Mlozi of Central Africa

Book excerpt: For more than a century, historians and writers on Africa have almost invariably associated the name Mlozi with all the cruellest excesses of the central and east African slave trade during the nineteenth century. That Mlozi bin Kazbadema was a significant slaver who conducted his trade according to all the brutal conventions of his period is beyond dispute. His subsequent botched hanging at the end of a British-sponsored rope, following a drum-head trial of questionable legality, has been generally regarded as well-deserved and a fitting, if muscular, exemplar of Pax Britannica in action. In The End of the Slaver, a title taken from recollections of Mlozi's hanging by the medical missionary Dr. Kerr Cross, author David Stuart-Mogg examines Mlozi's life and milieu and carefully weighs the often conflicting evidence apparent between official military and government reports and the largely unpublished private letters and diaries written at the time by those who participated in Mlozi's downfall and elimination. Stuart-Mogg's carefully evaluated findings call into serious question the altruism and philanthropy that the ultimate, and inevitable, victors of the struggle accorded their actions and their undoubtedly laudable ultimate objective - the eradication of slavery in British Central Africa. Referring to this book as 'an unusually stimulating study, Professor Shepperson recommends that The End of the Slaver deserves to be widely-read, not only by those whose primary interest is in the history of Malawi but also by students of slavery and the anti-slavery movements in the nineteenth century - and, indeed by all who are concerned with man's inhumanity to man.