Slavery in Africa

[2] Children of slaves born into families could be integrated into the master's kinship group and rise to prominent positions within society, even to the level of chief in some instances.

[16] This was most significant in the Nile valley (primarily in Sudan and Uganda), with slave military units organized by various Islamic authorities,[16] and with the war chiefs of Western Africa.

[21] Groups such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands, waging war on African states to capture people for export as slaves.

A slave trade bringing Saharans through the desert to North Africa, which existed in Roman times, continued and documentary evidence in the Nile Valley shows it to have been regulated there by treaty.

[29] Piracy became an important source of slaves for the Roman Empire and in the 5th century AD pirates would raid coastal North African villages and enslave those captured.

"[38]Davis' numbers have been disputed by other historians, such as David Earle, who cautions that the true picture of European slaves is clouded by the fact the corsairs also seized non-Christian whites from eastern Europe and black people from West Africa.

To behold ranks and files of half-naked, half-starved, half-tanned meagre wretches, chained to a plank, from whence they remove not for months together (commonly half a year), urged on, even beyond human strength, with cruel and repeated blows on their bare flesh....[44]As late as 1798, the islet near Sardinia was attacked by the Tunisians and over 900 inhabitants were taken away as slaves.

[46] In the Horn of Africa, the Christian kings of the Ethiopian Empire captured slaves primarily from the pagan Nilotic Shanqella and Oromo peoples from their western borderlands, or from newly conquered or reconquered lowland territories.

[55] In response to pressure by Western Allies of World War II, Ethiopia officially abolished slavery and involuntary servitude after it regained its independence in 1942.

[65][66][67][68][69][70] Eyewitness accounts describe the purchase, butchering, and consumption of slaves as a "daily-life activity, free from strong emotions", seen by those who practised it as not essentially different from the eating of goats and other animals.

[78] The Mossi Kingdoms tried to take over key sites in the trans-Saharan trade and, when these efforts failed, became defenders against slave raiding by the powerful states of the western Sahel.

It means, as continually found in this part of Africa, belonging to a family group-there is no compulsory labour, the owner and the slave work together, eat like food, wear like clothing and sleep in the same huts.

[82] Near the Gold Coast, many of those enslaved came from deep inside the interior of the continent as defeated people from numerous wars and were sold off as part of a practice called "eating the country" that aimed to disperse fallen enemies and prevent regrouping.

[87] With sea trade from the eastern African Great Lakes region to Persia, China, and India during the first millennium AD, slaves are mentioned as a commodity of secondary importance to gold and ivory.

Researchers Shane Doyle and Henri Médard assert the distinction with the following: "Peasants were rewarded for valour in battle by the present of slaves by the lord or chief for whom they had fought.

Historians Campbell and Alpers argue that there were a host of different categories of labour in Southeast Africa and that the distinction between slave and free individuals was not particularly relevant in most societies.

[101] The ancient Indian Ocean slave trade was enabled by building boats capable of carrying large numbers of human beings across the Persian Gulf with wood imported from India.

[104] Muslim participation in the slave trade started in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, beginning with small-scale movements of people, largely from the eastern Great Lakes region and the Sahel.

[11] The trade of slaves across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean also has a long history beginning with the control of sea routes by Arab traders in the ninth century.

[108] In 1814, Swiss explorer Johann Burckhardt wrote of his travels in Egypt and Nubia, where he saw the practice of slave trading: "I frequently witnessed scenes of the most shameless indecency, which the traders, who were the principal actors, only laughed at.

Medieval manuals for slave buyers – written in Arabic, Persian and Turkish – explained that Africans from Sudanic and Ethiopian areas are prone to illness and death in their new environments.

[117] The distribution of sex among enslaved peoples under traditional lineage slavery saw women as more desirable slaves due to demands for domestic labour and for reproductive reasons.

[134] According to Patrick Manning, internal slavery was most important to Africa in the second half of the 19th century, stating "if there is any time when one can speak of African societies being organized around a slave mode production, [1850–1900] was it".

In the late 19th century, the Scramble for Africa saw the continent rapidly divided between imperialistic European powers, and an early but secondary focus of all colonial regimes was the suppression of slavery and the slave trade.

Both the French, Spanish, Italian and British colonial authorities officially stated that they combatted the ancient slave trade transporting enslaved Africans across the Sahara to Arab North Africa and the Middle East.

Independent nations attempting to westernize or impress Europe sometimes cultivated an image of slavery suppression, even as they, in the case of Egypt, hired European soldiers like Samuel White Baker's expedition up the Nile.

Slavery has never been eradicated in Africa, and it commonly appears in African states, such as Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, and Sudan, in places where law and order have collapsed.

To meet the demand for menial labour, Zanj slaves captured from the southern interior were sold through ports on the northern seaboard in cumulatively large numbers over the centuries to customers in the Nile Valley, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, India, Far East and the Indian Ocean islands.

Walter Rodney argued that the export of so many people had been a demographic disaster and had left Africa permanently disadvantaged when compared to other parts of the world, and that this largely explains that continent's continued poverty.

[179] Karl Marx in his economic history of capitalism, Das Kapital, claimed that "the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins [that is, the slave trade], signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production."