The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (17 page)

MIDEAST SLAVE TRADE

Death toll:
18.5 million (18 million from Africa and 0.5 million from Europe)

Rank:
8

Type:
commercial exploitation

Broad dividing line:
Arabs enslaving Africans, mostly

Time frame:
seventh to nineteenth centuries

Location:
Middle East

Who usually gets the most blame:
Arab slave traders, African middlemen, Barbary pirates

Summarized in two words:
Eunuchs . . . ick

Economic factors:
slaves, gold, salt

Background: Slavery in General

Throughout most of recorded history, almost every person was legally subordinate to someone else. Children were at the mercy of their father; husbands ruled over their wives; commoners cringed under the nobility. Most state-level societies have had formal hierarchies connecting all individuals. The Romans maintained complex patron-client relationships with interrelated obligations among all free persons—citizens, foreigners, and freedmen. European feudalism had many layers of lord and vassal, while serfs were bonded to the land.

Slaves were the most extreme type of subordinate. While most members of a lord-peasant or patron-client relationship had reciprocal rights and duties, the master-slave relationship was simpler and entirely one-sided. A master could do anything he wanted to his slave, and a slave
could do nothing without the permission of his master. It was totally legal for a master to beat a slave to death well into the eighteenth century, even among peoples we would normally consider civilized, such as Virginians.
¹
On the scale of personhood, running from serf to freeholder to lord, a slave was at the bottom, one step below mule.
*
On the plus side, slavery was not widely considered a permanent condition.

Most societies didn’t go out of their way to get slaves; they merely acquired them accidentally, and they were often at a loss as to what to do with them. Usually, a person was enslaved only after a string of abnormally bad luck. Being captured in a war, convicted of a crime, abandoned as a child, and taken to pay a debt were the customary paths into bondage, and for the first three, the alternative to slavery was usually death.

Everyday housework created the steadiest demand for slaves, but as the supply of slaves fluctuated with the fortunes of wars, there might sometimes be a glut. In those cases, three of the customary dumping grounds for surplus, expendable people were mines, prostitution, and human sacrifice, depending on the culture.

In some societies, the economy got along fine with a minimum number of slaves. In medieval Europe, for example, there was no shortage of labor; land was the resource in short supply, so moving enslaved farm workers into a region didn’t boost output. On the other hand, in some slave-saturated societies, such as nineteenth-century Sudan, every household that rose above the barest poverty owned at least one slave girl to wash, sew, cook, and clean.

Demand for slaves occasionally surged, sending slave traders out to the fringes of civilization, wherever large populations existed without strong armies to protect the people from being kidnapped. The most famous surge filled the labor shortage that followed the discovery of America, but I will discuss that later (see “Atlantic Slave Trade”). For much of history, the biggest markets for slaves—mostly girls needed for housework—were the wealthy kingdoms of the Middle East, and the deepest reservoir of available people was Africa. Over the centuries, millions of slaves were shipped out from seaports along the East African coast and on dese
rt caravans crossing the Sahara.

East Africa

The slave trade along Africa’s east coast goes back as far as we have records. In the days of the Pharaohs, shipments of new slaves flowed steadily up the Red Sea to Egypt, most likely from Eritrea and Somalia. By the tenth century, Arab sailors had established a chain of trading posts down the African coast as far south as Kilwa (now in Tanzania). Many of these posts were offshore islands that had as little contact with the mainland as possible. By 1300, the southern reach of Arab traders had extended to Sofala (now in Mozambique).

After the Portuguese found their way around the southern cape of Africa in 1493, they quickly used their sup
erior firepower to bundle all of these slave stations into their rapidly expanding empire. However, in 1653, a fleet from the southern Arabian sultanate of Oman, armed with weaponry equal to anything the Europeans had, captured the northern slave ports. With one foot in Arabia and the other in Africa, Oman became a bipolar nation based on the slave trade, anchored at the island of Zanzibar in Tanzania.

In 1780, the Omanis captured the rival slave market of Kilwa and diverted Kilwa’s trade to their own routes. By 1
834, sixty-five hundred slaves per year were being exported from Zanzibar. By the 1840s, the number had doubled.
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In 1859, nineteen thousand slaves were recorded arriving at Zanzibar from the interior. After 1840, the ruler of Oman moved his court from the Arabian Peninsula to the richer and more cosmopolitan city of Zanzibar, which became independent of its Arab trading partner in 1845. By 1871 the sultan derived a fourth of his income from the slave trade.
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It wasn’t until the European exploration of Africa in the nineteenth century that detailed descriptions of slaving in the heart of Africa emerged. Every day, somewhere deep in Africa, slavers would select a vulnerable village and creep into striking distance. With a sudden attack, the raiders shot down any men capable of resistance and seized the women and children to be herded off to begin their new life of servitude.

On the exploratory safaris that opened up the Dark Continent, Europeans usually followed the slave trails into Africa, which were often the only trade routes that connected the coasts and the interior. Christian missionaries heading deeper into unexplored Africa encountered long columns of slaves, mostly women, scarred by whips, chaine
d by the neck, being driven toward the coasts. Explorers retracing paths they had followed on an earlier trip often found districts that had lost half of their villages to slavers since the last visit. A British superintendent of missionaries estimated that “four or five lives were lost for every slave delivered safe at Zanzibar.”
⁴

By the 1860s, the African slaver Tippu Tip was plundering an area deep in the interior, beyond the African lakes in the eastern Congo. His reach became a virtual kingdom, predatory and unstoppable, pillaging up and down the Congo River until Belgians carving out their own empire bought him off. In Kenya, near Lake Rudolf, slavers operated in the 1890s until the British established a protectorate over the region. One European reported that “an Arab who has lately returned from Lake Nyasa informed me that he has traveled for seventeen days through a country covered with ruined towns and villages . . . and where now no living soul is to be seen.”
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In the late nineteenth century, worldwide demand for ivory surged, as did the price, which temporarily made slaves more valuable as porters to carry the elephant tusks to the coast, rather than as a distinct commodity. Porters were taken from inland villages and sold overseas when their job was done.
⁶

To feed the slave caravans crossing the Tsavo River region in Kenya, traders hunted the big game into local extinction. With their usual food sources gone and caravan trails littered with the bodies of exhausted slaves, the local lions quickly discovered that humans were good eating. Then after the slaves stopped coming, the lions of Tsavo satisfied their newfound taste for humans by eating dozens of railroad workers, which temporarily halted the expansion of British control in the colony. In 1898 the most brazen man-eaters were killed; the wild game returned eventually, and the remaining lions went back to avoiding people.
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Arriving at the coasts, the slaves were delivered to traders for shipment overseas. A British visitor described the slaves at a market on the Indian Ocean in the late 1860s: “. . . all young boys and girls, some of them mere babies . . . Skeletons, with a diseased skin drawn tight over them, eyeballs left hideously prominent by the falling away of the surrounding flesh, chests shrunk and bent, joints unnaturally swelled and horribly knotty by contrast with the wretched limbs between them, voices dry and hard, and ‘distantly near’ like those of a nightmare . . .”
⁸

Small Arab trading vessels ferried the slaves from East Africa to the Middle East. A British captain on anti-slave patrol
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stopped a local boat carrying slaves on the Indian Ocean. Male slaves were chained above decks, in the open. Below decks were the women. “On the bottom of the [boat] was a pile of stones as ballast, and on these stones, without even a mat, were twe
nty-three women huddled together, one or two with infants in their arms. These women were literally doubled up, there being no room to sit erect.”
⁹

North Africa

When the Arabs introduced camels into North Africa in the Middle Ages, it became a lot easier to cross the Sahara and see what lay on the other side. Those who made the trip usually came back with slaves. Throughout the Middle Ages, the nomadic Bedouin in the Sahara raided the settled communities along the southern edge of the desert, in the band of savannah known as the Sahel, gathering slaves to be hauled to markets on the Mediterranean. By 1300, however, the Sahel had developed a line of powerful kingdoms, such as Ghana and Mali, along the edge of the desert that could stand up to the Bedouin. Unfortunately, rather than forming a barrier to slave raids into deeper parts of Africa, these kingdoms became the new middlemen, raiding farther south for fresh slaves to send north.

When raiding didn’t work, the Bedouin traded salt they found in the desert for slaves and gold from the Sa
hel. From the scattered records we have, it seems to have been a thriving business. In 1353, the Muslim travel writer Ibn Battuta returned to the Mediterranean coast on a caravan hauling 600 female slaves.

By the 1700s, at least 1,500 slaves per year were being taken north, the number peaking at as many as 3,000 per year in the late 1800s. As British warships closed off the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century, the slaves that would have been sent to America were sent north instead, across the desert. Because Libya remained free of European control longer than any other stretch of North African coast, Benghazi and Tripoli became the major outlets of the Saharan slave trade in the nineteenth century.

By the late 1850s, slaves accounted for two-thirds of the value carried on all of the caravans across the
Sahara.
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The trade was so lucrative that most rulers would use any excuse to arrest a subject and sell her into slavery.