Slave market

Anzibar’s Old Slave Market was built as a place to commemorate the slave trade and slavery at the expense of historical reality. This heritage site is a “myth” [Deutsch, 2007] that is the result of “sensational fictions” [Glassman, 2010: 179] built mainly in the 20th century. However, it is not a pure invention: the slave trade and slavery are an integral part of Zanzibar’s history. Beginning in the late 18th century, thousands of enslaved African men and women were transported to this East African archipelago. Most of them were deported to the islands of the Indian Ocean and the countries bordering them, and sometimes all the way to Europe and America. Others were enslaved on Zanzibar and worked as servants or concubines for wealthy urban families, or farm laborers on the plantations. While these historical facts are indisputable, the narrative of the slave trade, slavery, abolition and emancipation that reflects the slave market contains significant historical distortions and underestimates the relationship between the slave system and European imperialism in the 19th century, as demonstrated by historian Jonathon Glassman. It also obscures the later reinterpretations of this past that emerged in the struggle for representations about who belongs and who does not, the legacy of which can still be felt in this insular society.