đź’ While official figures on the exact number of slaves captured from Africa in the Trans Sahara trade are contested, most scholars put the estimate at about nine million.
The Eastern slave trade in Africa was predominantly concentrated in the East …
đź’ While official figures on the exact number of slaves captured from Africa in the Trans Sahara trade are contested, most scholars put the estimate at about nine million.
The Eastern slave trade in Africa was predominantly concentrated in the East and West African regions. In East Africa the coastal region was the preferred route and Tanzania’s archipelago of Zanzibar became a hub for this trade.
“The Arabs raided sub-Saharan Africa for thirteen centuries without interruption. Most of the millions of men they deported have disappeared as a result of inhumane treatment. This painful page in the history of black people has apparently not been completely turned,” read a loosely translated excerpt from The Veiled Genocide a book by Tidiane N'Diaye, a Franco-Senegalese author and anthropologist.
Enterprising Arab merchants and middlemen would gather in Zanzibar for raw materials including cloves and ivory. They would then buy black slaves who they would use to carry the raw materials and also work in their plantations abroad. Slaves from as far as Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia would be availed at the Zanzibar market and shipped through the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf or Arabic Peninsula where they worked in Oman, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. African Muslims were however never captured as slaves due to the Islamic legal views.
On the other hand the Trans Saharan Caravan concentrated on the West African region straddling the Niger Valley to the Gulf of Guinea along the Trans-Saharan roads to slave markets in Maghreb and the Nile Basin. The voyage that could take up to three months involved inhumane conditions that saw slaves die along the way due to diseases, hunger and thirst. An estimated 50 percent of all slaves in this trade would die in transit.
While European merchants were interested in strongly built young men as labourers in their farms, the Arab merchants were more focused on concubinage, capturing women and girls who were turned into sex slaves while living in harems. So high was the demand that the merchants would double the price of female slaves with, the ratio of captured women to men being three to one.
“THE Practice Of Castration On Black Male Slaves In The Most Inhumane Manner Altered An Entire Generation As These Men Could Not Reproduce."
Male slaves would work as field workers or guards at the harems. To ensure that they never reproduced in case they got intimate with their fellow female slaves, the men and boys were castrated and made eunuchs in a brutal operation by which the majority would lose their lives in the process.
“The practice of castration on black male slaves in the most inhumane manner altered an entire generation as these men could not reproduce. The Arab masters sired children with the black female slaves. This devastation by the men saw those who survived committing suicide. This development explains the modern black Arabs who are still trapped by history.”
