# French Slave Trade at Kilwa (1776)

URL: https://allhistories.com/malawi/timeline/1776-french-slave-trade-at-kilwa
Location: Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania
Themes: main-event

In the second half of the 18th century the French sugar and coffee plantations of the Mascarene Islands, Île de France (Mauritius) and Bourbon (Réunion), needed growing numbers of enslaved labourers. French traders, who had previously bought slaves mainly in Madagascar and Mozambique, began to look to the Swahili coast further north. In 1776 the French merchant Jean-Vincent Morice concluded an agreement with the Sultan of Kilwa, under which the sultan undertook to supply him with 1,000 slaves a year at a fixed price for a hundred years, and allowed the French to build a fort on the island. Although the treaty itself was short-lived, Kilwa became a significant source of slaves for the French islands in the following decades, alongside the Portuguese ports of Mozambique Island and Ibo. The new demand reached deep into the interior. Yao caravans, which had previously dealt mainly in ivory, began to bring captives to the coast, many of them taken from the Chewa, Mang'anja and other peoples around Lake Malawi. The French trade marked the start of a period in which slave raiding and trading grew steadily in the Lake Malawi region, culminating in the devastation of the mid-19th century witnessed by David Livingstone. At this point in the timeline (1776), the Kyungu of the Ngonde was Kyungu Kisyombe (c. 1760 – c. 1790).

## Why it matters
The opening of the Kilwa slave market to French buyers drew the Lake Malawi region into the Indian Ocean slave trade on a growing scale.

Ruler at the Time: [Kyungu Kisyombe](https://allhistories.com/malawi/rulers/kyungu-kisyombe)

## Sources
- [Wikipedia — Kilwa Sultanate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilwa_Sultanate)
- [Encyclopaedia Britannica — East African slave trade](https://www.britannica.com/search?query=East+African+slave+trade)
- [Wikipedia — The Maravi Kingdoms (period overview)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maravi)