While the West Africa Squadron patrolled the Atlantic to suppress the transatlantic slave trade, Britain simultaneously ran a separate naval campaign on the other side of the continent. The East Africa Squadron operated in the Indian Ocean and off the East African coast with the specific mission of intercepting Arab dhows carrying enslaved people and suppressing the centuries-old Arab slave trade.
The squadron had its roots in the 1850s, when the Royal Navy began operating out of the Cape Station against slavers in the Mozambique Channel and the Indian Ocean. It was formalised between 1862 and 1872 as the East Africa Squadron, part of the East Indies Station. After Parliament outlawed the East Coast trade in 1873, following David Livingstone’s published accounts of its brutality, Britain negotiated treaties with the Sultans of Zanzibar and Muscat allowing a permanent naval presence on the Zanzibar coast. From that point, the squadron had a formal base of operations and a clear mandate.
The Arab slave trade it was fighting was not a small or marginal operation. Zanzibar was the central hub for a trade that moved tens of thousands of enslaved Africans a year to the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, and the wider Middle East. The trade had been running for over a thousand years. The dhows that carried enslaved people were fast, shallow-drafted, and designed for the coastal waters the squadron had to patrol.
Over the course of its operations, the East Africa Squadron captured around 1,000 dhows and freed approximately 12,000 Africans from slavery. HMS London served as the central depot ship, supported by 13 smaller patrol craft able to operate in shallow inshore waters. HMS Dryad alone accounted for seven captured slavers in a single tour. The operation also used significant diplomatic force, pressuring the Sultan of Zanzibar into abolishing the trade entirely and, when the fort at Mombasa resisted, reducing it to rubble.
The East Africa Squadron is almost entirely absent from the reparations debate. The Arab slave trade it was fighting is itself largely absent from that debate. Both omissions are convenient. Britain spending decades and significant naval resources suppressing a non-European slave trade does not fit the narrative of Britain as the singular and unredeemed architect of African slavery.
