Saturday, July 01, 2017
Quite a few essential facts are absent
CHARLES RIVER EDITORS – THE EAST
AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE: THE HISTORY AND LEGACY OF THE ARAB SLAVE TRADE AND THE
INDIAN OCEAN SLAVE TRADE – 2017
The title bothered me from the very start. But I wanted to
see what was inside. If we speak of old slave trade bringing Black African
slaves into the vast area covering the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East,
or even the Indian Ocean and the Indian subcontinent, and eventually the rest
of Asia, we do have a problem. At the level of the world per se we also have the
same problem. Slavery developed with the emergence of agriculture and herd
husbandry after the Ice Age, between 12,000 and 5,000 BCE. These new economic
and productive activities required a new division of labor that made people available
when necessary for the crops – cultivation, harvesting and storing. This new
division of labor was harsh and the initiative of individuals was no longer
necessary. What used to be more or less collective work became slave work when the
property of the land and the organization of work was in the hands of a very
narrow minority of “free” people. Slavery as such had nothing to do with Islam.
In fact, it is clearly present in the Bible (Abraham is given his wife’s slave
by his own wife Sara for him to get a son since she, Sara, cannot perform the
service. That’s Ishmael. But God being what he is, he grants a son to Sara
afterwards. That’s Isaac. Then Sara, the wife, asks Abraham to throw the slave
maid of hers and her son Ishmael out into the desert to die of thirst and
hunger. But God being what he is, he saves both the slave mother and the slave
son Ishmael. We know what will happen later. Isaac is the founding figure of the
Jewish and later Christian religions and Ishmael is the founding figure of
Islam. Abraham being common to the three religions.
Plato, Socrates and Aristotle all defended a slave society
in which the slaves were the majority of the population. In Sparta, one day a
year, the free citizens had the right – and duty – to go hunting the slaves normally
working the fields of the city. The free citizens could kill these slaves the
way they wanted and as many as they could. The big empires in the Middle East,
Sumerian, Akkadian, Persian and all other Hittite or Anatolian empires, had a
vast number of slaves. One dynasty of Pharaohs in Egypt is known as the Black
Pharaohs and are the black slaves used as soldiers in Egypt who managed to
seize power for a century or so. The Roman Empire was basically a slave empire.
And the arrival of Christianity with Constantine did not change that. In fact,
it was changed only when the Germanic tribes arrived because they did not
practice that kind of slavery (and the gates of Rome were opened by slaves for
the Germanic invaders to come in during the night) and it is Charlemagne who
introduced the religious reform of the 9th century that will bring
feudalism that rejected slavery by principle, replacing it with serfdom. Black
slaves in all these empires were common and the practice of eunuchs was also
common. Eunuchs were generally abducted at an early age, before puberty most of
the time. They were castrated level to the abdomen and the survivors were
entrusted with the numerous harems of these empires. Roman Emperors, like
Julius Caesar and all the others had private counselors who were slaves most of
the time.
So I was surprised – at least – when I found out that this
book de facto starts slavery in this region of the world as being Arab and
clearly Muslim. There is one allusion to a very old system but no precision. In
fact it sounds as if slavery was started in this region in the 8th
or 9th century in Arab countries to be understood as meaning Muslim
countries, forgetting that Iran, most of Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. are
not Arab but all of them Turkic or Indo-European or Indo-Aryan, not to speak of
Turkey itself and vast areas in the Caucasus, around the Caspian Sea and in
Central Asia including vast areas of western China that were of course not Arab
or Arabic since they spoke Turkic languages.
Yet the book insisted on an element that is essential and without
which the slave trade in the Indian Ocean would never have been what it became
after the 15th century. The Portuguese controlled the vast section
of central and southern Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean:
Congo, central African small areas that have become Rwanda, Uganda, and some
others, Angola, Mozambique, and many islands in the Indian Ocean, plus India of
course, meaning the Indian subcontinent. One of their main activity was transatlantic
slave trade to the Americas, though they were joined there by the Spanish, the English,
the Dutch, the French and a few others. But in the Indian Ocean the Portuguese
were alone for at least three centuries. They used some kind of agreement with
the “Arab” traders, meaning of course the Muslim traders who collected slaves
along the eastern coast of Africa and took them to the Middle East, Egypt
included, the Indian subcontinent and the whole Muslim world. Though a map
shows another slave trade from western Africa to the Maghreb, Libya and Egypt,
the book does not say a word about this one. The land routes from western Africa
(the Mali empire that became officially Muslim in the 13th century)
and from eastern Africa ‘what is today Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia were highly
frequented across the desert and they were the normal routes for future
eunuchs. The boys were operated upon in special stations: survival rate about
50%. No official figures.
The book hints at the old practice going back to before
Christ, even prehistory, of some tribes establishing themselves as dominant (that
will be easy when a Middle East empire or the Roman Legion, etc. will support
them, later the various Muslim countries and their traders and the Portuguese
not to speak of the French in many islands and the English who take over after the
Portuguese in the second half of the 18th century. These dominant
tribes (the Swahili and the Yao, and quite a few more) managed to convert to
Islam, which protected them since a Muslim cannot be enslaved by another
Muslim, and then they raided the inner tribes, seen as less powerful,
especially since they are not provided with modern military means and they have
suffered from this exploitation for millennia (four or five or more), are
systematically kept away from Islam and they provide, at times peacefully with
some kind of an agreement with the raiders, the quota of slaves demanded by the
raiders. It’s only hinted at not explained.
The consequences are that when the English, like Livingstone
arrives with Christian missionary objectives, they will convert these animist
populations to Christianity in order to bring them together and make them
resist the millennia old practice. It is this minority Muslim tribe versus majority
Christian or animist tribes that is at the very basis of today’s tribalism in Africa.
The French and the English when they arrived just kept the dominant tribe in
power, tolerated the slave trade against the majority tribes and little by
little, slowly and painfully, managed in two centuries to bring this trade to
something like a halt. The details on the subject are only trying to save the face
of the English as being the main liberators, forgetting to say that colonialism
took over. It was no longer slave work but colonial work. Not much difference
indeed. Let say some very brutal serfdom.
The book is short on one more element. It alludes to the Code
Noir (there is a Spanish version of it) of Louis XIV. It does not at all take
into account the various practices of the various Christian countries in the Americas.
The French and before them the Spanish with the Inquisition and Royal justice
impose some strict limitations to the practice of slavery in their American
colonies that imposed their Christianization, their marrying in the Catholic Church
and the vast practice of manumission (a slave could buy his freedom because he
or she had some personal income authorized by his or her master, and anyone
could buy the freedom of any slave at any time. That produced the three tier
society of the ex-Spanish or ex-French colonies and territories (including Louisiana).
On the other hand, the Protestants of the Netherlands or Great Britain refused
to recognize the human dimension of slaves, refused to Christianize them and
they imposed a brutal over exploitation and the famous theory of the one-drop-of-black
blood that supposedly makes you Black. Livingstone
was in other words an exception and the book makes one allusion to the Hindu
caste system but does not go as far as saying that the Dalits are nothing but
slaves.
I think this book seems not to have read the following title
that they should read urgently to widen their minds on the subject. “The
Indian Ocean From Admiral Zheng He To Hub And Spoke Container Maritime
Commerce” by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU & Ivan Eve, Kindle Book, ASIN: B01AY2H0JC, January 2016. The first part of the book is on
the subject of slavery in the Indian Ocean. Commentary, review and presentation
at https://www.academia.edu/29122940/A_LONG_JOURNEY_IN_THE_WORLD_IN_THE_MIND_IN_THE_SOUL_OF_MAN
One shortcoming is of course the position of
Muhammad on slavery: he found it when he took over the Arab world at first and
he limited it to non-Muslims and edicted many rules to make it acceptable
though he did not in any way softened the lot of eunuchs or future eunuchs. The
book is totally silent on the point. You find the same limitation in the Mandingo
Charta instated by the first Muslim Malian Emperor in the 13th
century: “In
the early thirteenth century, following a major military victory, the founder
of the Mandingo Empire and the assembly of his wise men proclaimed in Kurukan
Fuga the new Manden Charter, named after the territory situated above the upper
Niger River basin, between present-day Guinea and Mali.” They just
forget to say the victor is Muslim and imposes Islam to the ruling class of the
empire (https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/manden-charter-proclaimed-in-kurukan-fuga-00290). Have a good
trip and remember that Admiral Zheng He was a Muslim and a castrated slave of the
Chinese Emperor.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:26 PM 
