Origins of the African Slave Trade
The annals of antiquity are full of stories about slavery as if it was a natural condition of humankind. Notwithstanding, when we think of slavery today, we often think of the African slave trade. However, slavery at its core is not about race, it’s about indifference. The African slave trade is just one chapter in a book of Man’s inhumanity toward Man. A book that proves the adage that (Homō hominī lupus) man is the wolf of man.
Arab Slave Trade
Much attention has been drawn to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade but not much has been given to the Arab slave trade that preceded it. As far as blacks were concerned, Islam was a double-edged sword. In many ways, blacks of North Africa were the benefactors and beneficiaries of Islam. The Moors would be placed in this group. However, many blacks suffered under Islam particularly those that did not convert. Islam prohibits the enslavement of free Muslims regardless of race and special exceptions were sometimes made for The People of the Book (Jews and Christians).
The denizens of Africa; however, were generally not considered People of the Book. Even though Islam is a religion comprised of many different racial and ethnic groups, it is evident from the writings of Al Jahiz (776–868) and other contemporary black scholars that racial discrimination and stereotypes existed in the Islamic world from its inception. Jahiz, a renowned scholar, went as far as to respond to discrimination in his book entitled: The Superiority in Glory of the Black Race over the White.
The Arab slave trade was established centuries in Africa before the Portuguese arrived in the 15th century. In this regard, Europeans, once again, followed in the footsteps of Islam and the Arabs. It is safe to say that the change in attitudes toward blacks within Islam began with the expansion of their empire. Before the Islamic expansion, slaves on the African continent, for the most part, were prisoners of war and localized without any racial connotation attached. However, as more and more slaves entered Arabia from Africa, a color connotation was attached. Blacks were transported from West Africa across the Sahara and along the Nile River from East Africa to Arabia. Many of the slaves had to walk across the burning sands of the Sahara, thus, leaving a trail of skeletons along the way.
Unlike white slaves from Europe and Semitic slaves from the Middle East, black skin was a Scarlet Letter within some circles of Islam, and many began to use race as a social status. Some went as far as to use the biblical narrative of the curse of Ham to justify the enslavement of black people. Furthermore, it was much easier for white and Semitic slaves to blend into the population and this provided a means for many of them to escape the stigma of slavery. This is somewhat illustrated in the word used for black in Arabia today. White slaves were normally called mamluk while black slaves were called abd, and over time, the word abd ceased to be used to refer to black slaves and was applied to black people.
In the Islamic world, if the mother was a slave then that status would transfer to the child. Arab fathers, however, had the option to free the sons of their slave concubines and many sons of mixed relationships achieved high social standings. The practice of castrating black male slaves virtually assured that the black slave population was limited.
The Arab slave trade continued for centuries even during the late Victorian era when it was illegal in Europe and the Americas. For example, as recent as 1878, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina were major slave-trading hubs. In all fairness, after the abolition of slavery in Europe and the Americas, Europeans, in some cases, tried to stop or impede the Arab slave trade.
Origin of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
The Trans-Atlantic slave trade did not start as a quest to enslave Africans, but rather as an attempt to explore the African continent and to find a route to India and the spice market. When the Muslims conquered Constantinople in 1453, it changed the dynamics of Eastern trade and the need to find alternative routes became paramount. This was the source of Columbus’ voyage in 1492. As in the case of the Arab slave trade, the enslavement of Africans was a product of expansion.
It was the contact with the Moors on the Iberian Peninsula that gave the Portuguese and Spanish a new type of ship, the caravel, capable of making it windward without the use of oars. From 1415 until his death in 1460, Prince Henry the Navigator collected the latest information on sailing techniques and geography, advocated a new Crusade against the Muslims and pushed for exploration. The Portuguese always believed that the quickest route to India was around the horn of Africa. Columbus’ voyage to the New World discovered new lands, flora and fauna hitherto unknown and initiated a race between Spain and Portugal.
In 1494, Pope Alexander VI initiated the Treaty of Tordesillas which divided the lands explored by Spain and Portugal, granting Brazil and Africa to Portugal. This was the opening salvo to African slavery. As more and more European nations began to explore, they followed the paragon established by Spain and Portugal and approved by the Catholic Church.
In the pre-Columbian world, the myth of Prester John, who was believed to reside in Africa, captivated the imagination of Henry the Navigator. It was, however, the capture of the Moorish city of Ceuta in 1415 that started Portugal on its quests for spices and their Christian hero Prester John. Rumors of gold, perhaps driven by the legend of Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage (1324), was also a catalyst for European expansion into Africa. Mansa Musa brought so much gold with him that he suppressed the gold market in the Middle East for 12 years. This gave Europeans the impression that Africa was a land full of gold.
For centuries finding Prester John’s kingdom was one of the causes that united Europeans and he was important to the overall psychology of the Crusades. Letters supposedly written by him were received in Europe with delight and zeal. In their darkest hours, it was the legend of this black hero that gave light to the European continent besieged by fear of conquest. Prester John was indeed their Pygmalion, their ray of sunshine during those days when the Islamic cloud lurked over Europe. To them, he was real and not a figment of their imagination.
So strong was their conviction to Prester John, that the Portuguese explored the African continent in search of his kingdom. Vasco da Gama on his trip to India in 1497 carried a letter for Prester John. However, in the quest for their hero, the Europeans, and the Portuguese in particular, was presented with an interesting racial dilemma. Their expeditions to Africa exposed them to a variety of blacks at a time when there was a growing demand for labor to work the fields of the New World. This virtual limitless supply of labor soon became their black gold.
The availability of black slaves for sale was a fortuitous and unexpected consequence of their search for Prester John and the desire for gold. Over time, their quest for gold and slaves superseded all other desires, and their dreams of finding the kingdom of Prester John were replaced by delusions of grandeur. When the Portuguese established plantations in Brazil, they began to ship slaves directly from Africa to the New World. This, unfortunately, became the paradigm of the future as additional land discoveries by European nations led to the importation of slaves into those regions. The once Gold Coast of Africa was transformed into the Slave Coast.
Ronald Sanders in his book the Lost Tribes and Promised Lands explains this phenomenon.
The assault on the blacks now being begun by Portugal and Spain was in a sense, just a part of the burgeoning vengefulness upon the entire legacy of those civilizations that had once overrun the peninsula from the south and ultimately the east, but in another, the outcome of the attitudes inherited from it. Whatever had been feared or loathed in medieval Spain by the Christians and Muslims alike had come from the deep south. The southern thrust that the Portuguese were now undertaking was the beginning of a voyage into terrifying dark recesses of the Iberian collective unconscious. The farther south their ships took them in the search of an eastward passage, the more the benign black image of Prestor John became obscured under the frightening and then contemptible ones of the Moor at Ceuta and the Guinea slave. [Lost Tribes and Promised Land, p.59]
Basil Davidson in his book entitled: The Lost Cities of Africa delineated a similar view:
If early Portuguese thought of Africa as the land of Prester John, of the gold of Ophir and the Queen of Sheba, marvelous and splendid rich beyond dreams, those afterward would return to another extreme. Africa would become by reputation altogether a land of savage torment, moral and mental darkness, childlike or perverse. [Basil Davidson: The Lost Cities of Africa, p.201]
The influence of Prester John’s legend on the maritime efforts of Europeans particularly the Portuguese should not be underestimated. What often started out as a game of enterprise and friendship between Africans and Europeans quickly transformed into a game of survival. It is most unfortunate that over time slavery became an ingrained part of the African landscape.
A perfect example of this phenomenon was Nzinga Mbemba who wholeheartedly embraced Christianity. He was a very articulate man that became King Alfonso I of the Congo in 1506. With the aid of Portuguese firearms, he expanded his kingdom and provided 3,000 slaves to the Portuguese each year as part of his conquest. In return, he received goods from Portugal and members of his court were educated by the Portuguese and showered with gifts. He and his court dressed like Europeans and acted like them too. There were nuns there to teach them the Bible and life was good.
By 1526, however, Alfonso’s subjects were being enslaved and even some of his noblemen and relatives. He complained to the king of Portugal who he thought was a good friend addressing him as “brother monarch”. He wrote the following regarding the condition of his kingdom: and so great, Sir is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated. … it is our will that in these kingdoms there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them. To which the king of Portugal replied: your kingdom has nothing else to offer and if he wanted to continue receiving goods and services from Portugal than he must continue to supply slaves. Slavery, and all it entailed, not only corrupted the body and soul of Africa, it corrupted the body and soul of humanity. It is estimated that 12 million African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean.
Differences between the two slave trades
The Arab slave trade, although also a stain on humanity, was not as universally brutal as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade for a variety of reasons. For the most part, the Arabs took more women than men and the Europeans took more men than women in inverse proportions(two-thirds of the trans-Atlantic slaves were men, and two-thirds of the Arab slaves were women). The women were used as domestics or concubines, and the male slaves were often used as bodyguards and servants. However, there is documentation of black slaves working in the Saharan salt mines in harsh and inhumane conditions. Although the Arab slave trade lasted far longer than the European slave trade, there are not as many people of African descent in Arabia as there are in the Western Hemisphere.
There was, however, a distinct difference between the Arab and the Trans-Atlantic slave trades. Slaves in America were treated as livestock, and after the slave trade was ended by Thomas Jefferson in 1807, the demand for domestic slaves increased as a result of cotton and an expanding America. Moreover, Americans drew a sharp line of demarcation based solely on race, to the extent that if you were not 15/16 white you were still a slave.
The line was drawn so sharply that even if 15/16 was comprised of descendants of the master as in the case of Thomas Jefferson’s and Sally Hemings’ progeny, it could not be knowingly crossed. This line did not exist among the Arabs. For example, Umar, the most powerful and influential caliph and companion of the prophet Mohammad was the grandson of a black mother, something unimaginable in ante-bellum or post-bellum America until the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008. In some cases, within the Arab world, the color of the skin did not matter, particularly if you were someone like Mansa Musa that had something to offer. Moreover, Muslims often point to Bilal ibn Ribah (Bilal) a revered black companion of the Prophet Muhammad and the first Muezzin, to illustrate the non-racial aspect of Islam.
Conclusion
The Sahara Desert was a barrier, and this geographically isolated many of the African tribes from advancements, such as guns, ships, etc. that were developed outside of Africa. This placed Africans on the continent at a severe disadvantage. Arabs and Europeans stood on the shoulders of antiquity and were the beneficiaries of fallen empires such as Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome that came before them. Furthermore, the Muslim expansion set the stage for European exploration by introducing, the compass, and gunpowder from the Far East and by laying the foundations of the Scientific Revolution that further enhanced European dominance around the globe.
In a nutshell, it could be said that the exploitation of black people in Africa was a cancer that spread from the Islamic world into the European world. This was driven by the demands for labor in the New World. There were, African tribes that collaborated with the Arabs and Europeans, not so much as to provide slaves from their tribe, but prisoners of war from their internal conflicts. Africa and its inhabitants were trapped between the global expansion of Europe and the Arab expansion that preceded it. What is often overlooked is how much slavery was engrained into the economies and politics of Europe and America.
