Slavery in Libya

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The slavery in Libya is one of the manifestations of slavery in Islam in Africa and lasted until the 20th century. She has been resuming since 2014. It served both the own needs of the merchant families involved in it and, above all, the shipping across the Mediterranean to Europe and the Ottoman Empire .

history

From the Libyan hinterland, one of the important trade routes from Chad and Fessan with connections to Sub-Saharan Africa , namely the Bornus Strait , led to Tripoli , a trade hub that is valued for its safety. From there ships with slaves left for Sicily , Venice and all port cities of the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean. This route was so reliable that Italy could be supplied with large numbers of slaves. In Florence , for example, between 1366 and 1397 there were no fewer than 387 slave sales.

The Libyan slave trade lasted, however, as the research of the Italian historian Salvatore Bono shows, until the 20th century. When Italy invaded Libya in 1911 , it encountered the slave trade, which continued despite an official ban on individual ethnicities and clans that had existed since the first half of the 19th century . Italy used this slave trade for its colonial purposes by playing off the interests of the tribal leaders connected with it against one another.

The Libyan traders had set up trading stations, especially in Chad, from which the Mediterranean coast could be reached and supplied via the Fessan. Fezzan was under the rule of the kings of Kanem , who traded in black slaves between the 13th and 15th centuries . The majority of blacks, however, were hunted by caravan traders. For the 19th century, the Fessan can be expected to have 1000 to 2000 blacks who came to the market in Murzuk every year . Many were needed there for work themselves. Tripoli, but also Benghazi, were destinations for onward transfers to Europe and Istanbul between the 17th and 19th centuries , which accepted half of all slaves shipped in Libya.

The slave trade was officially stopped by the influential Karamanli dynasty under Western pressure in 1835. But when a sheikh involved in the trade in Murzuk (Fessan) wanted to join the ban in 1842, he was murdered.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Deutschlandfunk, November 27, 2017
  2. ↑ Malek Chebel (2007), p. 83.
  3. ↑ Malek Chebel (2007), p. 177, and Salvatore Bono, Pirates and Corsairs in the Mediterranean: Sea War, Trade and Slavery from the 16th to the 19th Century , Stuttgart (Klett-Cotta) 2009.
  4. ↑ Malek Chebel (2007), pp. 177-179.

literature

  • Malek Chebel, L'esclavage en terre d'islam. Un tabou bien gardé , Paris (Fayard) 2007; ISBN 978-2-213-63058-8 .
  • Salvatore Bono, Pirates and Corsairs in the Mediterranean: Sea War, Trade and Slavery from the 16th to the 19th Century , Stuttgart (Klett-Cotta) 2009; ISBN 3-608-94378-1 .