The Dismal History of Tropical Islands

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Our image of tropical islands tends to emphasize their beauty and serenity. They are vacation destinations, often referred to as “paradises.”

If you’ve ever visited one of these lush places, you know how delightful they can be. Sun, surf and sand – who could ask for more?

But for centuries many of them were ruled by powerful European empires that turned them into brutal plantation economies, where sugar cane, coffee, tobacco, and other crops were produced by a workforce of slaves transported from Africa.

The Iberian kingdoms of Portugal and Spain were first off the mark to exploit slave labour on plantations. In 1425 Madeira, off the coast of Morocco, was colonised by the Portuguese and by mid-century it had become the largest single producer of sugar in the Western world.

By the sixteenth century almost all of the Atlantic Islands -- the Azores, the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé, and Madeira -- experienced sugar booms.

Once Spanish explorers reached the Caribbean, to be followed later by the British, Danes, Dutch, and French, islands such as Barbados, Cuba, Curaçao, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Martinique, and Trinidad also became plantation colonies worked by African slave labour.

By the end of the eighteenth century, literally millions of Africans had crossed to the Atlantic and Caribbean Islands and to the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Réunion, as well as to the mainland of the Americas. British–ruled Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) on Hispaniola had become the largest slave societies in the West Indies.

For many Africans the starting point for this crossing was an offshore African island – a place that made escape impossible while awaiting transport to the New World. The French-owned island of Gorée, off the coast of Senegal, became such a transit point.

The Atlantic slave trade came to an end in the early part of the nineteenth century. Slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, in Danish and French possessions in 1848, in Dutch colonies in 1863, and in Portuguese ones in 1869.

On Hispaniola, the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue had won its freedom in a revolution that ended in 1804 and slaves in the Spanish part of the island (now the Dominican Republic) were also emancipated. Slavery was not abolished in the other Spanish islands until later: in Puerto Rico in 1873 and Cuba in 1886.

Off the eastern coast of Africa, the Indian Ocean islands of Unguja and Pemba, known collectively as Zanzibar, have an even more sinister past.

Ruled by an Arab dynasty from Oman on the Arabian Peninsula, Zanzibar was a slave entrepôt, where Africans from the interior of the continent were sold to buyers in North Africa and the Middle East. Merchants from Oman and India settled in Zanzibar to participate more directly. There was also an earlier Persian influence.

Captives who survived the long trek from the mainland were crammed into dhows bound for Zanzibar, and paraded for sale in the capital. The main island was East Africa’s main slave-trading port, and in the mid-19th century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing annually through its slave markets. Slaves also worked in the clove plantations on the island.

Zanzibar was, as journalist Ryszard Kapus'cin'ski described it in his 2001 book The Shadow of the Sun, “a sad, dark star.”

In 1890 Britain established a protectorate over Zanzibar and ended the slave trade. The British left in 1963 and local African revolutionaries soon thereafter overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government, killing thousands of Arabs and Indians.

Zanzibar is now an autonomous part of Tanzania, united with Tanganyika on the mainland.

Given their histories, these tropical islands have a complex mix of peoples, religions and cultures. For instance, in Robert Kaplan’s 2010 book Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, Zanzibar is seen as being “African, yet different from Africa. It is Arabian and Persian, yet different from Arabia and Persia; and Indian, yet different from India.”

Though often forgotten today, the former exploitation of these tropical islands and their unfortunate inhabitants remains a grim and violent page in world history.