Arab Enslavement of Africans

[Akyeame Kwame]

Arab Slavery of Africans

http://allafrica.com/stories/200509260797.html

Arab Slavery of Africans

New Era (Windhoek)

September 26, 2005

ARAB-led slavery of Africans is important because it
affects directly contemporary Afro-Arab relations and
is complicated by the fact that both Africans and
Arabs frequently treat it as an issue to be hushed-up
because of the embarrassing reaction it generates. It
is a historical reality which differentiates the fate
and the aspirations of Africans on the one hand, and
Arabs on the other, in their different attempts to
achieve Arab unity and African unity respectively.
Both these objectives, if pursued democratically,
would assist in the emancipation and development of
the two peoples.

While the truth is uncomfortable, it is impossible to
move forward towards historical reconciliation through
"holocaust denial" or by "collective amnesia". Denying
the truth of what Helmi Sharawy of the Arab Research
Centre for Arab-African Studies and Documentation
(ARAASD) Cairo, Egypt calls the "ambiguous relations'
of the Afro-Arab cultural interchange in the
Borderlands, will not assist reconciliation. For more
than a thousand years the Sahara has been the melting
point of the two cultures. Slavery was generalized in
the Borderlands, stretching from Mauritania on the
Atlantic, westwards through the Sahel to Sudan on the
Red Sea, with slaves being captured from black Africa
and taken, often on foot, northwards through the Sahel
into Arabia and out of Africa. Whereas the
trans-Atlantic slave trade has been the focus of the
on-going struggle for reparations, Adwok Nyaba states
that Arab enslavement of Africans "has either been
ignored, minimized or completely rejected on false
account that the Arabs either were 'brothers in Islam'
equally colonized and oppressed by the west or
participated in the decolonisation struggles of the
African people".

Adwok states that slavery of black people in the Nile
Basin began in earnest with the defeat of the
Mamelukes of Egypt by the Ottoman Empire in 1517 and
that the commodification and merchandisation of the
slaves route down the Nile to Southern Europe, Arabia,
Persia and China is traced to the first quarter of the
nineteenth century.

Under Arab slavery men were castrated and the women
were used as sex-machines, so that over generations
the offspring of the enslaved women merged into
general Arab society, albeit into an inferior
caste-type class of sub-species. Today we have slave
descendants across the Sahara, such as the Harantines
in Mauritania, to the ebony blacks in Arabia.

This is because the slaves were so many that the
slavers could not ethnically dilute them into café au
lait. Castration and male culling is practised.

Mekuria Bulcha estimates that over 17 million Africans
were sold to the Middle East and Asia between the
sixth and twentieth centuries. In Bulcha's view the
distinction between western and Islamic slavery is
largely figurative. Both arrangements involved
violence and cruelty as well as the devaluation of
humanity.

Africans in the Middle East and Asia remain 'a
disjointed diaspora', although records indicate a
persistent desire amongst them to repatriate.

Arab slavery is still ongoing in Africa in the
Afro-Arab Borderlands. Much of the attention to
contemporary Arab slavery of Africans focuses on Sudan
and Mauritania but from Mali, Algeria, Niger, Libya
and Chad filter through reports about slave practices.

The subject of Arab slavery of Africans is one, which
many, including the African states, would prefer to
have buried and about which there is an unspoken
understanding that Africans should remain silent. The
practice has existed for 1 400 years, but both
Africans and Arabs, for different reasons exhibit
insensitivity to it. Muslim academics, both Arab and
African, shy away from the Arab slave trade. Islamic
leaders are profoundly defensive on the issue.

Ronald Segal in his book Islam's Black Slaves: The
Other Diaspora, explains that the Islamic slave trade
began some eight centuries before the Atlantic trade
and was conducted on a different scale providing
slaves more often for domestic - including sex - and
military service. In the Arab-led slave system, some
slaves achieved positions of authority, a few became
rulers. In Segal's view, because of specific spiritual
teachings, Islam was generally more humane than the
West in its treatment of slaves and in its willingness
to bestow manumission, although the process of
captivity, subjugation and transportation was
extremely cruel. Segal looks at the appeal of Islam to
African-American communities and the denial by some
black Muslim leaders like Louis Farrakan of the
continued existence of African slavery and oppression
in contemporary Mauritania and Sudan. An interesting
point made by Segal in an interview was that "whereas
the gender ratio of slaves in the Atlantic trade was
two males to every female, in the Islamic trade it was
two females to every male." It needs to be noted that
the Arab slave trade concentrated particularly on
children.

The Arabs focused and still do on children, because
children are easier to re-educate and Arabise. They
are also easier to capture and transport to Arabia.

With Islam and slavery came the Arabisation of the
African. The Arab conquest of North Africa and parts
of the Nile Valley spreading their influence
throughout the Sahel in the seventh century planted
confusion in the minds of Africans. In the Sudan more
than anywhere else, profession of Islam and speaking
the Arabic language made one an Arab. Many African
ethnic communities in Sudan, such as Borgo, Berti amd
Maali fell victim to this deception. In the 1960s
these zealous African Muslims were used to fight the
Southern Sudanese. The relentless struggle of the
Southern Sudanese against oppression, including
enslavement by northerners, has spread to other
marginalized and peripheral peoples in the west,
centre and east of Sudan.

When the first war ended in Sudan with South Sudan
winning a measure of self-rule through the Addis Ababa
Agreement of 1972, this left in the cold the Arabised
Africans who had fought on behalf of the Arab
dominated northern political elite in the name of
national unity. The current genocide in the Darfur
region of Western Sudan, where the Khartoum government
has used a tactic of ethnic cleansing by arming an
Arab nomad militia to attack African farmlands,
pushing Africans off their land, continues the Arab
push southwards, which is part of the Arab national
expansionist project dating back centuries, which has
seen Africans pushed southwards from the Mediterranean
coast into the arid Sahara area. Arabia in general
characterizes events in Darfur as 'tribal feuds'.

On the issue of reparations for Arab-led slavery in
Africa, the thesis of Adwok Nyaba presented at the
Conference on Arab-Led Slavery of Africans, convened
on the 22nd February 2003 in Johannes-burg by the
Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society
(CASAS), Cape Town, South Africa and the Drammeh
Institute of New York, USA, is that reparations is a
political issue with a legal objective, requiring
mobilization and common purpose.

A final declaration was published, as will be the
proceedings of the Conference.

Conference endorsed reparations and called for a
civilization dialogue between the Arab and African
nations. The Sudan Commission for Human Rights (SCHR)
pursues reparations for Arab-led slavery in the Sudan,
as an appropriate remedy. The World Conference Against
Racism and its NGO Forum added their voices to those
seeking reparations for African slavery. There are no
legal rules governing the law of reparations.

The study of other such initiatives indicates first
extensive legal posturing creating a powerful moral
climate supporting reparations, thus shaping public
opinion - as the primary stage in the campaign for
reparations.

[Akyeame Kwame]

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