Dear Omar,
I share your opinion on this issue,the fact that Mauritania and Sudan are
African countries and the fact that they are still engaged in the enslavement
of the black African is very painfull.These are countries who have close
contact with our governments.The Sudanise terorist government and racist
government of Mauritania are having the most beautifull relationship with the
Afpr government in the Gambia.Are we people with concience,what will we be
telling our black brothers and sisters from these countries when we meet them
? If a European country was involved in the enslavement of the black
Africans,at this time, then the noice will have been otherwise but here we are
silent as if nothing is happening.
For Freedom
Saiks
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Bro Kabir,
Thanks once more for yet another amazing revelation! The story helps to
explain why some Arabs up till now regard the black race as inferior.
And it is disgusting that America and Europe had the audacity to highligt the
wickedness of the Arab slavers in Zanzibar with satisfaction. Interesting
people, pretending as if they`ve never done anything wrong to black people.
Regards,
Omar.
-----Opprinnelig melding-----
Fra: Amadu Kabir Njie <[log in to unmask]>
Til: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Dato: 28. oktober 1999 03:45
Emne: The first slavers
NOVEMBER 1999
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SLAVERY
COVER STORY
The first slavers
At last, our major series on slavery and reparations can begin.
And we are going chronologically. Arab slavers were the first, and last, in
modern times to ship millions of Africans out of the continent as slaves, and
this is where our series begin. In this piece, George Pavlu and our
correspondents examine why the Arab slavers preferred more African women to
men, a situation reversed by the European slavers who shipped out more African
men than women. Thus, the Arabs too owe a huge debt to Africa and people of
African descent in reparations.
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
Africans, to justify the shipping of millions of Africans as slaves to
far-away lands in Asia (in particular, the Middle East) and the Americas.
"The African 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 Africa.
"Africa 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 Africa.
"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 Africa and the Iberian peninsula, cutting back the flow
of war captives, and the expansion of the import of black Africans 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
Africans as slaves."
Figures on the Arab slave trade in Africa are hard to come by, but
the historian Paul Lovejoy estimates that some 9.85 million Africans were
shipped out as slaves to Arabia and, in small numbers, to the Indian
sub-continent.
Lovejoy breaks his figures down as follows: Between AD 650 and
1600, an average of 5,000 Africans were shipped out by the Arabs. This makes a
rough total of 7.25 million.
Then, between 1600 and 1800, another 1.4 million Africans 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.
Thus, in terms of numbers, Arabia's 9.85 million is not far behind
the conservative estimate of nearly 12 million African victims of the Atlantic
slave trade. Some African historians, though, reject these figures on the
grounds that they are too low. They suggest over 50 million Africans 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.
Throughout 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 Africans 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 Africans.
David Livingstone, the British missionary/traveller/explorer was
so upset by the way the Arabs treated their African 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, weighing 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 place where a child lay. It
had 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 Africa's west coast to the Americas during which
millions of Africans, packed like sardines in the slave ships, died of thirst,
hunger, rough seas, and sometimes from the sheer brutality inflicted by the
European slavers.
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 African captives to
Arabia, they also sometimes sold them to European slavers.
In modern times, the popular image of African 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 Africa into the institutions of Islamic concubinage.
While in the European "New World", 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 hubris, the 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 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 Africa made black
Africans, the major source."
So invasive was the practice of slavery into the economic,
political, demographic, cultural, social and religious life of Africa 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.
Slavery unquestionably checked population growth in Africa 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.
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 Africa'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.
And while the Europeans paid a higher price for male slaves than
females, the reverse was the case with the Arabs. Moreover, while the
European/New World slavers profited mainly from male labour, the Arabs saw
profit in sexual satisfaction/reproductive potential. (Offspring of the union
between Islamic master and female slave was born free, out of respect of the
child's Islamic paternity. Any offspring of the Atlantic trade were born into
slavery).
"The laws of Islam," as the historian Hugh Thomas attests, "were
in some ways more benign in respect of slavery than were those of Rome. Slaves
were not to be treated as if they were animals. Slaves and freemen were equal
from the point of view of God. The master did not have power of life and death
over his slave property."
But to the Africans shipped across the Red Sea, the "benign"
Islamic laws provided little comfort - they were still slaves of Islamic
masters who had unfettered sexual access to them (if they were female) or
castrated and turned into eunuchs (if they were men).
The upshot of this gender profile of the respective slave-classes
in the Atlantic/New World and the Arab/Oriental world explains the large and
visible population of African origin in the New World where sexual relations
between white and black was the exception while in the Arab world where
miscegenation was the practice, the slave trade has left few visible traces.
So where are the descendants of the African slaves sent to
Arabia/Orient? There are no large concentrations of them, anywhere in the
Middle East or Asia.
Five years ago, a British TV documentary showed how poorly the
descendants of African slaves in Pakistan are treated by the authorities. The
racial discrimination was so bad that one of the African descendants recounted
on camera how, even in sport, they were not picked to represent Pakistan at
national and international levels no matter how good they were.
The demographic effects of Arabian slavery on the source
population (those left behind) cannot be overlooked, and specifically when
considering the palpable effects on African fertility as a consequence of the
grossly reduced female numbers.
To ensure survival, the Africans in the harvested areas adopted a
variety of social measures, which were in practice as extreme as the
circumstances called for. These revolved principally around the sexual purity
of the population's remaining female reproductive stock, as well as
accelerating the female's reproductive capacity.
Though the number of female slaves exported per annum from the
Savannah and the Horn was far smaller than the numbers taken from the west
coast in the Atlantic trade, the proportionate impact on the remaining
at-brink Savanna/Horn populations was far more severe.
The Arabian trade reached a total of perhaps 5-8% of the source
populations - and as mentioned earlier - as the proportion of females
harvested was exceptionally high, this resulted in a massive surplus of males
in the non-harvested population. Consequently the area experienced demographic
stagnation bordering decline.
In 1600, the black African population was some 50 million - about
30% of the combined population of the New World, Europe, Middle East and North
Africa. By 1800, the population had fallen to 20% of the total. In 1900, at
the end of the slave trade, Africa's population had fallen yet further to just
over 10% of the total - the population now so collapsed as to negatively
affect the continent's labour-intensive agricultural output.
In effect, while the populations of Europe and Asia increased year
on year, Africa's population declined dramatically due to the excessive
poaching by the slavers, both Arab and European.
In Arabia, the slave class (principally female), unlike the New
World slave class, could never maintain itself as a distinct social entity -
principally because of miscegenation. This created an even greater demand for
more and more new female slaves, and coupled with the frequent natural
disasters of drought and famine in the Savannah/Horn, led many African
families to offer their young girls into slavery as a last hope of survival.
There are many stories of long lines of hundreds of girls, mainly Oromos from
Ethiopia, trudging across the Horn towards the Red Sea seeking enslavement.
Deprived of ideology, ritual, and the African rite of passage to
adulthood and social membership, female slaves were uncommonly vulnerable to
conversion to Islam (the benefits of manumission aside). Manumission describes
a child born of a female slave and a free Islamic father and is thus born
free.
For the population remaining in Africa, it is in order to embark
on some speculation as to what changes the trauma of slavery may have wrought
on African thought. The experience of sudden turn of fate (a common experience
when confronted by the ever-present threat of slavers) tended to
systematically undermine any efforts at long-term planning beyond the constant
need to replace lost members.
It is a mistake to equate the bare survival of Africa with
cultural or social or economic stagnation, for the slave trade visited such a
panoply of tragically interconnected disasters into the lives of every African
for centuries, that they have worked their way into the very "racial memory"
of the continent and its people, particularly females, that only with time and
kindness can it be expunged from the psyche of Africa.
As one commentator puts it: "Could it be true that the corrosive
effects of four centuries of commerce in humans, with its temptation, its
in-built opportunism, its reduction of humans to a cash value, its cycles of
revenge and its inevitable physical brutality, have built lasting flaws into
African pattern of thought and action?"
Copyright © IC Publications Limited 1999.
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