There are many other heart-rending stories of how children, both girls and boys, were forcibly removed from their households and villages in late nineteenthcentury East Africa. The story of a ten-year-old Yao girl named Swema, from the interior of northern Mozambique, is a particularly moving one. In around 1865, Swema accompanied her mother, who was forced by debt to pay with her person, on a harrowing journey on foot to Kilwa Kivinje, the most notorious slaving port in eastern Africa. After her mother died on the long march to the coast, Swema herself became the subject of enslavement. By the time she reached Kilwa and after having barely survived the voyage by dhow to Zanzibar Town, she was so wasted that the man who financed this slaving caravan determined that she was not worth saving and ordered her to be abandoned in a shallow grave (Alpers, 1983). A collection of thirteen life stories written in the 1880s by boys at the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) school at Kiungani, Zanzibar, reveals the wide range of circumstances that led to children being held captive. All these boys were 'liberated' from slavery by the British navy, then 'given' to the Anglican missionaries at Zanzibar; while they were not enslaved, they were by no means free. Some of the Kiungani boys were seized in targeted slave raids by groups of opportunistic young men from the far interior; some by coastal slavers operating near the coast; some were kidnapped; some were initially pawns for settling debts and then were sold into slavery. Nearly all suffered the ignominy of becoming the property of more than one owner before being released from bondage by the British. Furthermore, however violent and traumatic their odyssey, as the editor of this remarkable collection of stories observed,