# CHAPTER 1  
## CHILDREN IN THE INDIAN OCEAN  
Edward A. Alpers  
Historians recognize that women and children worldwide have been especially vulnerable to enslavement. No more vivid example exists than the famous autobiography of Gustavus Vassa/Olaudah Equiano (see chapter 6 in this volume). The same sad story holds true for the slave trade of the Indian Ocean, in which children were continuously preyed upon in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Morton, 2009; Alpers, 2009; Allen, 2009). Children were regularly kidnapped by rapacious slave raiders, sold into slavery by mercenary relatives or pawned off during famines before being sold into slavery. Even when already enslaved on Unguja (the island of Zanzibar), children were seized by unscrupulous slavers to be carried off to Arabia, Persia, and western South Asia. Descriptions of the enslavement of children in Indian Ocean Africa abound in official British antislavery accounts, both consular and naval, as well as in missionary and - a few - colonial narratives. The context of this evidence is strongly abolitionist, highly patronizing, and often racist. Nevertheless, through it all there emerges a body of fragmentary evidence that represents the voices of these children: the voices that I emphasize in this short chapter.  
Although the full extent of the slave trade in eastern Africa is uncertain, there is no question that it reached its height during the nineteenth century. Demand centres in East Africa were part of the rapidly expanding clove and coconut plantation economy, first on Unguja and then, after the devastating