The 25th March was, as usual, commemorated as the day Britain officially abolished its Slave Trade in 1807. But how many recall that Arab slavers were the first, and last, in modern times to ship millions of Afrikans out of the continent as slaves? And that Arab slavers preferred more Afrikan women to men? We revisit our archives for this insightful reminder by George Pavlu.
In his book, Slaves and Slavery, published in 1998, the British writer Duncan Clarke defines slavery as “the reduction of fellow human beings to the legal status of chattels, allowing them to be bought and sold as goods”. This, in essence, is what both the Arabs and Europeans did to Afrikans, to justify the shipping of millions of Afrikans as slaves to far-away lands in Asia (in particular, the Middle East) and the Americas.
“The Afrikan slave trade, surely one of the most tragic and disturbing episodes in the history of mankind,” Clarke writes, “had its origins in the intervention of forces from the civilisations that developed in the regions of the Mediterranean sea — today’s Europe and the Middle East — into the arena of the more fragmented civilisations of sub-Saharan Afrika.
“Afrika became a source of slaves for the cultures of the Mediterranean world many centuries before the discovery of the Americas, but it was that discovery and the resulting shift in focus towards the Atlantic that prompted the culminating explosive growth in slavery with such tragic effect.”
Slavery, in fact, was a central feature of life in the Mediterranean world, especially in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Greece, Imperial Rome and the Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Afrika.
Then, between 1600 and 1800, another 1.4 million Afrikans were shipped out by the Arabs. The 19th century represented the highest point of the Arabian trade where 12,000 Africans were shipped out every year. The total figure for the 19th century alone was 1.2 million slaves to Arabia.
“The most important source of slaves in medieval Europe,” Clarke’s research shows, “was the coast of Bosnia on the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea. The word ‘slave’ and its cognates in most modern European languages is itself derived from ‘sclavus’ meaning ‘slav’, the ethnic name for the inhabitants of this region…
“For various reasons, including the harshness of the terrain and endemic warfare among local clans, Bosnia proved the most convenient and long-lasting of these slave-supplying regions. Whichever clan gained a temporary upper hand was always willing to sell its captured rivals in exchange for the goods of the Mediterranean world in the markets of the ancient Romanised city of Ragusa (present day Dubrovnik). From there, Slavs were shipped as slaves by Venetian merchants, to supply new markets in the Islamic world.”
Thus, “for the Islamic world,” Clarke continues, “Slavs provided the major source of slaves in the 250 or so years between the defeat at the battle of Poitiers in AD 732 that forced the consolidation of their dramatic conquests across North Afrika and the Iberian peninsula, cutting back the flow of war captives, and the expansion of the im port of black Afrikans across the Sahara from around AD 1000.”
The trade in slaves ended when the Ottoman Turks conquered the region in 1463. “The effective closure of the last major source of slaves on the European continent,” says Clarke, “thus co-incidentally took place at the same time as the Portuguese explorations of the West African coast which were to open up the second and most devastating route for the exploitation of Afrikans as slaves.”
Figures on the Arab slave trade in Afrika are hard to come by, but the historian Paul Lovejoy estimates that some 9.85 million Afrikans were shipped out as slaves to Arabia and, in small numbers, to the Indian subcontinent. Lovejoy breaks his figures down as follows:
Between AD 650 and 1600, an average of 5,000 Afrikans were shipped out by the Arabs. This makes a rough total of 7.25 million.
Then, between 1600 and 1800, another 1.4 million Afrikans were shipped out by the Arabs. The 19th century represented the highest point of the Arabian trade where 12,000 Afrikans were shipped out every year. The total figure for the 19th century alone was 1.2 million slaves to Arabia.
The numbers game
Thus, in terms of numbers, Arabia’s 9.85 million is not far behind the conservative estimate of nearly 12 million Afrikan victims of the Atlantic slave trade. Some Afrikan historians, though, reject these figures on the grounds that they are too low. They suggest over 50 million Afrikans were shipped out during the Atlantic trade alone.
According to Lovejoy, another 4.1 million Africans were shipped across the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and India. “This trade also, with the notable exception of some Portuguese involvement in the area of Mozambique, and of 18th and 19th century French exports to islands under their control in the Indian Ocean, was largely conducted by Muslims,” adds Duncan Clarke.
Through out the 19th century, the Omani Arab rulers of Zanzibar shipped hundreds of thousands of African slaves to work on clove plantations on the island. It was this trade that gave Europe and America so much satisfaction, after abolishing their own trade in African slaves, to highlight the wickedness of the Arab slavers who continued to enslave Afrikans well into the first decades of the 20th century. Even to this day, Arab slavers are still at work in Sudan and Mauritania, buying and selling black Afrikans.
David Livingstone, the British missionary/traveller/explorer was so upset by the way the Arabs treated their Afrikan slaves that he wrote back home in 1870:
“In less than I take to talk about it, these unfortunate creatures — 84 of them, wended their way into the village where we were. Some of them, the eldest, were women from 20 to 22 years of age, and there were youths from 18 to 19, but the large majority was made up of boys and girls from 7 years to 14 or 15 years of age.
“A more terrible scene than these men, women and children, I do not think I ever came across. To say that they were emaciated would not give you an idea of what human beings can undergo under certain circumstances. “Each of them had his neck in a large forked stick, weigh ing from 30 to 40 pounds, and five or six feet long, cut with a fork at the end of it where the branches of a tree spread out. “The women were tethered with bark thongs, which are, of all things, the most cruel to be tied with. Of course they are soft and supple when first striped off the trees, but a few hours in the sun make them about as hard as the iron round packing-cases. The little children were fastened by thongs to their mothers. “As we passed along the path which these slaves had travelled, I was shown a spot in the bushes where a poor woman the day before, unable to keep on the march, and likely to hinder it, was cut down by the axe of one of these slave drivers. “We went on further and were shown a p lace where a child lay. It had been been recently born, and its mother was unable to carry it from debility and exhaustion; so the slave trader had taken this little infant by its feet and dashed its brains out against one of the trees and thrown it in there.”
Such was the brutality meted out to the Africans by the Arabs. Like the Atlantic trade, the Arabian trade’s “middle passage” was equally as horrible and terrifying. The “middle passage” describes the harrowing journey lasting several months from Afrika’s west coast to the Americas during which millions of Afrikans, packed like sardines in the slave ships, died of thirst, hunger, rough seas, and sometimes from the sheer brutality inflicted by the European slavers.
David Livingstone, the British missionary/traveller/explorer was so upset by the way the Arabs treated their Afrikan slaves that he wrote back home in 1870:“In less than I take to talk about it, these unfortunate creatures — 84 of them, wended their way into the village where we were. Some of them, the eldest, were women from 20 to 22 years of age, and there were youths from 18 to 19, but the large majority was made up of boys and girls from 7 years to 14 or 15 years of age.
In the Arabian trade, the trudge across the Sahara, in leg and neck chains, and as Livingstone describes above, necks in large forked sticks and hands tied with bark thongs, was particularly harsh on the African slaves.
Says Duncan Clarke: “The hardships of these long marches across the desert were considerable, and much later travellers reported that the routes were lined with the parched skeletons of those who succumbed to exhaustion and thirst along the way.”
The Arab slavers did not only march their Afrikan captives to Arabia, they also sometimes sold them to European slavers.
In modern times, the popular image of Afrikan slavery springs from the vision of a tormented male suffering under the lash of unceasing labour on some “New World” sugar plantation. Yet the real face of servitude finds its focus in the forced migration of millions of girls and young women across the Sahara and the Horn of Afrika in to the institutions of Islamic concubinage.
Why they preferred women
While in the European “New W o r ld ”, the measure of a man’s stature was mapped out and calibrated on the physical dimensions of empire built upon the sinews of forced masculine labour, in the Islamic Orient wealth was a reflection of prestige, young girls the vessel of male h u b r is , th e mats of male pleasure ground, the malleable material to be shaped to the master’s will.
Thus, women slaves in the Arab world were often turned into concubines living in harems, and rarely as wives, their children becoming free. A large number of male slaves and young boys were castrated and turned into eunuchs who kept watch over the harems. Castration was a particularly brutal operation with a survival rate of only 10%.
“The combined effect of all these factors,” says Duncan Clarke, “was a steady demand for slaves throughout the Islamic world, which had cover story to be met from wars, raids or purchases along the borders with non-Islamic regions. Although some of these slaves came from Russia, the Balkans and central Asia, the continuing expansion of Islamic regimes in sub-Saharan Afrika made black Afrikans, the major source.”
So invasive was the practice of slavery into the economic, political, demographic, cultural, social and religious life of Afrika and persisted for so many centuries, that while its effects varied both geographically and temporally in intensity, slavery out-distances in scale and scope any single or combination of disasters — natural or man-made, which descended upon the continent.
Thus, women slaves in the Arab world were often turned into concubines living in harems, and rarely as wives, their children becoming free. A large number of male slaves and young boys were castrated and turned into eunuchs who kept watch over the harems. Castration was a particularly brutal operation with a survival rate of only 10%.
Slavery unquestionably checked population growth in Afrika and consequentially placed tremendous pressure upon gender and marital relationships during the three critical centuries of European expansion to global domination.
In this sense, the feminine-oriented Arab slave trade, though neither motivated nor executed with economic benefits as prime objective, caused far greater demographic damage and consequently greater economic decline, with its excessive poaching of the reproductive potential of the harvested areas.
The impact on Africa
No people are blank slates upon which can be inscribed untold miseries and expect no account thereof. The Arab slave trade began long before the Islamic conquest of Africa, remained at relatively low level compared to the Atlantic slave trade and did not become illegal or abolished, and was maintained till well after the colonisation of Africa. The Arabian trade was outlawed in Ethiopia only in 1935 in order to gain international support against the Italian invasion.
In the Atlantic trade, the slaves came predominantly from Afrika’s west coast with a male/female ratio of two-to-one. In the Arabian trade, the slaves were exclusively from the Savannah and the Horn of Africa, and favoured females over males at a ratio nearing three-to-one.
When slavery in the Black Sea area (the traditional source of the best grade female slaves for the Arab market) dried up, it triggered an even greater demand for Ethiopian “red” slaves, in particular the Galla and Oromo on account of their unquestioned beauty and willing sexual temperament.
Finish this terrible story here:
The New Afrikan
Eze Afrika
