#Abolitionsh

[scotianostra]

John Kirk was born in Barry, Angus, near Arbroath December 19th 1832.

Another wee snippet of history that few Scots know about, John Kirk was the driving force in Africa in eradicating the slave trade.

John Kirk was a physician, naturalist, a keen botanist and a valued member of David Livingstone’s Zambesi expedition of 1858-1863.

I read that perhaps his greatest contribution to the African expedition was as as the expedition’s unofficial photographer, however he worked tirelessly away from the expedition and is credited with being the driving force in ending the slave trade while working as an administrator in Zanzibar.

In the mid-19th century, the Zanzibar slave market was notorious as the last place on earth where human beings could still be bought and sold. Each year thousands of Africans were taken from the mainland and shipped to Arabia and Persia. Although slave trading had been suppressed elsewhere in the world, in East Africa it prospered with the connivance of the British authorities in India.

Dr John Kirk was appointed medical officer to the British Consulate in Zanzibar in 1866. Kirk was a pragmatist, and through a mixture of guile and perseverance, he finally contrived a way to shut down the slave market.

The National Library of Scotland hold many papers regarding Kirk, among them letters to Charles Allen, Secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society they contain detailed accounts of many aspects of life in Zanzibar and of the slave trade. He reports fathers selling their children into slavery to pay for food: ‘such a state of things attracts the human vultures’.

He made slavery, in the eyes of the Arabs, socially unacceptable. He persuaded the Sultan to crush this important source of his wealth and power, to discipline those who continued the trade, to stop the dhows, to close the slave market. And then, when the trade switched to land routes, marching their slave caravans across Africa to the North in order to avoid his energy and determination to wipe it out, he went into the interior, intercepting caravans, freeing slaves, fighting slavers, closing down slave staging posts and successfully, almost on his own, defeating and crushing slave trading from the East coast.

In June 1873 Sir John Kirk informed The Sultan of Zanzibar that a total blockade of Zanzibar Island was imminent. Reluctantly he signed the Anglo-Zanzibari treaty which provided for the complete abolition of the slave trade.