Somali People Were Never Enslaved — Dispelling Reoccuring Myths
If you’re Somali and have spent enough time on social media, especially Twitter, then it’s safe to say that you’ve run into someone spreading the myth that the Somali were once enslaved. This write-up will annihilate that allegation using primary and contemporary source material on our history.
First, we have to establish a distinction between actual ethnic Somali people and the Bantu people who just so happen to live in Somalia. Ethnic Somali are indigenous to the greater Somalia area seen here:
Whereas the Bantu are indigenous to contemporary Nigeria and Cameroon. Through brutal expansion, they were able to conquer central, southern, and southeastern Africa, places they were previously absent from. Now they constitute a permanent majority in said locations.
Now that we know the difference between the Somali (native to the lands they inhabit) and the Bantu (an invasive group that has no business outside of western Africa), we must look to the sources to figure out, which one of these people were enslaved in the horn of Africa.
Here’s what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says:
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Arab slavers armed with muskets and whips plundered those southern regions, capturing and shipping untold numbers of Bantu men, women and children via Zanzibar’s great slave market to the Persian Gulf and Middle East. Some ended up in Somalia, but without a written language, today’s Somali Bantu retain only patchy memories of their early history, told to them through song, dance and oral history
Gwyn Campbell in his book “The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia”:
For instance, in nineteenth-century Somalia, different terms employed to denote slaves included Jareer, Bantu, Mjikenda, Adoon, Habash, Bidde, Sankadhuudhe, Boon, Meddo, and Oogi
Excerpt from “The Somali Bantu: Their History and Culture”:
Many Bantu refugees can trace their origins back to ancestors in southeast African tribes who were enslaved in the 18th century by agents of the Sultanate of Zanzibar
Gerry Mackie in his journal article says:
In 1609 Dos Santos reported that inland from Mogadishu (Somalia) a group has “a custome to sew up their Females, specially their slaves being young to make them unable for conception, which makes these Slaves sell dearer, both for their chastitie, and for better confidence which their Masters put in them”
Page 1746 of “Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience”
Bantu-speaking slaves caprured from the interior in present-day Tanzania and Malawi harvested grain and canon along the Shabelle and Jubba rivers for the Digil and Rahanweyn clans…During the nineteenth century some 50,000 agricultural slaves escaped into the wooded areas of the Shabeelle Valley, where they established permanenr sertlements: others settled in the Jubba Valley. After abolition in 1900 both these areas would become destinations for freed slaves.
So as we can see, it wasn’t the ethnic Somali who were the slaves, but rather the Bantu people who were captured, enslaved, and traded all along. There is not a single source out there, whether in English, Arabic, Portugues, or Turkish that ever claims that Somalis were slaves at any point in history.
