LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
PEMBA. AND SLAVERY.
[To THE EDITOR Or [HZ "SPECTATOR ..] an article in the Spectator about two and a half years ago (December 28th, 1895), you made a suggestion that the Society of Friends should set itself to grapple with the question of slavery on the Zanzibar Coast. You sug- gested that they should purchase property on the island of Pemba, adjacent to Zanzibar, and " set themselves deliberately to govern and educate, in the highest sense of the word education, the emancipated slaves." It may interest your readers to know that this suggestion has not been made to deaf ears, and, though I am unable to say whether in direct consequence of your remarks, a start has been made almost exactly on the lines you indicated. The Friends' Industrial Mission, Pemba, has purchased a plantation of about three hundred acres, stocked with clove-trees and cocoa-nut palms, near the sea, and known as Banani. A house (whose timbers of West Australian wood are designed to resist the rapacity of white ants) has been sent out from this country for the use of the members of the Society of Friends, five in number, who have volunteered as missionaries to the island. Freed slaves are already busy preparing the foundations for this house, and are at work in other ways on the estate ; the training of the emancipated slaves in the use of tools, and in habits of industry and thrift, and their education, is, as you suggested it should be, one of the foremost objects of the Mission.
It is to be hoped that the Mission will be of use in making known among the slaves still unfreed how to obtain emancipa- tion, and in maintaining their rights. The so-called Eman- cipation Decree of April, 1897, has, in the opinion of these Friend missionaries, been in most respects a failure; the zeal of the officials seems to have rapidly disappeared ; the Decree being published in Arabic only, was incomprehensible to the majority of the slaves, and in many cases their abortive efforts at freedom have only tightened their chains. During the first six months after the publication of the Decree it is believed that only about twenty slaves out of fifty-five thousand in Pemba have obtained their freedom. In view of this fact, the Friends' Mission continues to urge that the execution of the Decree should be entrusted to Englishmen, the Arab Walls being by no means to be trusted with such a business : that the strip of mainland which was not included in the Decree should likewise be included, and that compensation should be paid only for slaves who are freed at once. They are also calling the attention of officials to the state of the prison where slaves are confined, and are generally making them- selves known—perhaps disliked—as the champions of the slaves.
I may add that the Friends who went out on a preliminary
journey to Pemba received much help and kindness from some of the English officials, and that an account of the con- dition and prospects of the islands has been published by one of them in a small volume entitled " Banani."—I am, Sir, &c.,
LIBERTAS.
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