City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (10 page)

“I hear you have an old man working there who used to be a slave,” I tell Essa. “I’d like to interview him.”

She doesn’t understand the word “slave.” I use the Arabic
abd
, or
abeed
in the plural.

“We have no
abd
, only handicrafts,” she says drily.

Slavery in the UAE is a touchy subject. As an institution, it was only banned in 1963. Hundreds or thousands of former slaves are still alive. Many black Dubaians are descendants of African slaves. They took UAE
citizenship after independence in 1971 and now reap the same privileges as any other Emirati citizen. It’s considered rude—to the point of starting a fight—to ask black Emiratis whether they are African or descended from slaves.

Essa grudgingly invites me to Heritage Village. It’s her job, as a guide, to explain Dubai’s history, even the dark chapters. “The
abeed
came from Africa,” she says as we stroll through the village. “We needed strong people, strong men to help with the work. There weren’t enough people here. They worked on the pearl dhows, the trading dhows.”

Essa is a twenty-something woman in a black
abaya
and
shayla
scarf over her hair. She wears oversized sunglasses. Her skin is coffee brown. She quickly assures me she’s descended from Bedouin. You can spot nonoriginal Emiratis, she says, by the color of their skin. If they’re too white, they’re probably from Iran. Too brown, and they’re African.

“When you see people with African faces and dark skin, these are from
abeed
. They’re locals like us now,” she says with no hint that it should be any other way.

Fatma Essa leads me into a copse of trees where a brown bullock and a wiry old man stand together in the shade. The man rakes eucalyptus leaves. His bandy arms are tightly muscled and his neck is ribbed with carrotlike cords. He’s wearing a checkered
lunghi
and a dirty T-shirt that is disintegrating at the seams. An embroidered skullcap is crushed on his head, accenting a kinky salt-and-pepper goatee. He is a black man and his name is Juma Khalaf Bilal az-Zari.

Az-Zari says he’s unsure of his age, but he figures he’s somewhere around seventy. His eyes are milky yellow, from cataracts and malarial jaundice. He was born in the east coast sheikhdom of Fujairah. He’s the only Emirati I’ve ever seen doing manual labor. I ask az-Zari if he’s got African ancestry.

“No, I’m pure-blooded Emirati,” he says bluntly. I don’t follow up by asking if he was once a slave.

But az-Zari knows all about the lives of slaves. He went to sea as a boy, sailing to the South Indian port of Calicut before he could grow a mustache. He launches into slave chants he sang, miming the rowing and sail-rigging and sundry hard labor he performed. Slaves in the Trucial States sailed to African ports like Mombasa and Zanzibar, where they could speak the language. They handled the bartering of Arabian dates
for African lumber and spices. He tells of building a road through the Hajjar Mountains and farming in Kuwait.

“There were no machines back then. Black people did all the work by hand,” he says. “We ate dates and fish. It’s the perfect food. Makes you strong.”

Az-Zari is a proud man. Not once does he say he’d been a slave. He thrusts out his chest and speaks with his chin pointed to the sky. I ask him about the buying and selling of slaves, the markets, and the transport. Was there a slave market in Dubai? “Like today, if you want a house or a car, there were people you could visit. You just said, ‘I need
abd
.’

“The big market for
abeed
was in Buraimi. From there they went to Saudi,” he says. “I saw them with chains on their wrists. Like this,” az-Zari crosses his forearms behind his back. “They put the cuffs on them, so they couldn’t go anywhere. If any
abd
refused to work, they chained his legs to keep him from running away. Stolen children also, they sold them through Buraimi. They stole them from Dubai and they sent them to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or Kuwait.”

Wealthy Dubai families owned slaves. Men handled outdoor chores and the women slaves cooked and cared for children. Slaves married each other and bore children who were enslaved by the same families. In the famine of the 1940s and 1950s, owners sold off their slaves. Few people could afford to feed themselves, let alone slaves.

“There was no rain, no fish, no food. People sold their
abeed
to get money for food,” az-Zari says.

Az-Zari remembers the 1963 emancipation like it was yesterday. By this point he’s given a demonstration to a group of schoolchildren of the ancient
falaj
irrigation system, whipping his bullock to draw well water into the stone channel, which directs it to the shade trees. Afterward he douses himself and mops his face with a towel.

“Sheikh Rashid and Sheikh Zayed said, ‘Every
abd
is free to go.’ They gave them land and houses. They said,
‘Khalas
—enough—it’s not allowed to be
abd
anymore. If you want to stay and work, okay. But you must be paid.’”

Essa explains that former slaves are no longer called
abd
. After 1963, they became
kadhim
, which means helper or servant. Freed slaves often took their owners’ family names, as in America. Black Emiratis now bear some of the most prestigious names in the country. But, unlike in America,
integration was quick and nearly total. Black Emiratis face little discrimination.

Slavery is deeply ingrained in Arabia, pre-dating Islam.
¹⁷
It was big business during the pearl boom. Arab captains delivered East African slaves to the ports of Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, and Dubai. Merchants sold slaves locally and assigned them to caravans bound for what is now Saudi Arabia, where they were especially prized. The Bani Yas tribe in Abu Dhabi controlled many of the slave routes into the interior. The ruler of Sharjah levied a $4 tax on each slave brought through his domain.
¹⁸

The British tried to thwart the practice and banned slave imports by sea in 1847.
¹⁹
But slavery in the Trucial States carried on in legality until 1963, when laws readied for independence outlawed ownership of humans. That date—a century after the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation—sounds barbaric, but slavery wasn’t usually the brutal institution it was in the United States.

Slaves sometimes became the masters. In the 1860s, when American slavery was about to be contested by the Civil War, Sharjah was ruled by a pair of half-brothers, including the son of a slave woman.
²⁰
In the east coast city of Dibba, an African slave named Bakhit bin Said governed between 1924 and 1926.
²¹

An African slave named Barut ran the east coast enclave of Kalba for decades. Barut was Kalba’s summer governor starting in 1903, when his owner, the
wali
Said bin Hamad, stayed in Ajman. When Said bin Hamad died in the 1930s, the crown prince, a boy named Hamad, was too young to rule. Barut took over as full-time ruler. In 1937, the British resident pressed Kalba to choose a real leader. Reluctantly, the tribesmen chose twelve-year-old Hamad. When the British rejected the boy as too young, they picked Barut the slave. Ironically, the British—who had campaigned against slavery for the previous seventy-five years—rejected Barut, presumably because he was a slave. Still, Barut managed to run Kalba until around 1950.
²²

Slaves worked aboard pearling dhows and lived in the walled compounds of prominent families. Most were more like second-class family members or trusted domestic servants. In the early days of oil exploration, slaves even toiled with the crews of international oil companies,
²³
and Thesiger ran across them several times in his travels. One elderly
Dubaian told me of seeing a group of slaves manacled to a wall in Al Ain in 1951.

A tour of Sheikh Saeed’s house, where Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed spent his first ten years, turned up a history of slaves. Abdulla al-Mutairy, the fifty-year old director of the museum that operates in the old coral-walled house, mentioned that the room where he and his staff chatted over coffee was the slaves’ quarters.

“The slaves lived here—where you’re sitting—this was the slave room,” al-Mutairy says. “The black people living here did the housework and the cooking.”

Emirati historian Fatma al-Sayegh describes her family’s ownership of slaves as “domestic slavery.” The slaves took the family’s last name and were considered members of the tribe. “We used to have a whole family working for us. They called themselves al-Sayegh, but they were from Africa,” she says. “Even middle-class families kept slaves.” Gulf Arabs’ current over-reliance on foreign labor and disdain for physical work and service jobs stems partly from their thousand-year history of slave ownership, al-Sayegh believes. The 1963 ban wasn’t much of a hardship for slave owners. They switched from slaves to low-paid Asians who find themselves mistreated in much the same way.

British policy in the Trucial States was to grant freedom papers to any slaves who presented themselves at their mission. The ceremony was simple. A slave would grasp the flagpole inside the compound and ask to be freed. In 1958, Dubai’s political resident Donald Hawley reported that two women slaves turned up to ask for freedom papers. One slave bared her back to reveal welts from a whipping she’d received from her mistress. “Not too serious but many and unpleasant,” Hawley wrote in his 2007 book
The Emirates: Witness to a Metamorphosis
.
²⁴
Hawley freed the women and gave them asylum inside the mission. The next day, the owner asked for the slaves back. Hawley refused. They stayed in the British mission until Sheikh Rashid intervened and guaranteed their freedom.
²⁵

Maryam Behnam, an Iranian-born Emirati, says her family kept “hundreds” of slaves around their home and farm in Bandar Lengeh, in southern Iran. When the family came to Dubai, they brought slaves with them. Everywhere they traveled, slaves accompanied them as integral
members of the family. Behnam had a personal slave, a girl her age named Jameela. The girl turned up on the family doorstep in Bandar Lengeh one day. Behnam’s grandfather was never able to find her parents, so they kept her.

“She would clean my shoes and put them on me. She helped me with my dress. She brushed my hair for me. I didn’t do anything in the house. These things were done by servant people,” Behnam says. “Lamps had to be cleaned and filled with oil. Water had to be brought in. Everywhere you looked, you saw three or four slaves.”

Behnam’s Dubai relatives freed their slaves in the 1960s. “They’re still in Dubai. They used to visit me,” she says. “Some of them are better off than we are. They’ve got children studying in America.”

In the 1960s, political scientists in the West declared the end was nigh for the world’s traditional monarchs. The theorists, including Daniel Lerner, Karl Deutsch, and Samuel Huntington, wrote that the kings and sheikhs clinging to power were hopelessly out of step with modernization.
²⁶
Either they would surrender power peacefully, perhaps retaining scraps of their privilege, as in Europe, or face overthrow.

The march of evidence backed this theory. Egypt’s king lost power to an army colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1952. Iraq’s army executed King Faisal II after overrunning his palace in 1958. Yemen’s King Muhammad al-Badr was overthrown by revolutionaries in 1962. In Libya, a coup in 1969 tossed aside King Idris in favor of Col. Muammar Ghaddafi. Just across the Gulf from Dubai, Islamic revolutionaries drove out Iran’s shah in 1979.

The Gulf monarchies, with their anachronistic sheikhs, looked like teetering dominoes. As societies grew wealthy and educated, there was no way a tribal chief could keep them happy. Given the modernization under way, the sheikhs would cave in to political reforms that gave citizens a greater say in governance.

The 1950s and 1960s were trying times for the Gulf-ruling families, with Arab nationalists like Nasser in Egypt calling for Arab unity and self-rule. Nasser’s message resonated deeply in Dubai and the Gulf, stoking opposition to the British first, and the ruling sheikhs second. The Soviet
Union egged on the radicals. Colonial empires withered. A slew of independent states emerged, especially in Africa.

For a while, it looked like the political scientists would be right. The Trucial States sat as fat targets for revolution. Gulf Arabs traveled to Egypt to meet with the Arab League and foment colonial overthrow. The league opened an office in Sharjah that imported nationalist teachers from Iraq and Syria. The radicals made plain their goal of expelling the British and upending absolute tribal rule. Pan-Arab and anti-British graffiti sprouted everywhere.

Much of the opposition focused on Hawley, the British political resident in Dubai. Hawley would attend a seemingly innocuous event, like a school sports day, and, instead of greeting him with the Union Jack, jeering students would wave flags of the United Arab Republic, Nasser’s short-lived union of Egypt and Syria. One morning Hawley woke to find the Union Jack missing from his residential compound. He found it floating in the creek. The British knew the end of their 152-year “colony-on-the-cheap” was near. The air smelled of rebellion, and many among Dubai’s prominent families became Nasser’s acolytes.
²⁷

“It’s impossible to overstate Nasser’s effect,” says Anthony Harris, a British diplomat in Egypt and Sudan during Nasser’s time. Later, he became UAE ambassador. “It was the first time an Arab leader stood up to the West. He had this honeyed voice. People fell into trances when he spoke. The British were scared that Nasserism would sweep them out of the Arab world.”

Nasser’s revolutionaries might have ousted the British and carried off the Gulf sheikhs. But their timing was bad. Competing with independence fever were new opportunities to get rich. Abu Dhabi had oil, and the ruler suddenly had income to distribute. In Dubai, which had not yet struck oil, Sheikh Rashid understood that a boom was on the way, requiring construction and huge imports of goods. Without oil income, he bought off his opponents with business concessions. The families fomenting revolt were the first recipients. Christopher Davidson, an English scholar who has written extensively on the end of British rule, says that the largest Dubai merchant families whose names now adorn shopping malls and car dealerships were the most vehement Arab nationalists of the 1950s.