Arab Slavemasters, Black African Slaves

This just in: the University of Michigan’s Black Student Union (BSU) has resigned from the anti-Zionist student group on campus, the Tahrir Coalition, citing what it described as “pervasive” anti-black discrimination fostered by its Arab leadership. But before going into the mistreatment of blacks by Arabs today at the University of Michigan, let’s recall the history, that lasted nearly fourteen centuries, of the Arabs who trafficked in, and held in thrall, black African slaves.

For the world clearly needs to be reminded about that trade, so much more extensive, in time and space and number of victims, than the transatlantic Slave Trade that receives almost all of the world’s attention.

Over 28 million Africans have been enslaved in the Muslim world during the past fourteen centuries. While much has been written concerning the transatlantic slave trade, surprisingly little attention has been given to the Islamic slave trade across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.

That Arab slave trade in East and Central Africa began in the late seventh century. We know this because there are records of the earliest slave revolts by Africans in what is present-day southern Iraq, dating from 689-90 and 694, both quickly suppressed. The Zanj revolt of 869-883 – “Zanj” being the word the Arabs used to describe black Africans – in southern Iraq was a much bigger rebellion. It lasted fourteen years, and took a great effort by the Arabs to put down. The slaves who revolted had been used in backbreaking work as agricultural labor, forced to remove nitrous topsoil to create arable land, and treated brutally by their Arab masters. The Zanj Rebellion, what conditions prompted it, and what murderous methods were used by the Arabs to suppress the revolt by the black slaves, deserves to be widely known.

The Arab trade in African slaves began much earlier than the Atlantic trade – the seventh rather than the fifteenth century — and it also lasted longer. There were no Arab abolitionists, no Muslim William Wilberforces. After all, Muhammad himself bought, sold, and owned slaves, and Muhammad remains “the Perfect Man” and “Model of Conduct.” Western pressure alone ended Arab slavery. It was the Royal Navy that patrolled the coasts of Arabia and intercepted dhows carrying slaves. Slavery continued to exist, however, in several Muslim Arab countries well into the twentieth century. Though officially banned in Mauritania in 1961 and again in 1981, it still continues to this day, with 600,000 black slaves held by Arabs. In Saudi Arabia, as recently as the 1950s, 500,000 black Africans, or 20% of Saudi Arabia’s population, were held as slaves. It was only in 1962 that slavery was officially abolished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and in Oman as late as 1970 – and only under terrific Western pressure. In the Sudan (before the creation of South Sudan in 2005), northern Arabs continued to enslave southern blacks during the Second Sudanese Civil War, with as many as 200,000 black Africans taken into slavery.

And today, despite formally abolishing slavery, Arabs still enslave blacks in three states in northwestern Africa — in Mali 200,000, in Mauritania 600,000, according to a 2017 estimate by the BBC, and in Niger 43,000. Yet the West remains indifferent to this continuing horror; the UN says nothing about it; black Americans simply do not know about it.

The Muslim Arabs held slaves for more than 1300 years, while the Atlantic slave trade lasted for only four centuries. We have estimates from historians as to the number of blacks who were seized by Arab slavers in Africa, and how many of them – women, children, and castrated boys – made it alive, during those 1300 years, to the Islamic slave markets. It turns out that about 28 million black Africans — a consensus estimate — were brought, either walked across the Sahara in slave coffles to the slave markets of North Africa and Egypt, or by dhow across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to the slave markets of Arabia and the Gulf. The Arab slave trade was particularly gruesome, for much of it involved castrating black boys in the bush, with the most primitive of implements, in order to supply eunuchs for the Muslim harems. Many of the boys died during the surgery; many others died in the days afterwards from infections, or during the long trek by land or sea to the Islamic slave markets. The historian Jan Hogedoorn, in his study of what he called The Hideous Trade, estimated the mortality rate for those castrated slaves as high as 80-90%, meaning only 10-20% of those African boys originally seized arrived alive at the slave markets. While the consensus estimate of 28 million black Africans who made it to the Islamic slave markets at first sounds like a lot, over 1300 years (650-1950 A.D.) this amounts to an average of a little more than 20,000 black slaves brought annually from Central and East Africa all the way to those slave markets, which is perfectly plausible.