East African slave trade

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East African slave trade describes the slave trade in which people from East Africa were sold as slaves , mostly to the Arab world , as well as to other parts of Asia, on islands in the Indian Ocean .

history

Plantation slavery and the Zanj revolt

The East African slave trade reached its first high point with the development of the wetlands in southern Iraq under the Abbasids . These large were plantations created exclusively by black slaves from East Africa - the so-called Zanj or Zanj were reclaimed for cultivation -. These slaves lived under similarly bad conditions as the slaves on the plantations in the " New World ". In the year 869 there was a great uprising of the Zanj in southern Iraq, which could not be finally put down by Al-Muwaffaq until 883 , whereby most of the slaves were killed. After that there were hardly any larger plantations in the Islamic world that were managed by slaves. Instead, male slaves were mainly used as eunuchs and female slaves as concubines .

Sultanate of Zanzibar

From the 17th to the 19th centuries, the island of Zanzibar was a center of the East African slave trade under the rule of the Sultan of Oman . Further trading centers for slaves were the islands of Lamu and Pate further north .

The East African slave trade reached its peak in the 19th century. On the one hand, there were too few potential slaves on the African west coast, which led European slave traders to relocate to the east coast and from there to procure slaves for America and for islands in the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, the significant demand from America and the Indian Ocean gradually declined later (ban in France in 1848, in the USA in 1865, in Brazil in 1888), as a result of which the prices for slaves fell across Africa and buyers within Africa and in the Arab-Islamic region became possible became to buy more slaves. So slaves were exported to the Middle East increased, but also on the East African coast on plantations, such as the under Said bin Sultan scale clove plantations , used by Zanzibar. Whole areas of East Africa were depopulated through extensive slave hunts. A well-known slave trader was the Zanzibar Tippu-Tip , who penetrated into the Central African Congo Basin on his expeditions .

Abolition of the slave trade and slavery

The effort to fight the slave trade was one of the motivations and justifications for the colonization of East Africa by European colonial powers.

From the 1860s onwards, Royal Navy fleets looked for dhows in the Indian Ocean to transport slaves ( dhow-chasing ). In 1875, Sultan Barghasch ibn Said of Zanzibar banned the slave trade in East Africa under pressure from Great Britain , but this trade continued illegally into the 20th century. In part, he shifted from the sea route to caravan routes that led to the Benadir coast in southern Somalia , from where the slaves were shipped to Arabia.

While the British took action against the slave trade, they initially tolerated the keeping of slaves, especially in private households. Slavery itself was abolished in the British protectorate of Zanzibar in 1897, followed by the ban in the British East Africa concession (later Kenya ) in 1907 .

There were public slave markets in Saudi Arabia until the 1930s. In 1956, witnesses reported a public slave sale in Djibouti that allegedly sold people from Chad . Slavery was officially abolished in Iraq in 1924, in Bahrain in 1937 , in Kuwait in 1949 and in Qatar in 1952 . In Yemen , slavery was abolished after the fall of the monarchy 1962nd In the same year it was abolished by Prince Faisal in Saudi Arabia, but of the 100,000 to 200,000 mostly African slaves, only a few thousand were immediately released. In Oman , Sultan Qaboos ibn Said abolished slavery as part of a general modernization of the country.

present

Little is known about the descendants of the East African slaves. Possible reasons for this are high death rates, the fact that numerous male slaves as eunuchs could not father any offspring, or that the slaves and their offspring were absorbed into the majority population.

In southern Somalia , descendants of slaves live today as " Somali Bantu ". In Turkey , Mustafa Olpak caused a stir when he published the life story of his grandfather, who had been sold as a slave from Kenya to Ottoman Crete . The Siddi in India and Pakistan are mostly descended from slaves, but some also descend from free Africans.

As in earlier times, slave hunts took place in the context of the civil war in South Sudan .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jacques Heers , Les négriers de terres d'Islam. La première traite des Noirs VIIe-XVIe siècle , Paris (Perrin) 2007, pp. 231-240.
  2. ^ Patrick Manning: Contours of Slavery and Social Change in Africa , in: The American Historical Review , 1983
  3. ↑ Catherine Besteman: Unraveling Somalia , 1999: 54f.
  4. ↑ Moses DE Nwulia: Britain and Slavery in East Africa , Three Continents Press, Washington 1975
  5. ^ The abolition of slavery on Zanzibar . In: Arthur von Scala (Red.): Austrian monthly for the Orient . Volume 23.1897, ZDB -ID 520152-4 . Verlag des k. k. Austrian Trade Museum, Vienna 1897, pp. 37–41. - Full text online .
  6. ↑ Christian Delacampagne: The History of Slavery , 2004, ISBN 3-538-07183-7 (p. 247)
  7. ↑ a b Delacampagne: History of Slavery (p. 283f.)
  8. ↑ La traite oubliée of négriers musulmans , in: L'Histoire N o 280, La Vérité sur l'Esclavage , October 2003
  9. ↑ Deutschlandfunk: Scratches in the Turkish historical image - The black slaves of the Ottomans

Web link

literature

  • Gwyn Campbell (Ed.): The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. Frank Cass, London et al. 2004, ISBN 0-7146-5486-8 ( Studies in slave and post-slave societies and cultures ).
  • William Gervase Clarence-Smith (Ed.): The economics of the Indian Ocean slave trade in the nineteenth century. Frank Cass, London 1989, ISBN 0-7146-3359-3 .
  • Egon Flaig : World History of Slavery. CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58450-3 .
  • Alexandre Popovic : The revolt of African slaves in Iraq in the 3rd / 9th century. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton NJ 1999, ISBN 1-55876-162-4 .
  • Ronald Segal: Islam's Black Slaves. The History of Africa's other Black Diaspora. Atlantic Books, London et al. 2001, ISBN 1-903809-80-0 .
  • Tidiane N'Diaye : The Veiled Genocide. The history of the Muslim slave trade in Africa . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2010; ISBN 978-3-498-04690-3 .