Eastward across the Western Sea: The Indian Oceanic Trafficking of Africans into China

Abstract

Despite its greater extensiveness in comparison to the ferrying of their West African counterparts across the Atlantic Ocean into bondage in the New World, the history of the extraction of East Africans to serve as slaves in the various lands that ring the Indian Ocean is barely known to most of us. Particularly as Westerners, our knowledge of even the sketchiest outlines of the latter phenomenon pales before what we know intimately about the intricacies of the former. Furthermore, unknown altogether to too many is the fact that—from at least as early as the eighth century of the Common Era—these East African slaves were exported as distantly as China. Based principally on the pertinent Chinese sources, this study raises and investigates three fundamental questions concerning this conveyance of East Africans into China. First, who were the original enslavers of these East Africans and thus the prime purveyors of their entrance over the centuries into bondage in China? Second, how—that is, by land or by sea—and under what auspices were these East Africans typically transported from their homelands mainly along the eastern African coastline to a locale as far away as China? Third and finally, what was the probable fate of these East Africans once they had arrived in China? The essay concludes with a consideration of the consequentiality of this largely overlooked and therefore unheralded saga amidst the history of Chinese institutionalised servitude overall.