Despite the trauma of being violently torn from one's kith and kin, or of the undermining of family values precipitated by the opportunities for personal gain  
created by the slave trade, many East African children survived their captivity and gained a new kind of freedom. A few of the children who found themselves committed to the UMCA became men of the cloth themselves. Among them was Yohanna Abdullah, the first Anglican priest in East Africa, a proud Yao and author of Chiikala cha Wayao (1919), and Petro Kilekwa, a Bisa from Zambia who published his autobiography, Slave Boy to Priest, in 1937. Captured in an Ngoni raid, Kibuli bin Mchubiri, also a Bisa, received the name Rashid when he was enslaved on Zanzibar. He later adopted the patronymic bin Hassani from the husband of a woman to whom he was assigned by his mistress, a sister of Seyyid Barghash bin Said, Sultan of Zanzibar (r.1870-1888), and who was manumitted upon the mistress' death at the end of the century. Rashid bin Hassani had a variety of jobs in colonial Tanganyika and ended his career as a forest guard near Moshi, at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. Reflecting upon his life in captivity and freedom, he reminisced,  
When I was a child my father went to the shamba with his bow and arrows and took us with him; he dared not leave us even for a day for fear we should be seized and sold as slaves... It is true you were free to live where you liked and go where you liked, but it was much more a question of living where you could and going where you dared (Perham, 1936, p. 118).  
To be a child at the height of the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean slave trade meant that one lived an often precarious existence that was fraught with potential dangers. Yet the strengths of children are their ineffable resilience, their hopes for a better future and their ability to forget the past and carry on living. Those who survived the violence of the slave trade embodied these characteristics as free men and women.