FIGHT AGAINST SLAVERY, EAST AFRICA, 1895
Captain Frederick Eyre Lawrence, Rifle Brigade
Winchester Cathedral, Hampshire
The Background
Although the popular conception of the Slave Trade tends to assume it was focused on the Atlantic trade to the Americas, in fact a much more established trade was centred on the Arab traders of East Africa, who for over a thousand years traded along the coast and further; into the Indian Ocean islands, South Asia, the Arabian peninsula, and the Ottoman Empire of the Middle East and North Africa.
Despite its historical participation in the Atlantic trade Britain was not involved in the East Africa until well into the nineteenth century. European participation was limited initially to the Portuguese in Mozambique and some French presence from their Indian Ocean islands.
In 1808, however, Britain established its West African Squadron, or Preventative Squadron, designed to halt slave trading from the West Coast of Africa to the West Indies and America. Over the following decades the resources at its disposal grew, and it placed an effective brake on the trade. Consequently the trade in East Africa increased, augmented by Brazil avoiding the Royal Navy by heading for Mozambique, and by the French introducing coffee and rubber plantations in their Indian Ocean possessions, manned by slave labour.
The largest slave trading centre on the East Coast was at Zanzibar, which had been part of the Sultanate of Oman, in the Arabian peninsula, until 1861, when it became a separate sultanate. The tendency is to think that Zanzibar is just a small island off Tanzania’s coast, but it was much more than that. The slavers based there penetrated over a thousand miles into the African interior, an estimated twenty to thirty thousand slaves were traded annually in the 1860s, and even as late as 1885, when the European colonial powers were making their presence felt, an Anglo-German border commission defined Zanzibar as including a 19 kilometre wide strip stretching from Cape Delgado, at the northern tip of Mozambique, to Kipini, in present-day Kenya. That is a distance of over seven hundred miles, and Zanzibar itself is not just one island, it is an archipelago with two main islands and scores of smaller ones.
That border commission seems to have had as its purpose a formalisation of European interests, as by 1890 Zanzibar had been recognised as a British protectorate, albeit under the nominal rule of the Sultan. One of the first effects of this was the complete abolition of the slave trade, to be enforced by naval ships along the coast, with Zanzibari soldiers commanded by British officers on the mainland.
One of those British officers was Captain Frederick Eyre Lawrence, seconded from the Rifle Brigade to be second-in-command of the anti-slavery force in East Africa.
The Man
He was the son of General Sir Arthur Lawrence, a Liverpool-born (Gatacre to be precise) man who had commanded the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade throughout the Crimean War, and his wife, Jacyntha Eyre, who came from Beverley. Born in 1862, when his father was in his fifties, Frederick had followed the expected route of Eton and Sandhurst before being commissioned in his father’s regiment. He served in the 1885 Sudan Campaign, and in India, before being made Captain in 1895 and posted to Zanzibar. By then both his parents had died, his mother in 1870 and his father in 1892, both being buried in St. Laurence’s, Seale. Sir Arthur’s last home, Fox Hills near Chertsey, was inherited by his step-son, Lieutenant-General Edward Hutton, and is now a hotel which was used by the British Cycling Team for the 2012 Olympics.
The Action
Although the slave trade had been abolished in Zanzibar, the size of the protectorate made if difficult to eradicate – it was difficult to get rid of a profitable trade that had existed for a thousand years. The most famous and powerful trader, known as Tippoo-Tip, had retired to Zanzibar in 1890, but others continued, and in October 1895 Lawrence heard of a trader named Kobo operating a day’s march inland, and set off after him on a punitive expedition. When they intercepted the traders Lawrence’s force attacked, but Lawrence “was shot through the head at close quarters while pursuing on his horse, and upon the point of capturing the rebel chief”. In disarray at his death his troops pulled back, leaving his body, although it was later retrieved and buried with military honours.
Afterwards
That Lawrence was much respected can be deduced from the fact that the story of his demise given above came from The Rifle Brigade Chronicle for 1905, when tributes to him were reprinted for the benefit of new officers who had not known him. Similarly the portrait shown was commissioned by his step-brother Edward Hutton, from a renowned Victorian artist, Ernest Breun, and was later left in his will to the Rifle Brigade Club Committee. It now resides with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Museum in Woodstock, although I cannot help thinking that it would be more appropriate in the Rifle Brigade Museum in Winchester.
TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND IN MEMORY OF FREDERICK EYRE LAWRENCE, CAPTAIN IN THE RIFLE BRIGADE, SON OF GENERAL SIR ARTHUR LAWRENCE, K.C.B. COLONEL COMMANDANT 2ND BATTALION RIFLE BRIGADE, WHO WAS KILLED WHILST ON SERVICE AT MBOYANI IN EAST AFRICA ON 15TH OCTOBER 1895, AGED 35 YEARS.
Sources
Photos
Portrait of Hamed bin Mohammed bin Juma bin Rajab bin Mohammed bin Said el Murgebi Known as Tippu Tip a Zanzibari Slave trader. This is a picture of a painting in The House of Wonders Museum Stone Town Zanzibar - by Didier Tais, from Wikimedia Commons
Portrait of Captain Frederick Eyre Lawrence of the Rifle Brigade - by Ernest Breun, from collection of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Museum
Winchester Cathedral - by Antony McCallum, from WyrdLight.com
Military/ genealogy
http://www.archive.org/stream/riflebrigadechr05owngoog/riflebrigadechr05owngoog_djvu.txt (an account of Frederick Lawrence's military career, with tributes)
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~engsurry/trnscrpt/sry0175.txt (Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton's will)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
http://royalnavalmuseum.org/visit_see_victory_cfexhibition_eastafrica.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/9chapter3.shtml
http://drc.owu.edu/handle/2374.OWES/6889
© Jonathan Dewhirst 2013
Photos
Portrait of Hamed bin Mohammed bin Juma bin Rajab bin Mohammed bin Said el Murgebi Known as Tippu Tip a Zanzibari Slave trader. This is a picture of a painting in The House of Wonders Museum Stone Town Zanzibar - by Didier Tais, from Wikimedia Commons
Portrait of Captain Frederick Eyre Lawrence of the Rifle Brigade - by Ernest Breun, from collection of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Museum
Winchester Cathedral - by Antony McCallum, from WyrdLight.com
Military/ genealogy
http://www.archive.org/stream/riflebrigadechr05owngoog/riflebrigadechr05owngoog_djvu.txt (an account of Frederick Lawrence's military career, with tributes)
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~engsurry/trnscrpt/sry0175.txt (Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton's will)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
http://royalnavalmuseum.org/visit_see_victory_cfexhibition_eastafrica.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/9chapter3.shtml
http://drc.owu.edu/handle/2374.OWES/6889
© Jonathan Dewhirst 2013