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Read, Debate: Engage.


https://www.fairplanet.org/dossier/beyond-slavery/forgotten-slavery-the-arab-muslim-slave-trade/
Dossier
Beyond Slavery
 * Chapter 01/05

00.

Introduction
Beyond Slavery
01.

Forgotten slavery: The Arab-Muslim slave trade
by Bob Koigi
02.

The forgotten Africans
by Bob Koigi
03.

The impact of slavery on modern Africa
by Bob Koigi
04.

Is the African Union doing enough to tackle modern day slavery?
by Bob Koigi
05.

Sheedis - The lost African tribe in Pakistan
by Shadi Khan Saif


FORGOTTEN SLAVERY: THE ARAB-MUSLIM SLAVE TRADE

Author: Bob Koigi

Over the years, global focus and discourse on slavery has concentrated on the
Trans-Atlantic trade that featured American and European merchants. One other
trade has however remained largely ignored, and at times has even been treated
as a taboo subject, despite being a key component of African history owing to
the devastating impact it has had on the continent, its generations and its
people’s way of life.

The Arab Muslim slave trade, also known as the trans-Saharan trade or Eastern
slave trade, is noted as the longest slave trade, having occurred for more than
1,300 years while taking millions of Africans away from their continent to work
in foreign lands in the most inhumane conditions.

Scholars have christened it a veiled genocide, attributing the tag line to the
most humiliating and near-death experience slaves were subjected to, from
capture in slave markets to labour fields abroad and the harrowing journey in
between.

While official figures on the exact number of slaves captured from Africa in the
Trans Sahara trade are contested, most scholars put the estimate at about nine
million.

In East Africa the coastal region was the preferred route of slave trade, with
Zanzibar as its hub.

The Eastern slave trade in Africa was predominantly concentrated in the East and
West African regions. In East Africa the coastal region was the preferred route
and Tanzania’s archipelago of Zanzibar became a hub for this trade.

“The Arabs raided sub-Saharan Africa for thirteen centuries without
interruption. Most of the millions of men they deported have disappeared as a
result of inhumane treatment. This painful page in the history of black people
has apparently not been completely turned,” read a loosely translated excerpt
from The Veiled Genocide a book by Tidiane N'Diaye, a Franco-Senegalese author
and anthropologist.

Enterprising Arab merchants and middlemen would gather in Zanzibar for raw
materials including cloves and ivory. They would then buy black slaves who they
would use to carry the raw materials and also work in their plantations abroad.
Slaves from as far as Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia would be availed at the
Zanzibar market and shipped through the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf or
Arabic Peninsula where they worked in Oman, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. African
Muslims were however never captured as slaves due to the Islamic legal views.

On the other hand the Trans Saharan Caravan concentrated on the West African
region straddling the Niger Valley to the Gulf of Guinea along the Trans-Saharan
roads to slave markets in Maghreb and the Nile Basin. The voyage that could take
up to three months involved inhumane conditions that saw slaves die along the
way due to diseases, hunger and thirst. An estimated 50 percent of all slaves in
this trade would die in transit.

While European merchants were interested in strongly built young men as
labourers in their farms, the Arab merchants were more focused on concubinage,
capturing women and girls who were turned into sex slaves while living in
harems. So high was the demand that the merchants would double the price of
female slaves with, the ratio of captured women to men being three to one.

“The practice of castration on black male slaves in the most inhumane manner
altered an entire generation as these men could not reproduce."

Liberty Mukomo

Male slaves would work as field workers or guards at the harems. To ensure that
they never reproduced in case they got intimate with their fellow female slaves,
the men and boys were castrated and made eunuchs in a brutal operation by which
the majority would lose their lives in the process.

“The practice of castration on black male slaves in the most inhumane manner
altered an entire generation as these men could not reproduce. The Arab masters
sired children with the black female slaves. This devastation by the men saw
those who survived committing suicide. This development explains the modern
black Arabs who are still trapped by history,” said Liberty Mukomo, a lecturer
at the University of Nairobi Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies.

And even as Europe, one of the key players in the African slave trade, abolished
the practice hundreds of years ago and the United States officially ended it in
1865, Arab countries continued the trade with majority ending it late in the
20th century. In Malawi, slavery was officially criminalized in 2007 with
mentions of some Arab countries currently being involved albeit clandestinely.

“Even as the rest of the world realized the harm slavery did to an entire
continent and made a declaration to abolish it, the Arabs protested it and it
took a lot of international trade and revolt by the slaves for them to end it.
But it is the degree and intensity with which it altered the entire social,
reproductive and economic life of black people that made it more brutal and
painful than the trans-Atlantic one,” said Liberty.

.


READ NEXT CHAPTER

Chapter 2 of 5
The forgotten Africans

by: Bob Koigi

"Call me Neguinho" by Selim Harbi is the story of a person tied to the yoke of
ancient slavery that altered their way of life and relation with the rest of the
world.
Read



ALL CHAPTERS

00.

Introduction
Beyond Slavery
01.

Forgotten slavery: The Arab-Muslim slave trade
by Bob Koigi
02.

The forgotten Africans
by Bob Koigi
03.

The impact of slavery on modern Africa
by Bob Koigi
04.

Is the African Union doing enough to tackle modern day slavery?
by Bob Koigi
05.

Sheedis - The lost African tribe in Pakistan
by Shadi Khan Saif

.
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lived far away from their homes - legally or illegally. Their reasons are as
varied as the political or economic situation, they leave [...]
Read
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Racism
by Ama Lorenz
More than 400 years after the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, the
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Read
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by Ellen Nemitz, Yair Oded
Journalists from across Latin America explore the risks, challenges and
solutions involved in the complex issue of fishery.
Read
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.
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