al-asl huwa ‘l-hurriya
‘The basic principle is liberty’
Traditional Islamic jurisprudence assumes that everyone is free, based on the dictum: ‘The basic principle is liberty’ (al-‘asl huwa ‘l-hurriya). On this basis was slavery was an exceptional, and undesirable, condition.
Ronald Segal
Ronald Segal lived from 1932 to 2008. He was a white South African, born into a rich Jewish family. He became a committed socialist and anti-apartheid activist who fled South Africa after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. He was a political activist, writer and editor, founder of the anti-apartheid magazine Africa South and of the Penguin African Library. He wrote 17 books, including a biography of Leon Trotsky, though he is best known for The State of the World Atlas (first edition, 1981), co-founded with Michael Kidron. Islam’s Black Slaves was his last book. It was conceived as a companion to his previous book, 1995’s The Black Diaspora: Five centuries of the black experience outside Africa.
The link with McLynn and Jeal
I was moved to buy this rather expensive book because my reading of Frank McLynn and Tim Jeal‘s histories of European (mostly British) explorers in nineteenth century Africa sparked my interest in a number of issues, among them their repeated descriptions of the impact of the non-white Arab slave trade on East and Central Africa. (They also piqued my interest in a) the large number of white slaves captured by Islamic slave traders and b) the central role of the Royal Navy in quelling the sea-borne slave trade after 1833, both subjects I hope to explore soon.)
Islam’s Black Slaves
Both Jeal and Adam Hochschild‘s accounts show that the capturing of black slaves in East Africa was a bloody, brutal business, with entire villages laid waste and thousands murdered for every hundred or so slaves (mostly women and children) who were finally transported down the slave trails to the east coast of Africa (specifically to the slave trading island of Zanzibar, owned and run after 1840 by the Sultan of Oman on the Persian Gulf).
Eye witness descriptions of widespread devastation and the brutality of the slavers on pages 152 to 153, 156 to 157, 161.
The Atlantic slave trade
Slavery was probably part of pre-Islamic Arab life and economy.
Whereas the Atlantic slave trade only got going after 1500 as European explorers (at first mainly the Portuguese) visited the west coast of Africa, the slave trade in the realm of Islam existed since the 7th century, 900 years earlier. Whereas the British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, many Arab countries only formally banned slavery in living memory, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, Oman in 1970.
According to the BBC, Muslim traders exported as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa.
However 1) the Islamic trade in African slaves was always a lot smaller than the Atlantic slave trade, especially when the latter was at its height in the 18th century:
There was no extensive and long-sustained commitment of black slave labour to the scale of commercial plantation agriculture that absorbed so many millions of black slaves in the Americas. (p.42)
In part this was due to memories of the Zanj Rebellion (869 until 883) when black African slaves who were put to work draining the salt marshes around then present-day city of Basra in southern Iraq, rebelled, gathering more and more followers, slaves and free, and presenting a major threat to the Abbasid Caliphate (pages 43 to 44).
The rebellion had a lasting impact. The use of a large number of black slaves in plantation agriculture and irrigation schemes sharply declined; it was considered too dangerous. (p.44)
2) The Islamic attitude to black slaves was markedly different from that of white Europeans, in a number of ways.
The Atlantic slave trade, particularly as it escalated in the 18th century, was a key element in the development of industrial capitalism, generating the profits from sugar and tobacco plantations which was then invested in new technologies in Britain (p.106; cf Eric Hobsbawm in Industry and Empire). But what makes capitalism different from all other social and economic models is the relentless focus on profit. If you take this as the be-all and end-all of social effort, then human beings can quickly come to be seen as mere units of productivity or consumption, totted up on dry accounts books.
Thus, according to Segal, African slaves were treated as units of productions, like donkeys, horses or steam engines, stripped of any individuality, faceless drones whose lives and deaths meant nothing to their owners.
The treatment of slaves in Islam was overall more benign, in part because the values and attitudes promoted by religion inhibited the very development of a Western-style capitalism, with its effective subjugation of people to the priority of profit. (p.5)
He then discusses slavery’s place in Christianity, which is highly problematic. If Jesus meant what he said about the brotherhood of man and so on then slavery was an outrageous blasphemy against Christian teachings. This had two broad consequences.
1) Slave owners and their propagandists scoured the Bible to try and find justifications for slavery (blacks being the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah who cast him out and curses him after Ham, saw his father drunk and naked, etc); or they simply denied that blacks were fully human, using any pretext which presented itself to argue that Africans were animals, savages, lower down the evolutionary scale etc.
2) The other consequence was those brave Christians who applied Jesus’s teachings consistently and so opposed the slave trade, generally evangelical ‘low’ Christians who formed the backbone of the Abolitionist movement and whose story is told in Adam Hochschild’s moving book Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery.
Islam’s treatment of slaves
By contrast, slavery was accepted by the Prophet Mohammed and his successors but, being openly acknowledged, was provided for. Mohammed goes out of his way to insist that slaves be treated humanely. A slave’s master was enjoined:
- not to show contempt for a slave
- to share his food with a slave
- to provide a slave as good clothes as his own
- to set a slave moderate and achievable work
- not to punish a slave excessively but forgive him ‘seventy times a day’
Of course slavery of any form is a wicked denial of the basic human rights of human beings as we now, in 2023, conceive of them. But Mohammed’s explicit insistence that slaves should be treated well established a venerable standard which all Muslim slave owners could be held to. Thus:
Slaves in the Ottoman empire were differently regarded and treated [than in the West]. In conformity with Islamic teaching and law, slaves were people who had stipulated rights. (p.106)
Two routes to slavery
According to the Prophet there were only two legitimate route to slavery: birth to a slave mother or capture in warfare (p.36). Warfare could only be against non-Muslims or infidels, as Muhammed assumed that Muslim would never fight Muslim, brother against brother. Enslavement of captives in war went some way towards repaying the losses of warfare but was also a means of assimilating and converting non-Muslims who could, ultimately, be freed.
Obviously these rules were flouted repeatedly through history, but at least there were rules, they were clear, and rulers could be held to account against them.
Islam’s anti-racism
There are other key distinctions between the two traditions. It follows from point 1) above, that the anxiety felt by European Christian slave traders and owners created and fuelled a vast ideology of racism. Christian slave owners could only square their consciences if they held to the view that black Africans were not fully human, less than human, or even a different species. Many, many commentators claim the legacy of these scandalous opinions lingers on today in numerous institutions and organisations and individuals.
The point is that the Prophet Muhammad explicitly forbade racism.
The Koran expressly condemns racism along with tribalism and nationalism. (p.6)
According to Arabist Bernard Lewis:
pagan and early Islamic Arabia seems to have shared the general attitude of the ancient world, which attached no stigma to blackness. (quoted p.46)
In his Farewell Sermon Muhammed said:
‘O people, your Lord is one and your father [Adam] is one. There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab; no superiority of a white person over a black person, nor superiority of a black person over a white person – except in righteousness.’ (quoted p.46)
Indeed, the first official muezzin, personally appointed by Muhammed to proclaim adhan in Mecca, was Bilal ibn Ribah, an African slave who was emancipated when Abu Bakr (who was to be the first caliph or successor to the Prophet) paid his ransom on Muhammad’s instruction (p.46).
This, as I imperfectly understand it, is one of the great appeals of Islam through the ages. When a convert submits to Allah he or she joins the great international ulema, regardless of ethnicity or skin colour. This, as I understand it, explains the surge of interest in Islam among American black activists of the later 1960s such as Malcolm X, who thought the Christian tradition espoused by the Reverend Martin Luther King, was hopelessly compromised by its profound involvement in the slave trade for centuries.
Forty years later James Fergusson dwelled on the appeal of Islam to Somalis in his book ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia’. He cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, who said:
‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)
Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens.
[Islam] continued to encompass slavery long after slaves had been freed throughout Christendom. But while slavery was practiced in Christendom and Islam alike, the freeing of individual slaves by their owners was much more frequent and widespread in Islam. This was of particular relevance to the social assimilation of blacks. As slaves, they were subject to no special racial discrimination in law; and, once freed, they enjoyed in law equal rights as citizens. (p.9)
Something very much not true of freed blacks in America and their descendants, arguably, to this day.
However, that was the theory, and Segal goes on to describe how Islamic social practice and attitudes often fell far short. He traces the emergence of anti-black attitudes which might be attributed to 1) the Zanj rebellion; 2) contempt for the mainly manual labour many black slaves were condemned to in a culture which prized intellectual achievement.
He then goes on to cite an impressive roster of medieval Islamic scholars who authoritatively declaimed a series of hair-raisingly racist generalisations against black Africans. A lot of this was repetition with elaboration of Galen’s founding racist generalisations from the third century of the Christian era.
By the Middle Ages the Arabic word ‘abd had come to denote black slave and mamluk to mean white slave (p.49).
A last point about the racism or absence arising from the Islamic slave trade. As mentioned, the Atlantic slave trade a) prioritised men, for hard manual labour and b) the European owners erected a severe race barrier, which involved legal and cultural denigration of Africans.
By contrast, the Islamic trade prioritised female slaves which led to greater miscegenation or inter-breeding. I wonder if anyone’s done research to discover how much ‘black DNA’ is present in the Arab population. I came across this website online: it claims the DNA of the typical Egyptian contains 3% of African genes, Kuwaitis are 7% African, Lebanese are 2% East African and so on. I’ve no idea if this is correct or scientifically meaningful.
But Segal definitely asserts that over 1,000 years of interbreeding between black Africans and Arabs produced a population many of whose members are racially indistinguishable – in stark contrast to the situation in North America where the visual distinction between black and white was fiercely enforced until well into the 20th century and so remains, to this day, much more prominent and problematic.
Islam’s slaves in the service sector
Slaves in the Atlantic system were, classically, regarded as units of production in a brutally capitalist system, worked to death on plantations. Thus it’s calculated that the slaves were transported in a ratio of 2 men to every woman, because sheer brute strength was required on the plantations.
Whereas slaves in the Islamic world tended to be employed in the name of consumption, often very conspicuous consumption, as Segal’s profiles of numerous immensely rich caliphs and Muslim rulers indicate. The very rich tended to have vast numbers of concubines, servants, attendants and whatnot, many of whom were slaves. Segal tells us that Ahmad b Tulun, the Tulunid ruler from 868 to 884, left at his death 24,000 white slaves and 45,000 black ones (p.54).
Essentially, the distinction between Western and Ottoman – indeed Islamic – slavery was that between the commercial and the domestic. (p.107)
Thus it is that the gender ratio was reversed, with an estimated two female slaves transported into the Islamic world for every male, as slaves were most commonly used for household work (most conspicuously, concubinage, which modern scholars might describe as sex slavery).
Lower down the social order, many slaves worked in the service sector as cooks, porters, secretaries and so on. There is much evidence that, although their capture in Africa was a violent and traumatic experience, once they ended up in Arab Muslim households, many slaves were treated well.
Slaves in Islamic armies
Some slaves were trained to serve as soldiers. This was the case with the Mamluks, an Arabic word which literally means ‘owned’ or ‘slave (p.31). These were non-Arab, ethnically diverse (mostly Turkic, Caucasian, Eastern and Southeastern European) enslaved mercenaries, slave-soldiers, and freed slaves who were assigned high-ranking military and administrative duties, serving the ruling Arab and Ottoman dynasties in the Muslim world.
Mamluks became a powerful military knightly class in various Muslim societies that were controlled by dynastic Arab rulers. Particularly in Egypt and Syria, but also in the Ottoman Empire, Levant, Mesopotamia, and India, mamluks held political and military power. In some cases, they attained the rank of sultan, while in others they held regional power as emirs or beys. Most notably, Mamluk factions seized the sultanate centred on Egypt and Syria, and controlled it as the Mamluk Sultanate from 1250 to 1517. The Mamluk Sultanate fought the Christian Crusaders in 1154 to 1169 and 1213 to 1221, effectively driving them out of Egypt and the Levant (p.31).
Segal’s discussion of slaves in Islamic armies pages 45 to 46.
Talking of one-time slaves rising to power, the longest reigning of the Fatimid Caliphs, al-Mustansir (1036 to 1094) was the son of a black Sudanese concubine, whose mother, because he only came to power when he was seven, was the real ruler of the Caliphate for the 15 years of his minority (p.51); and Segal gives other instances of Africans who rose to positions of high power, especially black eunuchs.
Islam’s releasing of slaves
The technical term in English is ‘manumission’, from the Latin, meaning simply ‘release from slavery’.
The Koran teaches that it is virtuous to free slaves. It says one of the uses of zakat, a pillar of Islam, which can be translated as ‘alms’, is to pay for the freeing of slaves:
‘Alms-tax is only for the poor and the needy, for those employed to administer it, for those whose hearts are attracted to the faith, for freeing slaves, for those in debt, for Allah’s cause, and for needy travellers. This is an obligation from Allah. And Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.
( Surah At-Tawbah 9:60)
Freeing your slaves can offset sins you have committed and hasten your entry to heaven.
‘The man who frees a Muslim slave, God will free him from hell, limb for limb.’ (quoted p.35)
The Koran describes a particular type of legal contract, the mukataba, which it encouraged slave owners to make with slaves, whereby they could work towards their freedom (p.36).
The Koran says slave owners can have sex with female slaves, but places on them an injunction to marry them off to male slaves, whereupon the husband has sole right. The Koran allots praise to a slave owner who educates his female slave, frees then marries her (p.36). Unlike America and other European colonies, it was expressly forbidden to separate slave mothers and their children.
Eunuchs
Islam expressly forbids mutilating the human body which is the image of God.
‘Whoever kills his slave, we will kill him; whoever mutilates (his slave), we will mutilate him; and whoever castrates his slave, we will castrate him.’ (Sunan an-Nasa’i 4736; Book 45, Hadith 31)
Nonetheless, eunuchs became an engrained part of wealthy Islamic culture and pious Muslims got around the ruling by having infidels do the castrating. Thus during the Middle Ages Prague and Verdun became castration centres supplying eunuchs to the Islamic market (p.40).
Possession of eunuchs was just one sign of the extraordinary conspicuous consumption which distinguished medieval Islam. Thus, Segal tells us, at the start of the 10th century, when Alfred the Great’s muddy successors were still fighting the invading Danes in East Anglia, the Caliph in Baghdad had seven thousand black eunuchs and 4,000 white ones, in his palace (p.41).
Vivid, stomach-turning description of castrating a boy (p.171).
Numbers and routes
There were three main routes of black African slaves into Islam:
- across the Sahara
- from Ethiopia across the Red Sea
- from East Africa
Segal cites the calculations of scholars like Ralph Austen and Paul Lovejoy who estimate that the total number of black Africans trafficked into the Islamic world between 650 and the twentieth century as 11 to 12 million. Raymond Mauvy calculates 14 million. This is directly comparable to the 11 or so million calculated to have been transported in the far shorter period of the Atlantic slave trade (pages 55 to 57). Scholar H.J. Fisher is quoted as saying the total number of black slaves transported in the Islamic slave trade was probably larger than the number involved in the Atlantic slave trade (p.61).
Segal points out that enormous though these numbers sound, the 14 million figure ‘only’ works out 10,370 slaves per year. All scholars agree that the 19th century saw a dramatic increase in volume in slave trading (in 1838 an estimated to 10 to 12 thousand slaves were arriving in just Egypt, each year), so the chances are that the figures for the previous 11 centuries are lower, a guesstimate of maybe 7,000 per annum (p.60).
Importantly, these numbers exclude the internal black-on-black slave trade, the intra-Africa slave trade. So, controversially, they don’t include the vast numbers of slaves captured in East Africa and transported to Zanzibar, owned by an Arab elite, to work on the clove plantations. Segal cites the figure of about a million black slaves set to work in Zanzibar during the nineteenth century. If you included the intra-African trade, the total would go up by at least 2 million.
If you add the Atlantic and the Islamic trades, you end up with a figure of around 25 million black Africans captured and taken off into slavery.
We will never know the precise numbers. All we can do, in this as so many other aspects of human history, is marvel, or reel, at the thought of so much human suffering.
Non-black slaves
Most of the above concerns black slaves. But Islamic rulers conquered and enslaved or bought slaves from many other ethnicities. Thus countless numbers of Turkish and Circassian people were enslaved, as were Slavs and others from the Balkans. Someone somewhere must have done research into this. Segal only mentions it in passing.
Chapters
The foregoing summarises the first 70 or so pages of the book, dealing in general principles, overall numbers and so on. Subsequent chapters deal with:
Chapter 5. The Farther Reaches
China
Segal brings together fleeting references to black people in medieval and early modern sources. Chinese porcelain has been found in ruined trading towns on the East African coast. There’s no records of an organised trade.
India
Islam expanded into north-west India through armed conquest. It brought black slaves, mainly for military service. They called themselves Sayyad, corrupted to Siddis who, when liberated, set up small kingdoms of their own, became employed as security on Muslim ships, some rose to become admirals. The story of the rise to power of Malik Ambar (1548 to 1626), a military leader who rose to the office of Peshwa of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate in the Deccan region of India, his military and cultural achievements.
Spain
North African Muslims invaded Spain in 611, overrunning almost the entire peninsula (apart from Galicia) by 620. The resulting kingdom of al-Andalus grew to legendary wealth. Black slaves were imported from Africa, but the realm was also famous for exporting white slaves from Gaul and Galicia. It became a centre for castrating male slaves to provide eunuchs (p.80). The career of the black poet and arbiter of taste, Ziryab (789 to 857).
Chapter 6. Into Black Africa
A very detailed look at the different routes of slave traders and the slave trade into the Islamic world, from Ethiopia across the Red Sea, from the coast of East Africa. Segal gives a long complicated account of the rise and histories of various black African empires in west Africa – the empires of Ghana, Mali, the Kanem and Songhai empires – many of whose rulers converted to Islam, and the complex history of black slaving along the major trans-Sahara slaving routes. It’s a complex, unfamiliar history.
Chapter 7. The Ottoman Empire
Of all the empires that rose and fell within the Islamic world, the Ottoman was the largest and longest lasting. Segal uses the Ottoman empire to really point the difference in attitudes to slavery between the Christian West and the Muslim East. Although many slaves may have held domestic positions in the Americas and some been released, the fundamental difference was the slaves in the West were used as units of production by fast-evolving capitalism. Whereas in the East, although some slaves were used in labour-intensive plantations and proto-factories, the majority were for domestic consumption. Plus the East had a more generous policy of freeing slaves. Many civil servants or soldiers who were, technically, slaves of the Sultan rose to become generals and governors (p.106).
He makes the simple crucial point that while the West pursued a model of nationalistic capitalism which encouraged aggressively competitive trade and enshrined in law the unbridled pursuit of profit, the Ottoman Empire cleaved to Islam’s disdain for trade, prioritising of military glory or scholarly achievement and its active discouragement, in law, of the kind of profit-seeking sought in the West. Merchants accumulated capital but their culture mandated them to use it charitably, to establish schools or hospitals. Lacking a central bank, or banks in general, which could be used to redistribute capital from its owners to speculative ventures, lacking the complex legal framework and definitions of property and company law which enabled Western capitalism, the Ottoman Empire condemned itself to slow decline.
While social, political and, above all, economic innovation swept the West, the Ottoman empire remained steeped in sterile ceremonial. (p.116)
Segal gives a lot of detail of Ottoman history, especially the role of black eunuchs at the highest level of the Ottoman court. As to general black slavery, there was a substantial and continuous trade but records are scanty.
He credits the British in particular for pressuring the Ottoman Turks to end slavery in their empire. In 1846 the slave market in Constantinople was closed. In 1855 moves to ban slavery throughout the empire led to a violent revolt in Arabia, led by an imam who declared the ban unIslamic. The revolt was put down but when the ban was promulgated, it made Arabia an exception, to the area continued to be a base for slavers. Slavery was banned in 1889 but kept its place in Sharia law. In 1923 the modern state of Turkey replaced the empire, with secular law banning slavery.
Chapter 8. The ‘Heretic’ State: Iran
Segal gives a thumbnail sketch of Persia’s resistance to Arab rule which came to be embodied in its espousal of a distinct brand of Islam, Shia Islam or Shiaism. There is scant evidence of black slavery in Iran; what there is suggests black slaves enjoyed good treatment and high status in households, especially of the wealthy. An English lady traveller speculated that between two and three thousand African slaves were imported each year (p.123).
A scholar estimates the number of slaves in mid-19th century Iran as 80,000. As late as 1898 the Anti-Slavery Society estimated up to 50,000 slaves in Persia. As with the Ottoman Empire, from the 1820s onwards the British brought pressure to bear to end the slave trade, but the exemption of Arabia allowed it to continue as a conduit of African slaves into Iran. Only in 1882 did the Persian government renounce slavery in a treaty signed imposed by Britain (p.126). Only in 1907 did the new National Assembly enact a law ensuring universal freedom.
Segal makes the interesting point that, as in the USA, colour prejudice might have intensified after the abolition of slavery.
Chapter 9. The Libyan Connection
The black slave trade into the semi-Ottoman state of Tripolitania. In 1818 a Royal Navy captain, G.F. Lyon, observed that the ruling Bey waged war on all his neighbours and carried away 5,000 slaves a year. Segal cites scholar Ralph Austen whose detailed calculations suggest that from 1550 to 1913 some 784,000 black slaves were transported through Libya. Given a 20% death rate on the journey from the South, this suggests 942,000 black Africans were kidnapped and enslaved by Arab and Muslim traders working the Tripoli route (there were numerous other routes).
In 1930 a Danish traveller to Libya reported that there was a slave market every Thursday in Kufra and a good adult slave cost £15.
Chapter 10. The Terrible Century
The nineteenth century saw an increase in volume and intensity of Islamic slaving across north and east Africa. In 1808 Britain withdrew from the slave trade and set about persuading other European nations to do the same. Britain also began to intervene in the Muslim world to abolish the trade, but tentatively, mindful of Muslim sensibilities.
East Africa
A European visitor stated that, around 1810, almost the entire income of the state of Oman derived from taxes on the slave trade. In 1840 the Sultan of Oman moved his court to the island of Zanzibar, main entrepot on the west of the Indian Ocean, principle outlets for black slaves captured in the interior.
By the 1840s up to 15,000 slaves a year were being trade. The Sultan himself needed huge numbers to work his clove plantations. In the 1850s it’s estimated that Zanzibar’s population included 60,000 slaves. A quarter of the Sultan’s income was said to derive from the trade.
The British protected the Sultan as their client but brought consistent pressure on him to abolish the trade. He signed a series of treaties to that effect but in the 1860s the British consul reported that 30,000 slaves were arriving annually at the coastal ports, some for Zanzibar, some shipped north to the Gulf. He also reported that for every slave who reached the coast alive, one had died en route. Other accounts claimed a far higher number.
Many of the slavers, the leaders of expeditions to attack and massacre African settlements, then take away prisoners in chains, were either Arab or, very commonly, of mixed Afro-Arab ethnicity. Segal, again, draws the distinction between the behaviour of the slavers, which was brutal and murderous, and slaves’ treatment in their destination households, which was often kind as per Islamic lore.
Sudan and Egypt
Khartoum was originally a small fishing village at the junction of the White and Blue Niles. After Sudan it was conquered by the Ottoman viceroy, Muhammed Ali, in 1840, it was turned into a major entrepot for African slaves. By 1838 12,000 black slaves were being imported into Egypt annually. Beyond the reach of the Egyptian authorities operated the Ja’aliyin, who raided west into Darfur and south into tropical Africa until well into the 1890s.
Huge enclosures for slaves were established in Cairo, where many died of smallpox and other infectious diseases. For every slave that made it to Cairo, it’s estimated that 5 died along the way (p.151). General Gordon calculated that in the area of Bahr el-Ghazal between 1875 and 1879, up to 100,000 slaves had been exported north. European explorers found entire areas which had been devastated and emptied of their populations by slavers (pages 152 to 153, 156 to 157, 161). Only in 1883, when Britain occupied Egypt, were they able to start cracking down on the trade. By 1904 the Viceroy, Lord Cromer, could claim that the systematic slave trade had been eradicated.
Ethiopia and Arabia
Slavery in Ethiopia thrived for centuries. Up to 500 slaves were sold at the market at Gallabat every day. King Menelik was alleged to take a 10% cut in the trade i.e. gifted one slave in ten. Most were sent across the sea to Arabia. After the Ottoman Sultan banned it, the trade increased because it was no longer taxed. A British reporter estimated in 1878 that 25,000 slaves a year were sold in Mecca and Medina and the trade continued into the early 1900s.
The trade through Kenya was ended when the British created the East Africa Protectorate in 1895. Slavery was only legally abolished in Zanzibar in 1897.
West Africa
Segal describes a confusing profusion of kingdoms and rulers, Muslim jihads, insurgencies, overthrows and new rulers, all across west Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. The point is all of them engaged in the slave trade, sending slaves north into Muslim Arab lands, or collecting them for their own grandeur. As the nineteenth century raiding became more intense and destructive, not least due to growing access to Western arms, which resulted in the devastation of entire regions. It’s instructive to learn that black on black slave trading continued energetically right to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. A French agent on the Senegal river reported that in 1889 some 13,000 slaves were transported along the river.
Chapter 11. Colonial Transactions
Northern Nigeria
The British claimed the former Sokoto Caliphate in 1906, naming it north Nigeria. Segal describes the economic, legal and social reforms which led to the erosion of slavery, not only the banning of the institution but the economic development of the colony which gave peasants paid work.
French Soudan
In 1848 the French National Assembly abolished slavery in all her colonies. But it wasn’t until 1905 that the Governor-General of French West Africa decreed an end to the slave trade and any person losing their liberty (p.181). The data suggests that slaves made their way back to their former towns and villages.
Mauritania
As the cost of accepting French rule (1905 to 1910), the leaders of inland tribes in this part of north-west Africa demanded that traditional tribal laws about slavery remain. Colonial attitudes and Islamic law favoured masters in this largely nomadic population. Drought and famine in the 1930s then again after the war, forced many to offer themselves as slaves in order to secure food.
Somalia
Italy seized part of Somaliland in 1892. They made noises about banning slavery but in 1903 a third of the population of Mogadishu were slaves. In 1906 when Italy took full control of the colony, they estimated the slave population at 30,000. When they freed the slaves in the city, the Italians discovered it led to unemployment and beggary, so were slower to act in the countryside. A complicated mesh of laws followed until the Fascists took power in 1922 and passed laws designed to liberate slaves but force them into low-paid labour on plantations.
Zanzibar and the Kenyan Coast
In 1890 the British declared the Sultanate a Protectorate but it wasn’t until 1897 that they passed legislation allowing slaves to claim their freedom and then take-up was patchy because for many ‘freedom’ meant loss of employment and home. Employers and ex-slaves had to negotiate new relations. Employers raised pay, many ex-slaves squatted on waste land or the edge of plantations. The authorities struggled with increased vagrancy, drunkenness and delinquency. The British supported the Arab minority, as small as 5% of the population, because they owned the land and the clove plantations. Resentment against this privileged minority would boil over at independence.
In Kenya Segal describes the long-running problem of ex-slaves who became squatters, had families, established squatter settlements, especially along the coast where there was likely to be more work, a problem which troubled the British authorities and carried on past independence in 1963.
In Zanzibar and along the coast anti-Arab feeling grew and in 1961 there were violent African-Arab riots which left 68 dead. In the election held after the British left, the Arab party won a majority through blatant vote-rigging. This led in January 1964 to an outbreak of politically-motivated African violence which massacred Arabs and seized property, overthrowing the Arab Sultan for good. As many as 4,000 Arabs were killed in the streets. President of Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere, offered the revolutionary leadership a union with their mainland neighbour and so the country of Tanzania was born.
Chapter 12. Survivals of Slavery
Stories of the ongoing existence of black slavery in Arab states such as Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Muscat. As recently as 1982 accusations that black Africans travelling to Mecca are captured and sold. On the west coast, evidence that African girls are trafficked to Lebanon.
Mauritania
At the time of writing the secretive government of Mauritania kept up slavery, with as many as a third of the population of about 2.5 million enslaved. Segal moves into the present era with a description of the racist activities of the Arab Islamic Mauritanian government in deporting, arresting, executing and generally harassing Mauritanians of black ethnicity. Especially the 1989 Mauritania–Senegal Border War which led to the expulsion of some 70,000 sub-Saharan African Mauritanians from the country. Wikipedia:
Modern-day slavery still exists in different forms in Mauritania. According to some estimates, thousands of Mauritanians are still enslaved. A 2012 CNN report, ‘Slavery’s Last Stronghold’, documents the ongoing slave-owning cultures. This social discrimination is applied chiefly against the ‘black Moors’ (Haratin) in the northern part of the country, where tribal elites among ‘white Moors’ (Bidh’an, Hassaniya-speaking Arabs and Arabized Berbers) hold sway. Slavery practices exist also within the sub-Saharan African ethnic groups of the south.
Sudan
The civil war in Sudan between the Arab north and the African Christian or animist south lasted for 40 years after independence in 1956. In 1972 the south was granted regional autonomy. South Sudan finally became an independent country in July 2011. Segal masters evidence for the ongoing practice of slavery in Sudan, generally practiced by Arabs on black Africans (pages 216 to 222). He mentions Christian Solidarity International which undertakes missions to buy slaves their freedom. At the time of writing CSI had freed more than 20,000 slaves, at an average price of $50 each.
Epilogue. America’s black Muslim backlash
This was by far the easiest part of the book to read and for a reason I often remark on – because it’s about America and we in the UK are bombarded with American culture, history and values. So when he writes about racism in Detroit or Harlem, about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, these are people and places and issues I feel superfamiliar with, from books and TV shows, documentaries and radio programmes and movies, exhibitions, art and photography.
Whereas the information about the trans-Sahara slave routes or the rise and fall of the various empires of west Africa or even the history of Islamic Spain were just some topics I knew next to nothing about and found very informative indeed, and all the more rewarding for being so radically unfamiliar.
Reading the stuff here about the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X reminded me of watching the movie starring Denzel Washington, plus documentaries, plus articles, all (over)familiar stuff. Whereas I know nothing about the Fulani or the Hausa kings, about the Oyo empire or the royal court of Bornu, about Usman dan Fodio or Muhammed al-Amin al-Kanami or Yusuf Pasha of Tripoli. Here is a huge subject (the history of north and west Africa) of which I am pitifully ignorant, and need to learn more.
Thoughts
The biggest, general thought prompted by the book is the ubiquity of slavery, among all nations and all ethnicities, throughout most of history. The chapter on the Ottoman Empire routinely describes the numbers of white slaves seized from the Balkans in the Sultan’s palace, or more broadly. The chapter on Iran mentions that Iranians were themselves taken as slaves by the Ottomans to the West or the Uzbeks to the north. Iranians in turn seized Christian Armenians or Circassians.
Next is the Big Idea that slavery in Islamic was qualitatively different than the Western and Atlantic form, as described above.
Third thing is the leading role played by Britain throughout the nineteenth century in trying to stamp out slavery, across North Africa, in the Turkish heartlands, in Iraq and Persia, and along the East African coast. In all these places British diplomats, backed up by the Royal Navy, tried to stamp out the Arab slave trade.
Lastly, and tangentially, Segal’s passage about West Africa and its empires (chapter 10) was illuminating in itself, but also made me wish I could find a good, affordable account of France’s empire in Africa, not just the well-covered Algeria, but countries like Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger and Gabon, French Congo, the Central African Republic and Chad, which we in the Anglosphere never hear about.
Credit
Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal was first published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2001. All references are to the 2002 paperback edition from the same publisher.
Related links
- Islamic views on slavery Wikipedia article
- UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery
- Anti-Slavery International
- Global estimate of modern slavery by Walk Free
Books & Boots 