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Africa Focus: Arab Slavery of Africans

Posted on Wednesday, September 28 @ 01:00:34 AST Topic: Slavery
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 caf 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

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