Slavery in Somalia

He declares: Here are sold a very great number of slaves, which are the people of Prester John (Ethiopia) whom the Moors take in battle, and from this place they are carried into Persia, Arabia Felix, and to Mecca, Cairo and into India.Zeila seems to have been the southernmost port frequented by Arab merchants, whose chief center for these regions, however, was Aden, where the commercial, and also the climatic conditions were more favorable.

[5][4]: 63 According to Richard Pankhurst, almost all of the Ethiopians captured by Imam Ahmad were subsequently sold to foreign merchants in exchange for firearms and cannons.

A Portuguese Jesuit reported that Adal managed to sell "thousands" of Abyssinian slaves to traders from across the sea, to Arabs, Turks, to Persians and to Indians.

[10]"The farming was performed by local client-farmers, boon, or low status groups of the dominant Biimaal, Geledle, Hintirre, Murosade, Mobileyn and other predominantly pastoral clans which had established control of small portions of the valley.

[11][12] The Somali Bantus belong to several ethnic groups, namely Majindo, Mnyasa, Mkuwa, Mzihuwa, Mushunguli, and Molima, each consisting of numerous subclans.

[14][15] All in all, the number of Bantu inhabitants in Somalia before the civil war is thought to have been about 80,000 (1970 estimate), with most concentrated between the Juba and Shabelle rivers in the south.

To meet the demand for menial labor, Bantu slaves were captured from southeastern Africa and sold in cumulatively large quantities over the centuries to customers in Egypt, Arabia, Somalia, Persia, India, the Far East, and the Indian Ocean islands.

[19] They were made to work in plantations exclusively owned by the Italian government along the southern Shebelle and Jubba rivers, harvesting lucrative cash crops such as grain and cotton.

Catherine Lowe Besteman notes:[22] While upholding the perception of Somalis as distinct from and superior to the European construct of "black Africans", both British and Italian colonial administrators placed the Jubba valley population in the latter category.

Colonial discourse described the Jubba valley as occupied by a distinct group of inferior races, collectively identified as the WaGosha by the British and the WaGoscia by the Italians.

[23] In addition to Bantu plantation slaves, Somalis sometimes enslaved peoples of Oromo pastoral backgrounds that were captured during wars and raids on settlements.

Prized for their beauty and viewed as legitimate sexual partners, many Oromo women became either wives or concubines of their Somali captors, while others became domestic servants.

[27]: 40 However, although the Italians freed some Bantus, some Bantu groups remained enslaved well into the 1930s and continued to be despised and discriminated against by large parts of Somali society.