The story of the enslavement of Africans is well known. But most of it is known from the perspective of the enslavers.

Africans themselves have been slow in writing about this historic and historical tragedy that robbed Africa of its people — men, women and children — many of them the best of the available labour

then.

There is enough research that shows that slave trade contributed to economic development of the continent.

Joe Khamisi adds a very significant voice to such stories in his new book, The Wretched Africans: A Study of Rabai and Freretown Slave Settlements (Jodey Book Publishers, 2016).

This is Khamisi’s third book afterPolitics of Betrayal: Diary of a Kenyan Legislator and Dash Before Dusk: A Slave Descendant’s Journey in Freedom.

Khamisi calls his book “A tribute to slaves and descendants of the 19th century slave trade in Eastern Africa.” And this is pretty much what the book is about. Following several sources, Khamisi

weaves a tale of his own origins as a descendant of slaves, showing how the trade in Africans by Arabs and Europeans shattered lives in the interior of what is today central Africa (Malawi, Zambia

and Zimbabwe) and the coastal regions of eastern Africa.

So, to a large extent the history he invokes in this book is an account of the unmaking and remaking of Africa in the 19th century.

Khamisi leaves no doubts in the mind of the reader that this book is as much about him as it is about his ancestors – strewn across Africa and the African diaspora — his community today in Kilifi County, and about Kenya.

He says this of himself in the preface: “I am a third generation slave descendant, a great grandson of freed slaves of the 19th Century slavery in eastern Africa. I was born in 1944 — thirty seven

years after Britain abolished slavery in Kenya in 1907.

My roots are at Rabai, a historical rustic village 25 kilometres north-west of the coastal town of Mombasa. It is also the home of the largest ex-slaves’ settlement in East Africa.

It was at Rabai that Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebman, the two German missionaries of the London-based Church Missionary Society (CMS) built the first Christian Church in Kenya in 1846.”

As the preface note above suggests, Khamisi’s book is quite interested in the role that the European Christian missionaries played in stopping the slave trade and how they subsequently dealt with the

freed Africans. Consequently a fair amount of the narration is dedicated to showing how trade in African slaves began and grew; why it became big business along the coast of eastern Africa, India,

the Middle East, Europe, all the way to America; its major consequences — the deaths of thousands of Africans in captivity, shipment of more thousands to foreign lands; depopulation of large parts

of Africa; the establishment of an African diaspora all over the world; its abolition; and the eventual settlement of thousands of Africans in ‘other’ lands away from their native homes.

TALE TOLD FRESHLY

Indeed Khamisi retells the slave trade tale freshly, often debunking myths that have circulated for so long, such as the presumed goodness of the European Christians, showing — from sources that

are rarely discussed in Africa — how even some of the celebrated abolitionists were racist.

He also does a good job of reminding the reader of the complicity of Africans