel takes place is the last of these colonies, located in the Great Lakes region of Africa, comprising areas that today belong to Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania.

German East Africa 1892 (the year in which our history begins)