Five Thousand Years of Slavery

by Marjorie Gann

  Accounts like these show the winds of change blowing through the Ottoman Empire:

  An enslaved African woman ran away to the British consul in Turkey, saying she’d been beaten and abused. The consul appealed to the Ottoman authority, the vizier, who recommended that the government buy the woman from her slaveholder and free her.

  In another case, an enslaved African family appeared at the British consulate in Tripoli. Their owner had tried to sell the mother and child onto a boat that would take them to far-away Istanbul. The father had been locked up by his owner but had managed to escape to the docks and free his wife and child just before they boarded the vessel. The British vice-consul appealed to the governor general of the province, who not only freed the family but put the slaveholder in jail.

  Still, no abolition movement ever took hold among the Ottoman Turks. Even educated people who favored reforms made excuses for their type of slavery; they said it was gentle, and overlooked the high death rate in caravans and on slave ships. Soon the British government began to pressure the Ottomans to put an end to the trade of thousands of African women through Egypt. When the Turks agreed to do this, religious leaders in Arabia were furious; banning the slave trade was actually against Islamic law, they said. They stirred up riots against the Turks, until the Ottoman government backed down and allowed the slave trade to continue.

  In the 1800s, the mighty British navy policed the world’s oceans to suppress the international slave trade. This print from 1884 shows Africans freed from a slave trader’s ship by HMS Undine. In the background are two British sailors.

  Photo Credit 4.5

  Modern Islamic Slavery

  In the late nineteenth century, when the British occupied Egypt and eventually controlled Sudan, the source of so many African slaves, they were able to suppress the slave trade. By the end of the century, enslavement of white people had disappeared and black slavery had been considerably reduced. But slavery still existed, as we know from travelers’ accounts from all over the Middle East. A Danish Muslim visitor to Libya in 1930 reported on a slave market held every Thursday in Kufra.

  In fact, in much of the Middle East slavery was not made illegal until between World War I and World War II – roughly 1918 to 1939. In Saudi Arabia it was not banned until 1962, and even today foreign workers are held there in slavelike conditions.

  The last Islamic country to end slavery officially was Mauritania, which passed various ineffective laws curtailing the practice in 1901, 1905, 1961, and 1981. The most recent law, in 2007, abolished slavery, but no one has been prosecuted for continuing to have slaves. During the long civil war between North and South Sudan (1983-2005), armed militias kidnapped people and forced them to work on farms or in military camps. This type of slave raiding continues in the war-torn Darfur region, and slaves are still forced to work in the country’s north.

  THE NUMBERS

  By the 1840s, Zanzibar was exporting between 13,000 and 15,000 slaves a year, from as far west as the Upper Congo, across the Arabian Sea to the Middle East and Persia. The total number deported over the centuries from Islamic regions is not easy to calculate. One scholar has estimated that about 11,500,000 black slaves were exported across the Sahara, across the Red Sea, and along the East African coast from the year 650 until 1900. This is close to the number traded across the Atlantic Ocean (about 12,000,000), but the Atlantic trade happened over a much shorter time, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

  CHAPTER 5

  CARAVANS, CANOES, AND CAPTIVES: AFRICA

  The Practice of Slavery

  We know that slavery began in Africa centuries ago, but because African societies did not leave written histories, piecing together the past is like detective work. The clues are bits of pottery, coins, gold and other metals, pieces of cloth, the remains of buildings, the records of travelers.

  Al-Yaqubi, an Arab geographer who lived in the late ninth century, gives one of the first written reports of slave trading within Africa: “I have been informed,” he writes, “that kings of the blacks sell their own people without justification or in consequence of war.”

  For centuries, Africans made raids on their neighbors for slaves to trade. The raiders were considered to be heroes, as in this old song about the ruler of a kingdom in Central Africa who made an enemy warrior flee, and captured his followers:

  Again and again you put him to flight,

  then forced him onto a raft of papyrus grass, …

  and captured [from his following] a thousand slaves,

  and took them and scattered them in the open places of Bagirmi.

  The best you took [and sent home] as the first fruits of battle.

  The children crying on their mothers you snatched away from their mothers.

  You took the slave wife from a slave,

  and set them in lands far removed from one another.

  Another account of African slavery comes from Ibn Battuta, a Muslim from the north coast of Africa who traveled the world between 1325 and 1354. His book, The Journey, gives us a glimpse of slavery in Africa before the Europeans arrived. At Takadda, an oasis in the Sahara desert, the traders “vie with one another in the number of slaves and servants they have,” he writes. He tells us that the slaves worked in the copper mines and smelted the copper in their houses. The copper was turned into a kind of money, and it was used to buy meat and firewood – and slaves. He even gave the slaves a backhanded compliment: “From this country are brought beautiful slave women and eunuchs and heavy fabrics.” Ibn Battuta left Takadda in a caravan that included six hundred slave women.

  Regional Differences

  What would your life have been like if you had been a slave in Africa? That depends on where you lived. In the Sahara, the camel-riding nomads had little use for slaves except to guard the unfortunate captives being transported across the desert in caravans, or to grow dates in desert oases. In more fertile areas like the highlands around the Great Lakes of East Africa, and the grassy savannas south of the Sahara, women slaves hoed the fields. In West Africa, slaves worked in the gold mines. Farther north, entire slave villages produced the food that fed the Songhay kingdom’s armies.

  Along the Congo River system, with its active trading network for metal goods, few slaves were needed. In southern Africa there was a long-standing rivalry between Tswana farmer-herders, who had chiefs and kept slaves, and San hunter-gatherers, who did not have enough people to support a slave class. The Tswana would capture San children and keep them as servants unless their parents ransomed them with cattle.

  Slave Work

  In some African societies, families had only a few slaves who were part of the household, working side by side with family members and even eating their meals with them. As time went on, a household slave’s children might be accepted as members of the society, slaves no longer.

  In larger communities where three out of every four people might be slaves, life was much different. Slaves lived in slave villages (some with slave chiefs) on the outskirts of a settlement, worked in groups, and neither ate nor worked with their masters. A form of sharecropping (sharing the crop between landlord and laborer) evolved in some regions. In the early nineteenth century in the Sokoto Empire, the master gave his slave a wife and fed the slave until the harvest. The slave worked five days a week from morning until midday, and then was free to work his portion of the land for himself. At harvest, the master gave him extra grain. In the dry season, slaves repaired houses, rebuilt fences, and even raided enemy villages for the master.

  In parts of Africa where slaves made up the ruler’s army, outstanding slave soldiers might be appointed officers, government administrators, trade representatives, even diplomats. A ruler might also accumulate a large number of slaves to show off; the more slaves you had, the richer and more powerful you were.

  Slave Sacrifices

  Like the Arab traveler who witnessed a slave girl being sacrificed by her Viking owners in the tenth century, a Portuguese
navigator reported watching slave sacrifices in Senegambia (today’s Senegal and Gambia) five hundred years ago. As late as the nineteenth century, when former slaves began to record their experiences, they talked about their fear of being sacrificed.

  Msatulwa Mwachitete was captured when he was a child in East Africa in 1891. Years later, in Tanzania, he told the story of his life to a Christian missionary who wrote it down for him.

  As a young man, Msatulwa was a bodyguard and butler to the sister of the chief. Although he was well fed and well treated, he yearned to go home. His brother also lived as a slave in the chiefdom, and though Msatulwa thought about running away, he was afraid the chief might kill or sell his brother if he did. Fearing that the two of them might be sacrificed, he begged his brother to escape with him:

  I thought, “Here are we, two slaves, alone in this country. My brothers and sisters and relations have all been sold. Some of them have been sacrificed to the ancestors on the graves of chiefs. Why should we stay in this country?” And then I thought, “One day Mkoma [the chief] will die, and they will come and kill us, that we may die with him. We shall be sacrificed, for there are no other slaves. We alone are left.” For it is a custom … on the death of the chief to bury four people with him: one of the elders, one of his wives, and two slaves – a man and a woman. They are strangled and their throats cut so that the blood flows into the grave, in which they are all buried with the dead chief. The body of the chief is placed on the knee of the wife, and she holds him in her arms. These people are to look after the chief and to serve him in the land of the shadows.… There are other sacrifices, too. When a new chief comes to the throne and goes to pray at the grave of the dead chief, another man is sacrificed. He is killed on the grave like a sheep or an ox. This is the sacrifice to ancestors.

  At last he happened to meet his uncle in a caravan. Here was the chance he’d been waiting for! He convinced his brother to flee with him, and they made their escape at night, arriving home nine and a half years after being captured.

  After the Europeans Arrived

  African slaves had been traded to Europe at times – for instance, to work in Italy after the plague. But what we think of as the European slave trade began with the Portuguese. When they were sent to explore the west coast of Africa by Prince Henry the Navigator in the 1400s, they found a thriving slave trade. One of Prince Henry’s captains reported that a king who ruled the Senegambia region

  supports himself by raids which result in many slaves from his own as well as neighboring countries. He employs these slaves in cultivating the land allotted to him: but he also sells many to Saharan Muslim traders in return for horses and other goods, and also to the Christians, since they have begun to trade with these blacks.

  By 1448, the Portuguese were trading with African merchants who exchanged a thousand slaves for horses, silver, and silks, items that the chiefs of Mali, Songhay, and other local kingdoms craved.

  The sixteenth century was a time of exploration for Europeans. The Dutch, the English, and the French followed the Portuguese to Africa and later across the Atlantic. Maps were drawn and redrawn, and untold riches in the form of gold and silver, sugar, tobacco, and rice were suddenly within reach. The Europeans wanted slaves to help them reap those riches. Since slave trading and slave raiding were already in place in Africa, the Europeans could get all the human merchandise they wanted.

  This wooden carving for the funeral of an African man shows that he was such a successful trader that he could afford a European-style hat, jacket, and flintlock gun.

  Photo Credit 5.1

  The port of Old Calabar, on the Bight of Biafra – a large bay on the West African coast of today’s Nigeria – was just one of many trading centers. The merchants of Old Calabar controlled the slave trade on the Cross River. When a European ship arrived at the river’s mouth, it stopped and fired its cannon. Once the Europeans had paid comey (customs duty) to the Africans, a native boat escorted the ship upriver. The Africans then set off with their fleets of canoes, each paddled by forty to fifty slaves, to pick up their human cargo.

  Dotted along the riverbank were small villages, easy pickings for the raiders. The slavers loaded twenty or thirty captives into the canoe, arms tied behind their backs with twigs and grass ropes. Once the canoes landed downstream, the captives were taken to the houses of African traders who fed them and oiled their skin to make them look healthier. Then they called in the Europeans, who inspected the group before shunting them once more into canoes which took them to the ships that would transport them to the Americas. The traders didn’t care if they tore husband from wife, or children from their parents’ arms.

  The Africans were paid with European goods, including muskets. This was the beginning of a vicious cycle: the more guns the Africans had, the easier it was for them to raid villages, the larger their haul of slaves grew, and the more guns they could acquire. The number of slaves transported from Old Calabar doubled every ten years from 1700 to 1750, making slave traders there immensely rich and powerful.

  The growth of the slave trade caused tragic social changes. Before the Europeans came, the oldest member, or “father of the house,” was the head of the community. Now money became more valuable than the traditional wisdom of the elders, and the leader was the richest member, or “father of the canoe.” Such men were often slave owners. The traditional social order fell apart.

  Another change was even more deadly: warfare between clans increased. In the 1760s, two rival clans were competing for control of the slave trade in the Old Calabar region, slowing the supply of slaves. The English, who favored one of the clans, set off a war between them. The victorious clan took over the trade on the river, and the flow of captives resumed.

  Old Calabar’s story was repeated throughout the continent. From 1450 to 1900 the slave trade robbed Africa of its workers, warfare and slave raids accelerated, and at least twelve million human beings were shipped away to the Americas.

  THE LONG SHADOW

  In the Cross River region, not all captives were exported across the Atlantic. Africans kept some of them to work as slaves. Today, people there avoid using the word “slave” when they talk about the past. But memories are long; they know who is descended from free people, and who from slaves. In the past, slaves were housed in etek asung, “slave villages” on the outskirts of a community; today, descendants of slaves still live in separate communities. They are not allowed to take part in the Etokobi dance, a ritual performed at the funerals of important people. And to this day, when a new chief is to be selected, tensions rise, since by custom the position cannot be filled by any descendant of a former slave.

  The Slave Trade Survives

  Even when the British and American slave trade ended in the early nineteenth century, slavery did not end in Africa. Why? One reason was that Europeans had a growing appetite for African products like peanuts and palm oil (used in making soap), and that increased the use of slave labor within Africa. Besides, the states that had grown rich on the slave trade became weaker when it ended. The results were disastrous for their people. Bands of Islamic peasants and herders in West Africa declared a jihad and formed armies to conquer one weakened state after another. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Sokoto caliphate (a territory under a Muslim religious leader) in today’s Nigeria, had become one of the largest slave societies in modern history, with as many as two and a half million slaves.

  The passengers in this dugout canoe are victims of a slave raid in the Congo in the 1880s.

  Photo Credit 5.2

  Slavery lasted in many parts of Africa, not only those that had been directly part of the Atlantic slave trade. On the other side of the continent, in Ethiopia, slavery was practiced throughout the nineteenth century. When slave prices were low, even poor peasants in the north could afford slaves to help them work their land. In southern Africa, the Tswana people sold their San enemies to white settlers as farm laborers. The San’s low status lasted well into
the twentieth century.

  Many Congolese workers were brutally punished if they failed to harvest enough rubber to please the Belgian rubber companies. The hands of Mola, who is seated, were bound too tightly; he lost them both to gangrene. Yoka’s hand was deliberately amputated.

  Photo Credit 5.3

  Slave raiding laid waste to whole regions of Africa. The southern end of Tanganyika, once “peopled with large and prosperous villages,” had become a desolate wasteland with “not a solitary human being – nothing but burned houses and bleaching skeletons,” wrote a traveler in 1888.

  KING LEOPOLD’S SLAVE KINGDOM

  King Leopold II of Belgium wanted an African colony for his country and great wealth for himself. Public opinion in Europe and the United States was strongly antislavery, and around 1876 he convinced powerful Europeans that Belgium could end the African slave trade by developing the Congo through building roads, a railroad, and trading posts, and encouraging Christian missionaries. Once he was recognized as “Sovereign and Protector” of the Congo, Leopold changed his tune. He used the Congo’s riches – ivory and rubber – to fill his own pockets by enslaving the Congolese people.

  Leopold called his kingdom the Congo Free State, but it was anything but free. At the trading posts his private company set up, natives were forced to provide fish, meat, and vegetables to Leopold’s traders. Armed white officers surrounded African villages and held women and children hostage to force the men into the forests to harvest rubber. Workers who refused or did not meet the rubber quota would be beaten, or even have their hands cut off. Uncooperative villages were burned. The toll of this abuse was huge; by some estimates, as much as half the Congo’s population died between 1885 and 1908, murdered, weakened by disease and malnutrition, or worked to death.