When people talk about the African slave trade, they almost always mean the same thing.
Ships, the Atlantic Ocean, the Americas.
And that story is real and it matters.
But there is another slave trade.
One that started 700 years earlier, one that lasted 1,300 years, one that took more people.
And almost nobody talks about it.
The slave trade.
Nobody talks about the Arab and Barbar trade that lasted 1,300 years.
How it started? 652 A.
The Arab slave trade of Africans began in 652 AD.
That is more than 1,000 years before the first European slave ship left the West African coast.
Here is what happened.
In 633 AD, 1 year after the death of the prophet Muhammad, Arab Muslim armies swept through Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and across the North African coast.
By 652 AD, Arab forces had pushed into the Sudan region, what is now modern Sudan and Ethiopia.
They encountered the Nubian Kingdom of Mccura.
Rather than defeat it militarily, they negotiated a peace agreement.
The agreement was called the Bagti Treaty.
Under its terms, the Nubian king was required to deliver 360 enslaved Africans per year to the Arab rulers.
That number later increased to nearly 6,000 per year at the peak of the trade in the late 18th century.
That single treaty in 652 AD was the starting point of a trade that would run continuously for 13 centuries.
First of all, I’ve chosen to call this trade the Arab slave trade because Arabs were a key part of this network.
Arabs weren’t the only people involved in this trade, but still most of the rulers and raiders involved in the process were Arabs.
Most of the important markets were in Arab cities as well.
Now, let’s be clear about what this trade actually was.
There was not one Arab slave trade.
There were three separate trade routes, all running at the same time, all targeting African people.
Route one, Transaharin.
Enslaved Africans were marched north across the Sahara Desert toward North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
Route two, the Red Sea route.
Enslaved Africans from East Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Swahili Coast were shipped across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf.
Route three, the Indian Ocean Road.
Enslaved Africans, particularly from the Swahili coast, modern Tanzania, Kenya, Mosambique, were shipped east across the Indian Ocean to destinations in the Middle East, Persia, and India.
Now, let’s talk about scale because this is where history gets deliberately vague.
Historians estimate that between 10 million and 18 million Africans were trafficked through these three routes from the 7th century to the 20th century.
Some scholars put the number as high as 20 million.
For comparison, the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas took an estimated 12.
5 million Africans over roughly 400 years.
The Arab slave trade ran for over 1,300 years.
And it targeted men, women, and children, but in very different ways than the Atlantic trade did.
In the Atlantic trade, the primary demand was for labor, men, field workers, plantation production.
In the Arab trade, the demand was different.
Women and girls were taken primarily as domestic servants and concubines.
Boys were taken to be soldiers, servants, or unics.
Men were used for labor, but in smaller proportions than in the Atlantic trade.
This difference in demand is one reason the Arab slave trade left almost no visible African diaspora in the Middle East and North Africa today compared to the large African-American population in the Americas.
We will come back to that.
Not all slaves come from black Africa.
They can also be procured on the Arabian Peninsula.
Sometimes all you have to do is organize a party, the kind the British have called slaving parties.
We hear about such a party in Qatar.
There’s music, dancing, laughter.
Let’s talk about what the journey actually looked like because the Sahara Desert crossing was one of the most deadly passages in human history.
Here are the facts.
Enslaved Africans captured in subsaharan Africa were tied together and marched north toward the Sahara Desert.
The crossing could take up to 3 months.
Scholars estimate that between 20 and 25% of enslaved people died during capture and transit before they even reached their destination.
The causes: dehydration, starvation, exposure, violence.
Author Tidian Nandi, a Francoagles anthropologist whose book The Veiled Genocide is one of the most detailed studies of this trade, wrote, “The Arabs raided subsaharan Africa for 13 centuries without interruption.
Most of the millions of men they deported disappeared as a result of inhumane treatment.
” The word he used, veiled genocide, is not casual language.
It reflects what the data shows.
Entire regions of subsaharan Africa were depopulated.
Communities were left without men, without women, without a generation of children.
Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who traveled through central Africa in the 1870s, personally witnessed Arab slave raids in progress and described them as some of the most horrific acts he had ever seen.
Merritus of Swahili and African linguistics at the University of Salala in Sweden, Abdulazizi Lodi says that slavery was a part of many African cultures.
When it came to trade, the people who were most important were the tribal Africans themselves.
There were no jails in many African countries, so people who were caught were sold.
Zanzibar as East Africa’s slave hub in East Africa.
The slave trade really took off in the 1600s.
If you want to understand the Arab slave trade in East Africa, you need to understand one place, Zanzibar.
Zanzibar, today a semi-autonomous island region of Tanzania, was for centuries the central hub of the East African Arab slave trade.
Arab traders based primarily in Oman on the Arabian Peninsula established control over the entire East African coast from present-day Somalia all the way south to Mosambique.
This coastal region was called the Swahili coast.
The oldest slave markets in East Africa were located in Kenya and Somalia.
Among the most active trading points before the 15th century, enslaved Africans from the interior from Tanzania, Kenya, the Congo base in Mosambique were marched to the coast, put on ships in Zanzibar, and transported across the Indian Ocean to Arabia, Persia, and the Gulf.
At the height of the Zanzibar slave trade in the 1800s, between 40,000 and 50,000 enslaved Africans per year passed through Zanzibar’s slave market.
Today, in Zanzibar Stone Town, a UNESCO World Heritage site, you can still visit the old slave market.
The holding chambers where enslaved people were kept underground before sale are still there.
They are not large.
They are not well ventilated.
They are exactly what you would expect from a place that treated human beings as inventory.
To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility.
We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path.
Onlookers said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her because she was unable to walk any longer.
We passed the woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead.
We came upon a man dead from starvation.
The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be brokenheartedness and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves.
Now let’s talk about something that is rarely discussed in mainstream coverage of this topic.
What happened to the women? Because the Arab slave trade was not primarily a labor trade.
It was to a significant degree a sex trade.
The majority of African women and girls taken in the Arab slave trade were taken for one purpose as concubines.
Domestic servants who were also sexually available to the men who purchased them.
This practice was institutionalized.
It was legal under the interpretations of Islamic law used at the time and it ran for over a thousand years.
Liberty Muko, a lecturer at the University of Nairobi Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies, stated, “The Arab masters sired children with the black female slaves.
This development explains the modern black Arabs who are still trapped by history.
” What Makomao is describing is the reason why today you see people in countries like Sudan, Moritania, Yemen, and Oman who have clear subsaharan African ancestry, but who are often treated as secondclass citizens in those same countries.
They are the descendants of enslaved women.
Their existence is the physical evidence of the trade, and the racism they face today is a direct continuation of it.
Now for the part of this trade that most history books skip entirely.
the castration of enslaved African men and boys.
This is documented.
It is factual.
And it explains one of the most important differences between this trade and the Atlantic trade.
In the Arab slave trade, many male slaves, particularly boys, were castrated to serve as Unix.
Unix were used to guard hers, manage royal households, and serve in administrative positions where trusted, non-threatening male servants were needed.
Boys were typically castrated around the age of eight or nine because it was believed the younger children had better chances of survival.
The mortality rate for from these procedures was extremely high.
Historian John Hogadorn in his study called the hideous trade estimated the mortality rate for castrated slaves at 80 to 90%.
Most died from blood loss, infection, or the conditions of the journey immediately following the procedure.
Note, some scholars contest the exact mortality percentage, but all agree that death rates were devastatingly high and that the practice was widespread and documented.
This practice is one of the primary reasons why the Arab slave trade left almost no African diaspora community in the Arab world.
Unlike the Americas, where a large black population exists today, the men were prevented from reproducing.
The children born to enslaved women were often absorbed into Arab households and their African identity was erased over generations.
As Liberty Mukcomo stated, the castration of black male slaves in the most inhumane manner altered an entire generation as these men could not reproduce.
Now, let’s shift to a part of this story that most black audiences have never been told and that most white Americans also don’t know.
The Barbar slave trade.
Because the Arab slave system didn’t only target Africans, it also enslaved Europeans.
The Barbar Coast, modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, was controlled by semi-autonomous states under the Ottoman Empire.
From the 1500s through the early 1800s, Muslim pirates from these states, known as Barbar Corsaires, raided coastal villages and merchant ships across the entire Mediterranean and beyond.
their targets, Italy, Spain, France, Portugal, England, Ireland, and even Iceland.
Historian Robert C.
Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, in his book, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, estimated that between 1 million and 1.
25 million Europeans were enslaved by Barbary Pirates between the early 16th century and the middle of the 18th century.
Here are specific documented raids.
1544 pirate commander Hydanin Barbar Roa raided the island of Iskia off the coast of Naples.
He took 4,000 prisoners.
1551 pirate commander Dragot enslaved almost everyone on the Maltese island of Goo.
Between 5,000 and 6,000 people were shipped to Ottoman Tropolitania.
1554 Dreit’s forces attacked Vieste on the Italian coast.
6,000 people captured.
1558, the Bellieric Islands raided.
4,000 people taken as slaves.
1631, the Irish coastal village of Baltimore County Cork was attacked at 200 a.
m.
107 men, women, and children were pulled from their beds and transported to the slave markets of Alers.
Most were never seen again.
Between609 and 1616 alone, England lost 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates.
At one point, approximately 35,000 European slaves were being held on the Barbarie coast at any given time, primarily in Alers, Tunis, and Tripoli.
The famous Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes who wrote Doniote was himself captured by barbar pirates and held as a slave in alers for almost 5 years before being ransomed.
When enslaved Europeans arrived in North Africa, men were typically used for hard labor.
Women were taken as domestic servants or concubines.
Children were often raised as Muslims and recruited into the Ottoman military structure, becoming part of the very system that had enslaved them.
If any enslaved person converted to Islam, they were by law supposed to be freed.
But that meant they could never return home.
The United States actually fought two wars over this.
The first Barbary War 1801 to 1805 and the second Barbary War 1815.
Both fought by the Young American Navy against the Barbar States after they captured American merchant sailors and demanded tribute.
This is why the United States Marines hymn begins.
From the halls of Montazuma to the shores of Tripoli.
The shores of Tripoli.
That’s the Barbar Coast.
The barbar slave trade of Europeans officially ended in 1816 after a combined Anglo Dutch naval bombardment of Alers.
So why does any of this matter right now? Three reasons.
Reason one, the Arab slave trade ran longer than anyone admits.
It started in 652 AD.
It technically continued into the 20th century.
Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery in 1962.
Moritania officially abolished it in 1981 and made it a criminal offense only in 2007, not 1865, not the Civil War era, 2007.
That’s a year many people watching this video were already alive.
Reason two, it explains the antilack racism in the Arab world today.
The Arab slave trade created a hierarchy with Africans at the bottom that didn’t disappear when the trade officially ended.
It became embedded in culture, language, and social structure.
In Arabic, the word abid, which means slave, is still used as a racial slur against black people in many Arab countries today.
Black African migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE continued to report treatment that echoes this history.
The slave trade ended, “The attitudes that built it did not fully die with it.
” Reason three, “This history was deliberately hidden.
” Scholar David Gakuni stated plainly, “The issue of the Eastern and Trans Saharan slave trade organized by the Arabs is deliberately ignored and considered a taboo subject.
” When the French documentary slavery roots aired on Al Jazzer in 2018, the Arab Channel deliberately cut the first episode, the one about Arab and Islamic involvement in the slave trade.
They aired the episodes about European involvement.
They removed the episode about their own history.
That is not ignorance.
That is an editorial choice.
The Atlantic slave trade is taught in schools.
It should be.
It was a crime against humanity, but it was not the only one.
1,300 years, 10 to 18 million people, three trade routes, castration, Sahara crossings, sex trafficking, and the country’s most responsible for it.
Still have not issued a formal apology, still have not paid reparations, still use a word that means slave as a racial slur against black people.
This is a history they don’t want you to know.
Now you know it.
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Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
