The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade

John Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134179862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This compelling text sheds light on the important but under studied trans-Saharan slave trade. The author uncovers and surveys this, the least-noticed of the slave trades out of Africa, which from the seventh to the twentieth centuries quielty delievered almost as many black Africans into foreign servitude as did the far busier, but much briefer Atlantic and East African trades.

Illuminating for the first time a significant, but ignored subject, the book supports and widens current scholarly examination of Africans' essential role in the enslavement of fellow-Africans and their delivery to internal, Atlantic or trans-Saharan markets.

1 Slaves, slavery and the Sahara

A state of subordination, and certain inequalities of rank and condition, are inevitable in every stage of civil society; but when this subordination is carried to so great a length, that the persons and services of one part of the community are entirely at the disposal of another part, it may then be denominated a state of slavery; and in this condition of life, a great body of the Negro inhabitants of Africa have continued from the most early period of their history; with this aggravation, that their children are born to no other inheritance.

Mungo Park

Many people have worked unpaid as the slaves, dependants or bondsmen of others. To sell one’s labour, perhaps as a so-called ‘wage slave’, is a modern habit. Slavery may only have emerged with the agro-pastoral revolution, for hunter-gatherers need no servile assistants. Common to many places, eras and cultures, slavery was taken for granted as a usual, perhaps regrettable, but very necessary social condition; so, too, were the common risks, especially for travellers, of kidnap or capture for enslavement or ransom.¹

The belief that slavery and the slave trade were morally wrong began to gain wide acceptance only with the British movement for abolition in the late eighteenth century. But the changes in public opinion that were to make slavery and slave trade abolition a popular ideology of Victorian Britain were largely confined to the black slavery of the Americas and the trans- Atlantic slave trade that supplied it. British Atlantic slavers had, after all, been by far the most successful for some two centuries, and Britain was the first to make amends by halting its slave traffic. Opinion has been so well formed that American slavery and the associated Atlantic slave trade are in the popular imagination still the sole, reprehensible models for so many other, similar but unknown or disregarded practices of slaving or slavery from different times and places. Thus far less is understood, known or acknowledged of slavery in the Islamic World, of its supply with captives from Europe, Asia and Africa, and especially the trade in black slaves across the Sahara that lasted until well into the twentieth century, if not the twenty-first.

Whether by capture, purchase or birth, a slave is a property owned by, and in the power of, another person. As a chattel, the slave lacks freedom or personal rights. Essentially he is an outsider whose separation from kin and community deepens his powerlessness. Thus a newly bought slave is like a helpless, new-born child, starting life afresh, with identity and social position defined solely through the master.² Indeed, the Ahaggar Tuareg of the central Sahara, whose slaves are ‘the fictive children of the master’,³ even claim that ‘without the master, the slave does not exist’.⁴

The enslavement of outsiders has usually been a forceful exploitation of human resources. Unless they had remarkable looks, or had skills or education, or had survived the eunuch-maker’s crude surgery, African slaves were usually traded as raw, unimproved goods. So long as they were enmeshed in protracted and often complex slave-making, marshalling, marketing and delivery systems, most black trade slaves were simply treated as goods in transit. But when at last sold to final owners as robust labour for the mines or plantations of the Americas, or as soldiers, domestics and/or sexual partners in the Islamic World, they had to be ‘seasoned’, moulded to their new working, social, religious and cultural environments. ‘Slaves were seen as so much malleable material, easily deprived of form, and easily shaped to the master’s will.’⁵ Force and other forms of coercion would be used in this process, especially with male slaves. Muslim slave-buyers, in particular, preferred to bring young, untrained girls and boys into the closed environment of the Islamic household. There they could be given the necessary practical training and religious instruction as future adult members of a properly regulated Muslim (or sometimes Jewish) home. Free sexual access to these domestic slaves marked them off from all other people, as well as their juridical classification as property.

Slaves were kept because they were useful; they were sexually available; versatile; mobile; capable of supporting and sometimes reproducing themselves. They could make up for scarce human resources in a particular society, being given work or military duties free people could or would not do. Depending on age, sex, appearance and skills, they might be valuable, marketable investments and redeemable assets, perhaps to be given as tribute or presents, and often conferring prestige on their rich or otherwise important owners: ‘wealth in people was often thought more important than wealth in property’.⁶ Yet the evidence suggests that existing slave populations were only maintained, let alone increased, by a constant supply of fresh captives, for many slaves failed to reproduce themselves.⁷ The most notable exception was British North America (the later USA) where ‘it is a commonplace that the slave population was . . . the only one to reproduce itself and even grow’.⁸ The trade supplying slave societies or slave-owning societies usually failed fully to meet their demands, and only rarely dumped surplus slaves on them. It has been estimated that the ‘service life’ of a slave in Islam (the time between final purchase and death or manumission) was a mere seven years (when a slave’s accumulated labour was supposed to match his purchase price). This implies that about 15 per cent of the existing slave pool had to be renewed every year just to maintain numbers.⁹ Slave communities in the Islamic World were constantly eroded by early deaths in alien climates and disease environments; by poor treatment and living conditions; by the freedom of children born of free fathers and slave women (for, in contrast to common American practice, no Muslim father could have a slave child); and by manumission (but in both Islam and Jewry the freed slave still often depended on the former master).

The first ‘modern’ people to create this constant demand for large numbers of foreign slaves were the Arabs ‘and their light-skinned converts to Islam from Morocco to Iran’. This demand lasted from the seventh century until, in some places, well into the twentieth.¹⁰ Once established, the Islamic Caliphal empire, dominating trade and communications between the three Old World continents, drew on slaves from beyond the frontiers of Islam, where jihad (holy war) was legitimately waged against heathens rather than Christian or Jewish infidels.¹¹ For many centuries the peoples of inner Asia and Europe (especially the pagan Slavs from whom the very word slave derives) were main sources of captives. But for the Islamic World the most lasting and seemingly limitless slave reservoir was sub-Saharan Africa, where slavery was endemic and where surplus slaves were readily available for export by the Red Sea, down the Nile Valley, or across the Sahara.

The Arab and wider Islamic Worlds needed slaves for sundry economic and social roles.¹² There was some heavy male slave labour to be done; some regimes sometimes recruited black slave armies or corps of black slave guards; and some male slaves became the trusted agents of their masters. But both North Africa and the Middle East normally lacked the great agricultural estates, the latifundia of Roman type, or American-style plantations, worked only by slave-gangs. Thus the main demand for slaves in the Islamic World was for women and girls as household servants, entertainers and/or as concubines. ‘The most common and enduring purpose for acquiring slaves in the Arab World was to exploit them for sexual purposes.’¹³ This seems reasonable when it is accepted (and the slave trade returns of nineteenth-century British consular officials in North Africa and the Sahara confirm) that about two-thirds of slaves taken across the desert were women and girls, either to be sold singly, or to be presented in a group to the appropriate authority as tribute, a tax settlement or a gift.¹⁴

Slavery continued as an economic institution so long as owners could profit from slave labour, after the costs of daily subsistence, and the original purchase price, had been met. Such, at least, may have been the case in fully fledged slave societies where slave labour underpinned the basic economy. But few slaves were economically productive in the slave-owning societies of Islam. In Muslim North Africa, the military, labouring and domestic slaves (both black Africans imported across the Sahara and white Europeans from Mediterranean Christendom) made scant contribution to the economy. (Exceptions were perhaps southern Morocco and the western Sahara and Sahel.) Wealth was generated mainly by other forms of free or dependent labour: by small-scale cultivators or, in the southern oases, by a class of debased black serfs, the harratin; by nomadic and semi-nomadic tribal herders and their family slaves; by merchants, traders and pedlars; and by artisans and craftsmen (many of them Jews or Christian renegades). The reluctance of women, at least in the medieval Islamic–Jewish societies of Egypt and neighbouring lands, to go into service, and particularly domestic service, is noted by S.D. Goitein in his monumental study based on the documents of the Cairo geniza, A Mediterranean Society. Thus ‘the female slaves formed a vital section of the working population, insofar as they provided domestic help, a type of work shunned by free women . . . the larger households could hardly do without [such] domestic help.’¹⁵ Berber women slaves were valued for housework; black women were considered docile (‘born to slavery’), robust and excellent wet-nurses; Greeks could be trusted with precious things around the house.¹⁶ Such slaves and concubines, unlike the slave-gangs of the Americas, may have made domestic life easier and the choice of sexual partner more varied in the middle-class homes of North Africa and the Middle East, but they contributed little to the local economy or the processes of long-term capital accumulation.

While not usually put to productive work, slaves in the Islamic World enabled their owners ‘to enjoy the comfort afforded by having a large domestic staff, kept under strict control’. Owners apparently could rely not only on the tacit consent and cooperation of most of their slaves but, as slave-owners, they were assured the moral sanction of public opinion, custom and Islam in their dealings with them, including sexual relations.¹⁷ The Koran recognises that slavery in principle satisfies religious scruples, while St Augustine accepts that slavery is contrary to basic human equality, but as a consequence of sin it is tolerable as an institution.¹⁸ Thus Muslims, like Christians, could readily justify the enslavement of pagan Africans as a means of leading them from the darkness of ignorance into the enlightenment and community of the true faith. African slaves shipped to Christian (and particularly Roman Catholic) destinations were routinely baptised and given Christian names on embarkation or as they arrived in the Americas. Those exported from pagan Africa to the Islamic World sooner or later became Muslims, to a greater or lesser degree.¹⁹

Under sharia law, new slaves could be recruited only by birth in slavery or by capture in war. Muslims could not enslave fellow-Muslims: a Muslim thus reduced to slavery suffered a grievous injustice, but a slave who became a Muslim remained a slave: all depended on the sequence of events. The status of a non-Muslim slave who converted was not altered by his Islam.²⁰ Nevertheless, even if slavery in the Islamic World was more a matter of religion than race, Muslim slave-traders in sub-Saharan Africa were sometimes unable to resist the temptation of enslaving free black Muslims merely because they were black. For in the Sudan,²¹ where Islamisation was in places so gradual that it still continues, the elusive frontiers between the Dar al-Islam (The House of Islam) and the as yet unconquered Dar al-Harb (literally, The House of War) for centuries marked off those benighted lands where enslavement by whatever means (war, raiding, kidnapping, punishment, buying or barter) was a licit activity. Thus ‘in the Muslim view, slavery becomes a simile for the heathen condition – a symbolic representation of the very antithesis of Islam’.²² Even the great fourteenth-century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun believed that negroes were submissive to slavery because ‘they have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals’.²³

In Islam, slaves may have been ‘a mere commodity generally ranking with the domestic animals’, or in Moroccan society could be ‘perceived as beasts with the faculty of communicating and being believers’.²⁴ Thus some of those kept at the great religious centre at Smara in the western Sahara in the late nineteenth century lived in open pens with the goats and camels.²⁵ But slavery in the Islamic World was usually very different from the harsh mine or plantation slavery of the Americas, and a strong case has always been made for its benign face. The slave in Islam had the same spiritual value and eternal expectations as the free man, although, unless emancipated, he had simply to resign himself to a lifetime’s inferior status. While Islamic law and practice made no provision for the abolition of slavery or the slave trade, Islam did try ‘to moderate the institution and mitigate its legal and moral aspects’, even if there were often gulfs between doctrine and practice.²⁶ The Koran accepts the existence of the institution of slavery but refers only rarely to it, mostly stressing the merits of manumission.²⁷ Koranic references urging real kindness towards slaves, and the virtues of manumission attributed to the Prophet and his companions in the hadith – ‘do not forget that they are your brothers’ – effectively applied to Muslim slaves only. Most slaves, and especially the females, no doubt enjoyed such prescribed treatment after they had been bought to be kept by final owners, and had by then become at least nominal Muslims, with a re-sale value that in some respects also protected them from severe maltreatment. But there were clearly many exceptions to the norm, and wide ranges of living conditions and treatment. On their long trek to their point of final sale, many slaves had seen the malign face of Muslim slavery, with a level of mistreatment in every way comparable with the worst excesses of the Atlantic trade. Such was the common experience of the so-called ‘trade slaves’ – all those unfortunates enmeshed in the long transition from point of first capture to final sale. For it was an established fact that ‘trade slaves’ were the worst used of all. The gaggles of slaves forced across the Sahara with large or small northbound caravans were in the absolute power of nominally Muslim slave-drivers who had themselves to contend with all the hardships and dangers of desert travel. Such guardians were hardly likely to show the same benign face as the indulgent masters of well-appointed bourgeois Islamic households of assimilated slave domestics and concubines.²⁸ Slaves physically and mentally scarred by their recent experiences could only expect better conditions and treatment once

they had been bought to be kept, and could then start the processes of assimilation into a new social and cultural host-environment.²⁹ Many paid a very high price indeed before they were able to enjoy the vaunted mildness of Muslim domestic slavery. For black men, women and children forced across the Sahara, such ‘enjoyment’ was reserved for those who first survived the extreme trials of that rite of passage under the mostly malign handling of Muslim slave-drivers.

By the time slaves reached their final point of sale in North Africa or the Levant, they were already nominal Muslims with at least some Arabic, for there were no buyers for a ‘pagan’ slave with no known speech. The slavedealers had ensured that the male slaves were circumcised as necessary and that all slaves had been given Arabic names. ‘These names were often peculiar to slaves and tended to have meanings which were redolent of happiness, good fortune and favour from God.’³⁰ Such, at least, seems to have been the practice in modern times; but in the High Middle Ages (tenth– thirteenth centuries) there was apparently less concern for slaves’ religion. Thus Goitein has found that ‘the Islamic injunction that no one should be converted to any religion except Islam was [then] largely disregarded. Many male and female slaves must have been baptised to Judaism.’³¹

Yet after their capture and enslavement, pagan Africans’ introduction to and instruction in Islam were at best cursory and misleading. Probably the first Muslims they met in inner Africa were raiders and traders on essentially temporal slaving campaigns, whatever their religious justification for their actions might have been. Such freebooters were unlikely to have been much concerned with ...