Slavery part II

The Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria was giving a guest lecture at New York’s Howard University. “You African-Americans are the luckiest people on earth.” The audience was taken a bit aback, but he continued, “One million Africans were brought to these shores.  Today, you are 40 million and the richest Africans in the world. 60 million African slaves were sent to the Islamic world and today you hardly see any Africans there.  Why is that?  They were made eunuchs and the women were put in harems—the babies were killed.  Few Africans survived.”

            There were other factors involved but he’s approximately correct. As Africans were captured and sent to N. African ports, they were force-marched through the Sahara. There are still trails marked by piles of human bones of slaves who died.  Women were particularly vulnerable.  Muslim records show that for every slave to reach Cairo, 10 died. (compared to 10% of Atlantic crossing slaves who died en route.) An estimated 50-90% of males died from castration, hence eunuchs brought higher prices than common slaves. [Ottoman Turks had a “tax” on European-conquered peoples that every couple’s first-born son would be taken as a slave, indoctrinated into Islam, and most were made into eunuchs or janusaries/soldiers. Do you wonder why animosity is still high between Bosnian/Albanian Muslims and the Christians in the Balkans?] Marriage for slaves and concubines was forbidden. And Muslim enslavement of Slavic people from Eastern Europe was also common.  The 15^th century Caliph of Baghdad had 7000 African eunuchs and 4000 Caucasian ones. But import of European slaves was severely curtailed when Russia conquered the Caucus area in the 19^th century. East African slaves were marketed in Zanzibar and sent by boat to the Persian Gulf.  President Obama’s Kenyan family was engaged in slave trading via this route. The prime destination of slaves was to the market in Istanbul, capital of the Ottomans.  There, women were paraded, examined, questioned, and bid on in public display often witnessed by horrified foreigners.  The market was officially closed in 1847 but simply went underground. In Saharan Africa, the slave trade still abounds today in Sudan and Mauitania and with groups like Boko Haram.

            Slave owners in the Middle East were sometimes considered milder than the plantation owners in the West.  But the actual evidence is sketchy.  There was no Uncle Tom’s Cabin or an abolition movement. What happened behind Ottoman home walls is little known. Slaves were not allowed to write and Africans were almost completely uneducated, so we don’t know how the slaves felt about being a degraded people in a foreign land, how a eunuch felt about having no possible family, how concubines felt about the genocide of their children, that she might be lent out to other men or sold. What is known is that some who became Muslims were freed but the rate of reproduction was almost nil, a good indicator of how people see their condition. But there are surprises in everything.  The Assyrian church of Iraq has genetic descent from both Africans and Balkans.  Evidently some slaves who got free became believers in Jesus Christ and were adopted into the Assyrian Christians.  Faith, Hope and Love abide.