Red Sea slave trade
The Red Sea, the Sahara and the Indian Ocean, were the three main routes by which enslaved people from East Africa were transported to the Muslim world.
While in Pre-Islamic Arabia, Arab war captives were common targets of slavery, importation of slaves from Ethiopia across the Red Sea also took place.
Hejaz did not consider itself obliged to obey the laws and treaties signed by the Ottoman Empire in regard to slavery and slave trade.
Primarily children and young women were bought or given as tribute by their parents to Ethiopian chiefs, who sold them to slave traders.
[10] The southwest and southern parts of Ethiopia supplied most of the girls being exported by Ethiopian slave traders to India and Arabia.
During the 13th century, Indian boys, women and girls intended for sexual slavery, were trafficked from India to Arabia and to Egypt across the Red Sea via Aden.
[16] Some historians estimate that during the 17th century as many as 150,000 Malagasy slaves were exported from Boeny in northwest Madagascar to the Muslim world including the Red Sea Coast (Jeddah), Hejaz (Mecca), Arabia (Aden), Oman (Muscat), Zanzibar, Kilwa, Lamu, Somalia (Barawa), and possibly Sudan (Suakin), Persia (Bandar Abbas), and India (Surat).
[17] Given the racial diversity of Madagascar, which was populated by a mix of Austronesian and Bantu settlers, the Malagasy slaves included people with Southeast Asian, African and hybrid phenotypes.
In 1694, a Dutch East India Company (VOC) ship transported at least 400 Malagasy slaves to an Arabian port on the Red Sea (presumably Jeddah) where they were sold to Arab Muslim traders to be enslaved in Mecca, Medina, Mocha, Aden, al-Shihr, and Kishn.
[18] [19] To varying degrees, Portuguese, French, Dutch, English and Ottoman merchants were known to have participated in the Malagasy slave trade as well.
[20]: 1–3 Slave traders trafficked primarily women and children in the guise of wives, servants and pilgrims to Hejaz, where they were sold after arrival.
When they arrive in Saudi Arabia without a visa they are arrested and put into prison for a few days and then handed over to licensed slave dealers.
In addition, raids are made in Baluchistan and the Sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf and people are captured and carried off by land and sea, taken to small Saudi Arabian ports and sold in slave markets.
[9]: 17 The Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1880 formally banned the Red Sea slave trade, but it was not enforced in the Ottoman Provinces in the Arabian Peninsula.
The right for manumission by seeking asylum could be used by any slave who managed to reach the consul office or a ship belonging to a foreign power.
[9][page needed] In order to combat the Red Sea slave trade, which was strongly connected to the Hajj pilgrimage, the Inter-Sanitary Conference in Alexandria of 1927 declared that pilgrims were to travel only by steamers or motorboats in order to avoid the dhow slave boats, but this regulation proved to be difficult to enforce in practice, and pilgrims continued to cross the Red Sea by dhow to land at places difficult to control.
They could not remember exactly where they had come from or where their family lived, could no longer speak any language other than Arabic, and thus had difficulty supporting themselves after repatriation, all of which in the 1930s had caused a reluctance from the authorities to receive them.
[20]: 3–4 The British Anti-Slavery Society failed to pass stricter enforcement at the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on Slavery, but the issue started to attract international attention.
[20]: 4–5 The Kennedy administration also experienced international pressure from influential secular Middle East regional leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser, as well as from the newly decolonized African states, whose own citizens were the most common victims of the slave trade to the Arabian Peninsula,[20]: 4–5 and whose good will was necessary Kennedy's anti Soviet New Frontier agenda in the Global South.
[20]: 17 The Kennedy administration therefore put pressure on Saudi Arabia to introduce "modernization reforms", a request which was heavily directed against slavery.
