Slavery in Africa.

« The spread of Islam from Arabia into Africa after the religion’s founding in the 7th century AD affected the practice of slavery and slave trading in West, Central, and East Africa.

Arabs had practiced slave raiding and trading in Arabia for centuries prior to the founding of Islam, and slavery became a component of Islamic traditions.Both the Qur'an (Koran) (the sacred scripture of Islam) and Islamic religious law served to codify and justify the existence of slavery.

As Muslim Arabs conquered theirway westward across North Africa in the 7th and 8th centuries, their victorious leaders rewarded themselves with Berber captives, most of whom were eventuallyenrolled in Muslim armies.

Over time, large segments of North Africa’s Berber population converted to Islam.

The religion spread to the camel herders of the SaharaDesert, who were in contact with black Africans south of the Sahara and who traded small numbers of black slaves.

Muslim Arabs expanded this trans-Saharan slavetrade, buying or seizing increasing numbers of black Africans in West Africa, leading them across the Sahara, and selling them in North Africa.

From there, most ofthese slaves were exported to far-off Asian destinations such as the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia (in present-day Turkey), Arabia, Persia (present-day Iran), andIndia. The trans-Saharan slave trade grew significantly from the 10th to the 15th century, as vast African empires such as Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Kanem-Bornu developedsouth of the Sahara and marshaled the trade.

Arab slave raiders also penetrated south, up the Nile River to present-day Ethiopia, capturing thousands of slaves andsending them down the Nile to Egypt.

Over the course of more than a thousand years, the trans-Saharan slave trade saw the movement of at least 10 million enslavedmen, women, and children from West and East Africa to North Africa, the Middle East, and India.

The slaves and their descendants contributed to the harems, royalhouseholds, and armies of the Arab, Turkish, and Persian rulers in those regions. Also, by the 9th century, seafaring Muslims from Arabia and Persia had made their way down the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa, obtaining African slaves in portsfrom Mogadishu (in present-day Somalia) to Sofala (in present-day Mozambique) and conveying them to western Asian cities to work.

The culture of the East Africancoastal regions was strongly influenced by Arab and Persian traders, many of whom intermarried with Africans, thus producing the Swahili people and culture.

Betweenthe 9th and the 13th centuries, this Arab-Persian-Swahili population established cities and city-states along the East African coast.

These cities and states captured orpurchased slaves from the East African interior for domestic and agricultural tasks.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, as plantation agriculture developed in the region, theEast African slave trade increased dramatically. Scholars’ opinions differ on the issue of the long-term effects of Islam on African slavery.

Some believe that Islamic law helped regulate slavery, thus limiting its abuses;these scholars often argue that because Islam encouraged the freeing of slaves upon their master’s death, it increased instances of emancipation.

Other scholarsbelieve that Islam led to the expansion of slavery, arguing that at the time that slavery was growing in the parts of Africa coming under Islamic influence, slavery wasdeclining in most of medieval Europe. Between the 7th and the 15th century, the trans-Saharan and East African slave trades spurred the gradual expansion of slavery within Africa.

The slave tradescontributed to the development of powerful African states on the southern fringes of the Sahara and in the East African interior.

The economies of these states weredependent on slave trading.

Neighboring states competed with one another for trade, leading to wars, which in turn led to the capture of more slaves.

Slave raiding inWest, East, and Central Africa became more common and wide-ranging.

When European explorers and traders arrived in West Africa beginning in the 15th century,they found and began using well-established slave-trade networks.

While the trans-Saharan and East African slave trades continued until the early 20th century, theywere overshadowed by the Atlantic slave trade after the 15th century.

The Atlantic slave trade dwarfed the trans-Saharan and East African trades in terms of volume ofexport, impact on African practices of slavery, and lasting effect on Africa in general. B The Atlantic Slave Trade The Atlantic slave trade developed after Europeans began exploring and establishing trading posts on the Atlantic (west) coast of Africa in the mid-15th century.

Thefirst major group of European traders in West Africa was the Portuguese, followed by the British and the French.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, these Europeancolonial powers began to pursue plantation agriculture in their expanding possessions in the New World (North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean islands),across the Atlantic Ocean.

As European demand grew for products such as sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton, and as more New World lands became available forEuropean use, the need for plantation labor increased. West and west central African states, already involved in slave trading, supplied the Europeans with African slaves for export across the Atlantic.

Africans tended to livelonger on the tropical plantations of the New World than did European laborers (who were susceptible to tropical diseases) and Native Americans (who were extremelysusceptible to “Old World” diseases brought by the Europeans from Europe, Asia, and Africa).

Also, enslaved men and women from Africa were inexpensive by Europeanstandards.

Therefore, Africans became the major source, and eventually the only source, of New World plantation labor. The Africans who facilitated and benefited from the Atlantic slave trade were political or commercial elites—generally members of the ruling apparatus of African statesor members of large trading families or institutions.

African sellers captured slaves and brought them to markets on the coast.

At these markets European and Americanbuyers paid for the slaves with commodities—including cloth, iron, firearms, liquor, and decorative items—that were useful to the sellers.

Slave sellers were mostly male,and they used their increased wealth to enhance their prestige and connect themselves, through marriage, to other wealthy families in their realms. The Africans who were enslaved were mostly prisoners of war or captives resulting from slave raids.

As the demand for slaves grew, so did the practice of systematicslave raiding, which increased in scope and efficiency with the introduction of firearms to Africa in the 17th century.

By the 18th century, most African slaves wereacquired through slave raids, which penetrated farther and farther inland.

Africans captured in raids were marched down well-worn paths, sometimes for severalhundred miles, to markets on the coast. From the mid-15th to the late-19th century, European and American slave traders purchased approximately 12 million slaves from West and west central Africa.

A smallpercentage of these slaves, particularly in the early years of the trade, were sent to Europe, especially to Spain and Portugal.

Most, however, were shipped across theAtlantic for sale in Portuguese-administered Brazil; the British, French, Dutch, and Danish islands of the Caribbean; Spanish-controlled South and Central America; andthe British North American mainland (later the United States and Canada).

The Atlantic crossing, known as the Middle Passage, was nightmarish for slaves, who werepoorly fed, subject to abuses at the hands of the crew, and confined to cramped storage holds in which diseases spread easily.

Historians estimate that between 1.5and 2 million slaves died during the journey to the New World. The Atlantic slave trade differed from previous practices of slavery and slave trading in Africa in its huge scope and its importance to the economies of world powers.While traditional African slavery was practiced largely to help African communities produce food and goods or for prestige, slave labor on European plantations in theNew World was crucial to the economies of the colonies and therefore to the economies of the colonial powers.

This global economic demand for African slaves alteredAfrican practices of slavery.

In much of Africa, slavery became a more central, structural element of African life, as rulers and wealthy elites sought to accumulate moreand more slaves, for sale as well as for their own use.

In addition to the systematic and institutional practice of slave raiding, other practices were introduced in Africanstates to bring in even more slaves, including enslavement as punishment for crimes and religious wrongdoing.

As a result, by the 19th century vast numbers of blackAfricans in West and Central Africa faced the threat of being enslaved. IV THE END OF SLAVERY IN AFRICA. »