Muted Memories: Heritage-Making, Bagamoyo, and the East African Caravan Trade

In the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of porters carried ivory every year from the African interior to Bagamoyo, a port town at the Indian Ocean. In the opposite direction, they carried millions of meters of cloth, manufactured in the USA, Europe, and India. This book examines the centrality of the caravan trade, both culturally and economically, to Bagamoyo's development and cosmopolitan character, while also exploring how this history was silenced when Bagamoyo was instead branded as a slave route town in 2006 in an attempt to qualify it for the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Jan Lindström is a teacher and researcher in social anthropology at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. From 1980-1990 he held the post of Senior Anthropologist at the Tanzania Food and Nutrition Centre, Ministry of Health, and from 1996-2002 he was Socio-Cultural Analyst at the Swedish Embassy in Tanzania.