When, at the close of the 18th century, British philanthropists were desirous of repatriating loyalist negroes in North America who wished to return to Africa, the Sierra Leone Company was started, which purchased from native chiefs the nucleus of the present colony of Sierra Leone. Here, for three-quarters of a century, British cruisers landed and set free the slaves that were captured off the West coast of Africa. Zanzibar, on the other side of the continent, became about twenty years ago the eastern analogue of Sierra Leone. Since the British occupation of Egypt, slavery has practically ceased to exist in that country; and owing to the French occupation of Algeria and Tunis, and the influence brought to bear by Britain on Turkey in regard to Tripoli, there is not much traffic in slaves across the Sahara Desert to those countries; though anybody visiting the south of Tunis will be surprised at the large number of negroes in all the villages, showing that quite recently constant supplies must have been received from Bornu and the Hausa states. The devastating slave raids of the Matebele Zulus have been abolished by the British South Africa Company; and similar raids of the Angoni have been put an end to by the British and German Governments in East and Central Africa. The Arabs of Zanzibar had acquired an evil fame for their gigantic slave raids in East-central Africa. Great Britain, who had assisted to separate Zanzibar from Maskat as an independent state in 1862, began to concern herself a few years later with the slave trade which flourished in those dominions. By 1873 the Sultan of Zanzibar had, after considerable pressure, been induced to make the slave trade illegal in his Sultanate, though it continued to flourish in an illegal manner until the administration of his territories by the British and Germans.