This book examines the history of the European Scramble for Africa from the perspective of the Omanis and other Arabs in East Africa. It will be of interest not only to African specialists, but also those working on the Middle East, where awareness is now emerging that the history of those settled on the southern peripheries of Arabia has been intimately entwined with Indian Ocean maritime activities since pre-Islamic times. The nineteenth century, however, saw these maritime borderlands being increasingly drawn into a new world economy, one of whose effects was the development of an ivory front in the interior of the continent that, by the 1850s, led the Omanis and Swahili to establish themselves on the Upper Congo. A reconstruction of their history and their interaction with Europeans is a major theme of this book. European colonial rivalries in Africa is not a subject in vogue today, while the Arabs are still largely viewed as invaders and slavers. The fact that the British separated the Sultanates of Muscat and Zanzibar is reflected in European research so that historians have little grasp of the geographic, tribal and religious continuum that persisted between overseas empire and the Omani homeland. Ibadism is regarded as irrelevant to the mainstream of Islamic religious protest whereas, during the lead up to establishing direct colonial rule, its ideology played a significant role; even the final rally against the Belgians in the Congo was conducted in the name of an Imam al-Muslimîn. Back home, the fall out from the British massacre that crushed the last Arab attempt to reassert independence in Zanzibar was an important contributory cause towards the re-founding of an Imamate that survived until the mid-1950s.

During the last two decades, the (re-)discovery of thousands of manuscripts in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa has questioned the long-standing approach of Africa as a continent only characterized by orality and legitimately assigned to the continent the status of a civilization of written literacy. However, most of the existing studies mainly aim at serving literary and historical purposes, and focus only on the textual dimension of the manuscripts. This book advances on the contrary a holistic approach to the study of these manuscripts and gather contributions on the different dimensions of the manuscript, i.e. the materials, the technologies, the practices and the communities involved in the production, commercialization, circulation, preservation and consumption. The originality of this book is found in its methodological approach as well as its comparative geographic focus, presenting studies on a continental scale, including regions formerly neglected by existing scholarship, provides a unique opportunity to expand our still scanty knowledge of the different manuscript cultures that the African continent has developed and that often can still be considered as living traditions.

Excerpt from The Fall of the Congo Arabs During the present century, many circumstances have combined to make the Zanzibar Arabs the most noted slave-hunters and slave-dealers in the world. Of their earlier history little is definitely known, beyond the fact that already in the tenth century there were Arab settlements along the East Coast of Africa. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Written by one of the commanders of the European-financed force sent to end the thousand-year-old Arab slave trade in Africa, this astonishing book tells of the little known Aran Campaign, or "Congo-Arab War" of 1892 to 1894. European intervention against the Arab slave trade started with the foundation in 1876 of the International African Association which had as its aim the "exploration and opening to civilization of Central Africa" and the "abolition of the trade in blacks." The Arab slave trade in black Africans-which had started soon after the first Muslim incursions into North Africa in 640 AD, and continued until the 1920s-had encroached all the way to Central Africa. From there, Africans were sold into slavery by other Africans-many of them converts to Islam-or by Arab colonists, all directed from the main Islamic slave trading island outpost of Zanzibar on Africa's east coast. In terms of the 1884 Berlin Conference, Central Africa was turned into the "Congo Free State" and was placed under the control of the king of Belgium, Leopold II. That date marked the start of formal preparations to drive the Arab slave traders out. The author, appointed as a captain in the Congo Free State armed forces, took part in the conflict which followed, and became famous in his native Britain and in Europe for his role in defeating the great Arab slave trader Tippu Tip, and his successor, Sefu. This firsthand account tells the course of the war, and Hinde's personal observations of the Congo, its people, and the Arab slave trade. Among the many fascinating details revealed in this book-all of which contributed to its latest suppression by politically-correct establishment historians-are the following: - that all the Africans in the Congo basin were voracious cannibals as late as the 1890s; - that the slave trade was conducted with equal ferocity by both Africans and Arabs alike; and - that a vicious anti-white racist sentiment was always bubbling up among the natives, resulting in repeated attempts to exterminate all Europeans in the area, missionaries, doctors, or otherwise.