Paper short abstract:

Adopting an "urban" "Swahili" or "Ngwana" culture provided respectability within the caravan trade complex and the basis for urbanization along the former caravan trade routes after colonial conquest had destroyed the caravan trade complex - propagandistically claiming to have abolished slave trade.

Paper long abstract:

The nineteenth-century history of slavery and slave trade in East Central Africa was embedded in the caravan trade complex. The emancipation from slavery should, therefore, also be understood in relation to the caravan trade complex.

Marcia Wright researched formerly enslaved people who had been liberated by Christian missionaries. Philip Gooding described how making career within the caravan trade complex was a gradual process of increased respectability and independence. Both historians talk about fundamentally different groups of people: humans shipped by the caravan trade complex versus people running the caravan trade complex. In East Central Africa the distinction between both groups was not as clearcut as it may seem further east.

I argue that, first, life perspectives had been shattered before being absorbed by the caravan trade complex, and that, gradually, hopes for the future were developed within that complex. The "enslaved" label is mainly an external qualification. The precarious, arbitrary, and violent situation within the caravan trade complex, however, was something people wanted to liberate themselves from. Some people may have found this emancipation by fleeing, but we know little about them. We can trace those who found emancipation within the complex, though.

Adopting an East Central African "urban" "Swahili" or "Ngwana" culture provided status or respectability within the caravan trade complex and the basis for urbanization along the former caravan trade routes after colonial conquest had destroyed the caravan trade complex - propagandistically claiming to have abolished slave trade.