13 TransSaharan Slave Trade

The Arab slave trade was the practice of slavery in the Arab world, mainly in Western Asia, North Africa, East Africa, and certain parts of Europe (such as Iberia and Sicily) during their period of domination by Arab leaders. The trade was focused on the slave markets of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. People traded were not limited to a certain race, ethnicity, or religion,[1] and included Turks, Iranians, Europeans, and Berbers, especially during the trade’s early days.

During the 8th and 9th centuries of the Fatimid Caliphate, most of the slaves were Europeans (called Saqaliba) captured along European coasts and during wars.[2] However, slaves were drawn from a wide variety of regions and included Mediterranean peoples, Persians, peoples from the Caucasus mountain regions (such as Georgia, Armenia and Circassia) and parts of Central Asia and Scandinavia, English, Dutch and Irish, Berbers from North Africa, and various other peoples of varied origins as well as those of African origins.

Toward the 18th and 19th centuries, the flow of Zanj (Bantu) slaves from East Africa increased with the rise of the Oman sultanate, which was based in Zanzibar. They came into direct trade conflict and competition with Portuguese and other Europeans along the Swahili coast.[3] The North African Barbary states carried on piracy against European shipping and enslaved thousands of European Christians. They earned revenues from the ransoms charged; in many cases in Britain, village churches and communities would raise money for such ransoms. The government did not ransom its citizens.

SCOPE OF THE TRADE

Historians estimate that between 650 and 1900, 10 to 18 million peoples were enslaved by Arab slave traders and taken from Africa across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert.[4][5][6][7] The term Arab when used in historical documents often represented an ethnic term, as many of the “Arab” slave traders, such as Tippu Tip and others, were physically indistinguishable from the “Africans” whom they enslaved and sold. Due to the nature of the Arab slave trade, it is impossible to be precise about actual numbers.[8][9][10]

To a smaller degree, Arabs also enslaved Europeans. According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured between the 16th and 19th centuries by Barbary corsairs, who were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, and sold as slaves.[11][12] These slaves were captured mainly from seaside villages from Italy, Spain, Portugal and also from more distant places like France or England, the Netherlands, Ireland and even Iceland. They were also taken from ships stopped by the pirates.[13] The effects of these attacks was devastating: France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships. Long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants, because of frequent pirate attacks. Pirateraids discouraged settlement along the coast until the 19th century.[14][15]

Periodic Arab raiding expeditions were sent from Islamic Iberia to ravage the Christian Iberian kingdoms, bringing back booty and slaves. In a raid against Lisbon in 1189, for example, the Almohad caliph, Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur, took 3,000 female and child captives, while his governor of Córdoba, in a subsequent attack upon Silves in 1191, took 3,000 Christian slaves.[16]

The Ottoman wars in Europe and Tatar raids brought large numbers of European Christian slaves into the Muslim world too.[17][18][19]

The ‘Oriental’ or ‘Arab’ slave trade is sometimes called the ‘Islamic’ slave trade, but a religious imperative was not the driver of the slavery, Patrick Manning, a professor of World History, states. However, if a non-Muslim population refuses to adopt Islam or pay the jizya protection/subjugation tax, that population is considered to be at war with the Muslim “ummah” (nation), and it becomes legal under Islamic law to take slaves from that non-Muslim population. Usage of the terms “Islamic trade” or “Islamic world” has been disputed by some Muslims as it treats Africa as outside of Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world.[20] Propagators of Islam in Africa often revealed a cautious attitude towards proselytizing because of its effect in reducing the potential reservoir of slaves.[21]

From a Western point of view, the subject merges with the Oriental slave trade, which followed two main routes in the Middle Ages:

  • Overland routes across the Maghreb and Mashriq deserts (Trans-Saharan route)[22]
  • Sea routes to the east of Africa through the Red Sea and Indian Ocean (Oriental route)[23][24]

The Arab slave trade originated before Islam and lasted more than a millennium.[25][26][27] Arab traders brought Africans across the Indian Ocean from present-day Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania,[28] Eritrea, Ethiopia and elsewhere in East Africa to present-day Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Somalia, Turkeyand other parts of the Middle East[29] and South Asia (mainly Pakistan and India). Unlike the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the New World, Arabs supplied African slaves to the Muslim world, which at its peak stretched over three continents from the Atlantic to the Far East.

SOURCES AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE SLAVE TRADE

A RECENT AND CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC

The history of the slave trade has given rise to numerous debates amongst historians. For one thing, specialists are undecided on the number of Africans taken from their homes; this is difficult to resolve because of a lack of reliable statistics: there was no census system in medieval Africa. Archival material for the transatlantic trade in the 16th to 18th centuries may seem useful as a source, yet these record books were often falsified. Historians have to use imprecise narrative documents to make estimates which must be treated with caution: Luiz Felipe de Alencastro states that there were 8 million slaves taken from Africa between the 8th and 19th centuries along the Oriental and the Trans-Saharan routes.[30]

Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau has put forward a figure of 17 million African people enslaved (in the same period and from the same area) on the basis of Ralph Austen’s work.[31] Paul Bairoch suggests a figure of 25 million African people subjected to the Arab slave trade, as against 11 million that arrived in the Americas from the transatlantic slave trade.[32] Ronald Segal estimates between 11.5 and 14 million were enslaved by the Arab slave trade.[33][34][35]

Another obstacle to a history of the Arab slave trade is the limitations of extant sources. There exist documents from non-African cultures, written by educated men in Arabic, but these only offer an incomplete and often condescending look at the phenomenon. For some years there has been a huge amount of effort going into historical research on Africa. Thanks to new methods and new perspectives, historians can interconnect contributions from archaeology, numismatics, anthropology, linguistics and demography to compensate for the inadequacy of the written record.

The Arab trade of Zanj (Bantu) slaves in East Africa is one of the oldest slave trades, predating the European transatlantic slave trade by 700 years.[36][37][38] Male slaves were often employed as servants, soldiers, or laborers by their owners, while female slaves, including those from Africa, were long traded to the Middle Eastern countries and kingdoms by Arab and Oriental traders as concubines and servants. Arab, African and Oriental traders were involved in the capture and transport of slaves northward across the Sahara desert and the Indian Ocean region into the Middle East, Persia and the Far east.[37][38]

650 TO 20TH CENTURY

From approximately 650 until around the 1960s, the Arab slave trade continued in one form or another. Historical accounts and references to slave-owning nobility in Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere are frequent into the early 1920s.[36] In 1953, sheikhs from Qatar attending the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II included slaves in their retinues, and they did so again on another visit five years later.[6]

As recently as the 1950s, Saudi Arabia‘s slave population was estimated at 450,000 — approximately 20% of the population.[39] It is estimated that as many as 200,000 Sudanese children and women had been taken into slavery during the Second Sudanese Civil War.[40][41] Slavery in Mauritaniawas legally abolished by laws passed in 1905, 1961, and 1981.[42] It was finally criminalized in August 2007.[43] It is estimated that up to 600,000 Mauritanians, or 20% of Mauritania‘s population, are currently in conditions which some consider to be “slavery”, namely, many of them used as bonded labour due to poverty.[44]

The Arab slave trade in the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and Mediterranean Sea long predated the arrival of any significant number of Europeans on the African continent.[36][45]

Some descendants of African slaves brought to the Middle East during the slave-trade still live there today, and are aware of their African origins. The number of descendants was limited as men were castrated by their Arab masters to be eunuchs in domestic service.[29][46]

MEDIEVAL ARABIC SOURCES

These are given in chronological order. Scholars and geographers from the Arab world had been travelling to Africa since the time of Muhammad in the 7th century.

  • Al-Masudi (died 957), Muruj adh-dhahab or The Meadows of Gold, the reference manual for geographers and historians of the Muslim world. The author had travelled widely across the Arab world as well as the Far East.
  • Ya’qubi (9th century), Kitab al-Buldan or Book of Countries
  • Abraham ben Jacob (Ibrahim ibn Jakub) (10th century), Jewish merchant from Córdoba[47]
  • Al-Bakri, author of Kitāb al-Masālik wa’l-Mamālik or Book of Roads and Kingdoms, published in Córdoba around 1068, gives us information about the Berbers and their activities; he collected eye-witness accounts on Saharan caravan routes.
  • Muhammad al-Idrisi (died circa 1165), Description of Africa and Spain
  • Ibn Battuta (died circa 1377), Moroccan geographer who travelled to sub-Saharan Africa, to Gao and to Timbuktu. His principal work is called A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling.
  • Ibn Khaldun (died in 1406), historian and philosopher from North Africa. Sometimes considered as the historian of Arab, Berber and Persian societies. He is the author of Muqaddimah orHistorical Prolegomena and History of the Berbers.
  • Al-Maqrizi (died in 1442), Egyptian historian. His main contribution is his description of Cairo markets.
  • Leo Africanus (died circa 1548), author of Descrittione dell’ Africa or Description of Africa, a rare description of Africa.
  • Rifa’a al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), who translated medieval works on geography and history. His work is mostly about Muslim Egypt.
  • Joseph Cuoq, Collection of Arabic sources concerning Western Africa between the 8th and 16th centuries (Paris 1975)

EUROPEAN TEXTS (16TH–19TH CENTURIES)

OTHER SOURCES

  • African Arabic and Ajam Manuscripts, such as Tarikh al-Sudan
  • African oral tradition
  • Kilwa Chronicle (16th century fragments)
  • Numismatics: analysis of coins and of their diffusion
  • Archaeology: architecture of trading posts and of towns associated with the slave trade
  • Iconography: Arab and Persian miniatures in major libraries
  • European engravings, contemporary with the slave trade, and some more modern
  • Photographs from the 19th century onward
  • Ethiopian (Ge’ez and Amharic) historical texts, such as Kebra Nagast

HISTORICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT

A brief review of the region and era in which the Oriental and trans-Saharan slave trade took place should be useful here. It is not a detailed study of the Arab world, nor of Africa, but an outline of key points which will help with understanding the slave trade in this part of the world.

THE ISLAMIC WORLD

The religion of Islam appeared in the 7th century CE. In the next hundred years, it quickly diffused throughout the Mediterranean area, spread by Arabs after they conquered the Sassanid Persian Empire and many territories from the Byzantine Empire, including the Levant, Armenia and North Africa. The Muslims invaded the Iberian peninsula, where they displaced the Visigothic Kingdom. These regions therefore had a diverse range of different peoples and were, to some extent, unified by an Islamic culture built on both religious and civic foundations. For example, they used the Arabic language and the dinar (currency) in commercial transactions. Mecca in Arabia, then as now, was the holy city of Islam and the center of pilgrimages for all Muslims, whatever their origins.

According to Bernard Lewis, the Arab Empire was the first “truly universal civilization,” which brought together for the first time “peoples as diverse as the Chinese, the Indians, the people of the Middle East and North Africa, black Africans, and white Europeans.”[48]

The conquests of the Arab armies and the expansion of the Islamic state that followed have always resulted in the capture of war prisoners who were subsequently set free or turned into slaves or Raqeeq (رقيق) and servants rather than taken as prisoners as was the Islamic tradition in wars. Once taken as slaves, they had to be dealt with in accordance with the Islamic law which was the law of the Islamic state, especially during the Umayyad and Abbasid eras. According to that law, slaves were allowed to earn their living if they opted for that, otherwise it is the owner’s (master) duty to provide for that. They also could not be forced to earn money for their masters unless with an agreement between the slave and the master. This concept is called مخارجة (mukharaja ? please verify) in Islamic law. If slaves agree to that and they would like the money they earn to be counted toward their emancipation, then this has to be written in the form of a contract between the slave and the master. This is called مكاتبة(mukataba) in Islamic jurisprudence. Muslims believe that slave owners are strongly encouraged to perform mukataba with their slaves as directed by the Quran:

…And if any of your slaves ask for a deed in writing (to enable them to earn their freedom for a certain sum), give them such a deed if ye know any good in them: yea, give them something yourselves out of the means which Allah has given to you. …

—Quran, sura 24 (An-Nur), ayah 33[49]

The framework of Islamic civilization was a well-developed network of towns and oasis trading centers with the market (souq, bazaar) at its heart. These towns were inter-connected by a system of roads crossing semi-arid regions or deserts. The routes were traveled by convoys, and slaves formed part of this caravan traffic.

In contrast to the Atlantic slave trade, where the male-female ratio was 2:1 or 3:1, the Arab slave trade instead usually had a higher female-to-male ratio. This suggests a general preference for female slaves. Concubinage and reproduction served as incentives for importing female slaves (often Caucasian), though many were also imported mainly for performing household tasks.[50]

ARAB VIEWS ON AFRICAN PEOPLE

In the Quran, the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and the overwhelming majority of Islamic jurists and theologians, all stated that humankind has a single origin and rejected the idea of certain ethnic groups being superior to others.[48] According to the hadiths:

…an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action.

—Muhammad, The Farewell Sermon[51]

Despite this, some ethnic prejudices later developed among Arabs for at least two reasons: 1) their extensive conquests and slave trade;[48] and 2) the influence of Aristotle‘s idea that slaves are slaves by nature.[52][POV? – discuss] A refinement of Aristotle’s view was put forward by Muslim philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna, particularly in regards to Turkic and black peoples;[48] and the influence of ideas from the early mediaeval Geonic academies regarding divisions among mankind between the three sons of Noah, with the Babylonian Talmud stating that “the descendants of Ham are cursed by being black, and [it] depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates.”[53] However, ethnic prejudice among some elite Arabs was not limited to darker-skinned people, but was also directed towards fairer-skinned “ruddy people” (including Persians, Turks and Europeans), while Arabs referred to themselves as “swarthy people”.[54] The concept of an Arab identity itself did not exist until modern times.[55] According to Arnold J. Toynbee: “The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.”[56]

The famous 9th-century Muslim author Al-Jahiz, an Afro-Arab and the grandson of a Zanj[37][57][38] slave, wrote a book entitled Risalat mufakharat al-Sudan ‘ala al-bidan (Treatise on the Superiority of Blacks over Whites), in which he stated that Blacks:

…have conquered the country of the Arabs as far as Mecca and have governed them. We defeated Dhu Nowas (Jewish King of Yemen) and killed all the Himyarite princes, but you, White people, have never conquered our country. Our people, the Zenghs (Negroes) revolted forty times in the Euphrates, driving the inhabitants from their homes and making Oballah a bath of blood.

—Joel Augustus Rogers and John Henrik Clarke, World’s Great Men of Color[58]

And that:

Blacks are physically stronger than no matter what other people. A single one of them can lift stones of greater weight and carry burdens such as several Whites could not lift nor carry between them. […] They are brave, strong, and generous as witness their nobility and general lack of wickedness.

—Yosef Ben-Jochannan, African Origins of Major Western Religions[59]

Al-Jahiz also stated in his Kitab al-Bukhala (“Avarice and the Avaricious”) that:

“We know that the Zanj (blacks) are the least intelligent and the least discerning of mankind, and the least capable of understanding the consequences of their actions.”Jahiz’ criticism however, was limited to the Zanj and not blacks in totality, likely as a result of the Zanji revolts in his native Iraq.

This sentiment was echoed in the following passage from Kitab al-Bad’ wah-tarikh (vol.4) by the medieval Arab writer Al-Muqaddasi:

As for the Zanj, they are people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair, and little understanding or intelligence.[60]

Al-Dimashqi (Ibn al-Nafis), the Arab polymath, also described the inhabitants of the Sudan (region) and the Zanj coast, among others, as being of “dim” intelligence and that:

…the moral characteristics found in their mentality are close to the instinctive characteristics found naturally in animals.

—Andrew Reid and Paul J. Lane, African Historical Archaeologies[61]

By the 14th century, an overwhelming number of slaves came from sub-Saharan Africa, leading to prejudice against black people in the works of several Arabic historians and geographers. For example, the Egyptian historian Al-Abshibi (1388–1446) wrote: “It is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals.”[62]

Mistranslations of Arab scholars and geographers from this time period have led many to attribute certain racist attitudes that weren’t prevalent until the 18th and 19th century to writings made centuries ago.[7][63] Although bias against those of very black complexion existed in the Arab world in the 15th century it didn’t have as much stigma as it later would. Older translations of Ibn Khaldun, for example in The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained[64] which was written in 1841 gives excerpts of older translations that were not part of later colonial propaganda and show black Africans in a generally positive light.

In 14th century North Africa, the Arab sociologist, Ibn Khaldun, wrote in his Muqaddimah:

When the conquest of the West (by the Arabs) was completed, and merchants began to penetrate into the interior, they saw no nation of the Blacks so mighty as Ghanah, the dominions of which extended westward as far as the Ocean. The King’s court was kept in the city of Ghanah, which, according to the author of the Book of Roger (El Idrisi), and the author of the Book of Roads and Realms (El Bekri), is divided into two parts, standing on both banks of the Nile, and ranks among the largest and most populous cities of the world. The people of Ghanah had for neighbours, on the east, a nation, which, according to historians, was called Susu; after which came another named Mali; and after that another known by the name of Kaukau ; although some people prefer a different orthography, and write this name Kagho. The last-named nation was followed by a people called Tekrur. The people of Ghanah declined in course of time, being overwhelmed or absorbed by the Molaththemun (or muffled people;that is, the Morabites), who, adjoining them on the north towards the Berber country, attacked them, and, taking possession of their territory, compelled them to embrace the Mohammedan religion. The people of Ghanah, being invaded at a later period by the Susu, a nation of Blacks in their neighbourhood, were exterminated, or mixed with other Black nations.

—William Desborough Cooley, The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained[64]

Ibn Khaldun suggests a link between the decline of Ghana and rise of the Almoravids. However, there is little evidence of there actually being an Almoravid conquest of Ghana[65][66] aside from the parallel conflict with Takrur, which was allied with the Almoravid and eventually absorbed by them.

Ibn Khaldun attributed the “strange practices and customs” of certain African tribes to the hot climate of sub-Saharan Africa and made it clear that it was not due to any curse in their lineage, dismissing the Hamitic theory as a myth.[67]

His critical attitude towards Arabs has led the scholar Mohammad A. Enan to suggest that Ibn Khaldun may have been a Berber pretending to be an Arab in order to gain social status, but Muhammad Hozien has responded to this claim stating that Ibn Khaldun or anyone else in his family never claimed to be Berber even when the Berbers were in power.[68][relevant? – discuss]

The 14th-century North African Berber geographer and traveller, Ibn Battuta, on his trip to western Sudan, was impressed with occasional aspects of life.

Battuta later visited the Zanj-inhabited portions of East Africa and held more positive views of its black people.[3][69]

We … traveled by sea to the city of Kulwa (Kilwa in Tanzania)…Most of its people are Zunuj, extremely black…The city of Kulwa is amongst the most beautiful of cities and most elegantly built… Their uppermost virtue is religion and righteousness and they are Shafi’i in rite.

[The people of Mombasa in Kenya] are a religious people, trustworthy and righteous. Their mosques are made of wood, expertly built.

Ibn Battuta was also impressed with aspects of the Mali Empire of West Africa, which he visited in 1352, writing that the people there:

…possess some admirable qualities. They are seldom unjust, and have a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people. There is complete security in their country. Neither traveler nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence.

—Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354[70]

In addition, he wrote many other positive comments on the people of the Mali Empire, including the following:[69]

I met the qadi of Malli… he is a black, has been on a pilgrimage, and is a noble person with good qualities of character… I met the interpreter Dugha, a noble black and a leader of theirs… They performed their duty towards me [as a guest] most perfectly; may God bless and reward them for their good deeds!

Another of [the Malli blacks’] good qualities is their concern for learning the sublime Qur’an by heart…One day I passed a handsome youth from them dressed in fine clothes and on his feet was a heavy chain. I said to the man who was with me, ‘What has this youth done — has he killed someone?’ The youth heard my remark and laughed. It was told me, ‘He has been chained so that he will learn the Qu’ran by heart.’

[the people of Iwalatan in West Africa] were generous to me and entertained me…and as for their women — they are extremely beautiful and are more important than the men…

Ibn Battuta’s remarks contrasted greatly to that of many other comments from Arab authors concerning blacks. However, many of the exaggerated accounts are noted to have been based on hearsay and even perpetuated by Africans themselves in an attempt to keep their states and economies isolated, in addition to Ibn Battuta having been the only medieval Muslim scholar referenced here to have actually traveled to both east and west Africa.[60]

AFRICA: 8TH THROUGH 19TH CENTURIES

In April 1998, Elikia M’bokolo, wrote in Le Monde diplomatique. “The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth).” He continues: “Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean”[71]

In the 8th century, Africa was dominated by Arab-Berbers in the north: Islam moved southwards along the Nile and along the desert trails.

  • The Sahara was thinly populated. Nevertheless, since antiquity there had been cities living on a trade in salt, gold, slaves, cloth, and on agriculture enabled by irrigation: Tiaret, Oualata, Sijilmasa, Zaouila, and others.
  • In the Middle Ages, sub-Saharan Africa was called bilad -ul-Sûdân in Arabic, meaning land of the Blacks (Sudan region). It provided a pool of manual labour for North Africa and Saharan Africa. This region was dominated by certain states and people: the Ghana Empire, the Empire of Mali, the Kanem-Bornu Empire, the Fulani and Hausa.
  • In eastern Africa, the coasts of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean were controlled by native Muslims, and Arabs were important as traders along the coasts. Nubia had been a “supply zone” for slaves since antiquity. The Ethiopian coast, particularly the port of Massawa and Dahlak Archipelago, had long been a hub for the exportation of slaves from the interior, even in Aksumite times. The port and most coastal areas were largely Muslim, and the port itself was home to a number of Arab and Indian merchants.[72]

The Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia often exported Nilotic slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces.[73] The Somali and Afar Muslim sultanates, such as the Adal Sultanate, exported slaves as well.[74] Arabs also set up slave-trading posts along the southeastern coast of the Indian Ocean, most notably in the archipelago of Zanzibar, along the coast of present-day Tanzania. East Africa and the Indian Ocean continued as an important region for the Oriental slave trade up until the 19th century. Livingstone and Stanley were then the first Europeans to penetrate to the interior of the Congo Basin and to discover the scale of slavery there. The Arab Tippu Tip extended his influence and made many people slaves. After Europeans had settled in the Gulf of Guinea, the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897, under Sultan Hamoud bin Mohammed.

GEOGRAPHY OF THE SLAVE TRADE

“SUPPLY” ZONES

Merchants of slaves for the Orient stocked up in Europe. Danish merchants had bases in the Volga region and dealt in Slavs with Arab merchants. Circassian slaves were conspicuously present in the harems and there were many odalisques (from the Turkish odalık, meaning “chambermaid“) from that region in the paintings of Orientalists. Non-Muslim slaves were valued in the harems, for all roles (gate-keeper, servant, odalisque, musician, dancer, court dwarf, concubine). In the Ottoman Empire, the last black slave sold in Ethiopia named Hayrettin Effendi, was freed in 1918. The slaves of Slavic origin in Al-Andalus came from the Varangians who had captured them. They were put in the caliph‘s guard and gradually took up important posts in the army (they became saqaliba), and even went to take back taifas after the civil war had led to an implosion of the Western Caliphate. Columns of slaves feeding the great harems of Córdoba, Seville and Grenada were organised by Jewish merchants (mercaderes) from Germanic countries and parts of Northern Europe not controlled by the Carolingian Empire. These columns crossed the Rhone valley to reach the lands to the south of the Pyrenees.

There are also historical evidence of North African Muslim slave raids all along the Mediterranean coasts across Christian Europe and beyond to even as far north as the British Isles and Iceland (see the book titled White Gold by Giles Milton).[75] The majority of slaves traded across the Mediterranean region were predominantly of European origin from the 7th to 15th centuries.[76] The Barbary pirates continued to capture slaves from Europe and, to an extent, North America, from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Slaves were also brought into the Arab world via Central Asia, mainly of Turkic or Tartar origin. Many of these slaves later went on to serve in the armies forming an elite rank.

  • At sea, Barbary pirates joined in this traffic when they could capture people by boarding ships or by incursions into coastal areas, mainly in Southern Europe as well as other European coasts.
  • Nubia and Ethiopia were also “exporting” regions: in the 15th century, Ethiopians sold slaves from western borderland areas (usually just outside of the realm of the Emperor of Ethiopia) or Ennarea,[77] which often ended up in India, where they worked on ships or as soldiers. They eventually rebelled and took power (dynasty of the Habshi Kings in Bengal 1487-1493).
  • The Sudan region and Saharan Africa formed another “export” area, but it is impossible to estimate the scale, since there is a lack of sources with figures.
  • Finally, the slave traffic affected eastern Africa, but the distance and local hostility slowed down this section of the Oriental trade.

ROUTES

Caravan trails, set up in the 9th century, went past the oasis of the Sahara; travel was difficult and uncomfortable for reasons of climate and distance. Since Roman times, long convoys had transported slaves as well as all sorts of products to be used for barter. To protect against attacks from desert nomads, slaves were used as an escort. Any who slowed down the progress of the caravan were killed.

Historians know less about the sea routes. From the evidence of illustrated documents, and travellers’ tales, it seems that people travelled on dhows or jalbas, Arab ships which were used as transport in the Red Sea. Crossing the Indian Ocean required better organisation and more resources than overland transport. Ships coming from Zanzibar made stops on Socotra or at Aden before heading to the Persian Gulf or to India. Slaves were sold as far away as India, or even China: there was a colony of Arab merchants in Canton. Serge Bilé cites a 12th-century text which tells us that most well-to-do families in Canton had black slaves whom they regarded as savages and demons because of their physical appearance. Although Chinese slave traders bought slaves (Seng Chi i.e. the Zanj[78]) from Arab intermediaries and “stocked up” directly in coastal areas of present-day Somalia, the local Somalis—referred to as Baribah and Barbaroi (Berbers) by medieval Arab and ancient Greek geographers, respectively (see Periplus of the Erythraean Sea),[37][57][79] and no strangers to capturing, owning and trading slaves themselves[80]—were not among them:[81]

One important commodity being transported by the Arab dhows to Somalia was slaves from other parts of East Africa. During the nineteenth century, the East African slave trade grew enormously due to demands by Arabs, Portuguese, and French. Slave traders and raiders moved throughout eastern and central Africa to meet the rising demand for enslaved men, women, and children. Somalia did not supply slaves — as part of the Islamic world Somalis were at least nominally protected by the religious tenet that free Muslims cannot be enslaved — but Arab dhows loaded with human cargo continually visited Somali ports.

—Catherine Lowe Besteman, Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery[82]

Slave labor in East Africa was drawn from the Zanj, Bantu peoples that lived along the East African coast.[37][38] The Zanj were for centuries shipped as slaves by Arab traders to all the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs recruited many Zanj slaves as soldiers and, as early as 696, we learn of slave revolts of the Zanj against their Arab enslavers in Iraq (see Zanj Rebellion). Ancient Chinese texts also mention ambassadors from Java presenting the Chinese emperor with two Seng Chi (Zanj) slaves as gifts, and Seng Chi slaves reaching China from the Hindu kingdom of Srivijaya in Java.[78]

BARTER

Slaves were often bartered for objects of various kinds: in the Sudan, they were exchanged for cloth, trinkets and so on. In the Maghreb, they were swapped for horses. In the desert cities, lengths of cloth, pottery, Venetian glass slave beads, dyestuffs and jewels were used as payment. The trade in black slaves was part of a diverse commercial network. Alongside gold coins, cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean or the Atlantic (Canaries, Luanda) were used as money throughout black Africa (merchandise was paid for with sacks of cowries).

SLAVE MARKETS AND FAIRS

Enslaved Africans were sold in the towns of the Muslim world. In 1416, al-Maqrizi told how pilgrims coming from Takrur (near the Senegal River) had brought 1,700 slaves with them to Mecca. In North Africa, the main slave markets were in Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli and Cairo. Sales were held in public places or in souks. Potential buyers made a careful examination of the “merchandise”: they checked the state of health of a person who was often standing naked with wrists bound together. In Cairo, transactions involving eunuchs and concubines happened in private houses. Prices varied according to the slave’s quality. Thomas Smee, the commander of the British research ship Ternate, visited such a market in Zanzibar in 1811 and gave a detailed description:

‘The show’ commences about four o’clock in the afternoon. The slaves, set off to the best advantage by having their skins cleaned and burnished with cocoa-nut oil, their faces painted with red and white stripes and the hands, noses, ears and feet ornamented with a profusion of bracelets of gold and silver and jewels, are ranged in a line, commencing with the youngest, and increasing to the rear according to their size and age. At the head of this file, which is composed of all sexes and ages from 6 to 60, walks the person who owns them; behind and at each side, two or three of his domestic slaves, armed with swords and spears, serve as guard.Thus ordered the procession begins, and passes through the market-place and the principle streets… when any of them stikes a spectator’s fancy the line immediately stops, and a process of examination ensues, which, for minuteness, is unequalled in any cattle market in Europe. The intending purchaser having ascertained there is no defect in the faculties of speech, hearing, etc., that there is no disease present, next proceeds to examine the person; the mouth and the teeth are first inspected and afterwards every part of the body in succession, not even excepting the breasts, etc., of the girls, many of whom I have seen handled in the most indecent manner in the public market by their purchasers; indeed there is every reasons to believe that the slave-dealers almost universally force the young girls to submit to their lust previous to their being disposed of. From such scenes one turns away with pity and indignation.[83]

TOWNS AND PORTS INVOLVED IN THE SLAVE TRADE

SEE ALSO

This article was initially translated from the featured French wiki article “Traite musulmane” on 19 May 2006.

FURTHER READING

  • Edward A. Alpers, The East African Slave Trade (Berkeley 1967)
  • Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans. F. Rosenthal, ed. N. J. Dawood (Princeton 1967)
  • Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New York 1989)
  • Habeeb Akande, Illuminating the Darkness: Blacks and North Africans in Islam (Ta Ha 2012)
  • Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (OUP 1990)
  • Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge 1990)
  • Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge 2000)
  • Allan G. B. Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa, ed. C. Hurst (London 1970, 2nd edition 2001)
  • The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton Series on the Middle East) Eve Troutt Powell (Editor), John O. Hunwick (Editor) (Princeton 2001)
  • Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves (Atlantic Books, London 2002)
  • Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, London 2003)
  • Audio Documentary

EXTERNAL LINKS

  • Arab Slave Trade
  • BBC – History – British Slaves on the Barbary Coast
  • BBC – Islam and Slavery
  • s Guide to Black History
  • iAbolish.ORG! American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) – particular focus on North African slaves
  • Digital History/Slavery Facts & Myths Mintz, S.

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