[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]
Slavery by other powers
Ethiopia illustrates the scope of the trade well beyond its shores. Its rulers did not just use men and women in their courts and palaces but also sold them as slaves across the Red Sea to Arabia (Bonacci & Mecklenburg, Citation2017, p. 5). Traders took Ethiopian captives to India. Some may have been among the African slaves imported by China (Jákl, Citation2017, p. 335; Wyatt, Citation2010, p. 56). As early as the 14th century the great Berber explorer, Ibn Battuta, witnessed thousands of Ethiopians during his travels across the Indian sub-continent and Ceylon (Gibb, Citation1929; Pearson, Citation2003). Some Ethiopians, like Ambar Malik, rose to become among the most illustrious military leaders of the 17th century, resisting two Mogul emperors and whose feats were acknowledged after his death in 1626 by one of his former enemies. In his official memoir, Emperor Jahangir declared that although a slave, Ambar was nonetheless an able man. In warfare, in command, in sound judgement, and in administration he had no rival or equal … He maintained his exalted position to the end of his life and closed his career in honour. History records no other instance of an Abyssinian slave arriving at such eminence. (Eaton, Citation2006, p. 127)
The Africans enslaved in India – or Sidis, as they became known – were mostly male who had to marry local women. They were gradually absorbed into the local populations. Over time, the communities, which had once been so significant, gradually faded from memory, although they did not vanish. The Sidis ruled two Indian states: Janjira, in today’s Maharashtra, from 1618 and Sachin, in modern day’s Gujarat from 1791 (Jayasuriya, Citation2015, p. 9). Both were absorbed into India at independence in 1947. Janjira was a base for African traders and for free African migrants, with the democratic system of electing Sidi leaders. As late as 1851 the traveller, Richard Burton, commented on the strong African character of the people of the Sind (Finneran, Citation2011, p. 239) How many slaves there were on the Indian sub-continent is impossible to say. Estimates range from 6 to 8 million (the 1840 World Anti-Slave Convention figure) to 16 million (Sir Bartle Frere, a figure that included all the British protectorates and princely states) (Temperley, Citation2000, p. 177). Perhaps 100,000 Indians continue to identify themselves as Sidis to this day, living in Gujarat, Karnataka and other states – a tiny fraction of India’s 1.2 billion people (Jayasuriya, p.11). Elderly Sidis continued to speak Kiswahili into the 20th century, while the musical instruments and drumming characteristic of Swahili culture can still be found in India. A further 150,000 Sidis live in neighbouring Pakistan, where they face discrimination and racism (Saif, Citationn.d.).
Indian Ocean slavery was a trade in which both Arabs and Europeans participated, with both exporting approximately the same number of slaves from eastern Africa once the Europeans began trading in the Indian Ocean in the 16th century. Between 1500 and 1873 it has been calculated that Arabs, Muslims and Swahilis exported around 937,000 Africans while the Europeans exported between 755,500 and 1,156,000 slaves (R. Allen, Citation2014, Table 1, p. 24). Oman was a major Indian Ocean slaving state before the Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497. It came to dominate the trade, moving the Sultanate from Muscat to Zanzibar to capitalise on slaves, ivory and cloves. They were only finally dissuaded from the practice in Zanzibar after being threatened with a bombardment by the Royal Navy in 1873 (Howell, Citation1987, p. 94), and fighting a war with the Belgians for control of the African interior in 1891 (Ewans, Citation2002; Harms, Citation2019). Oman only terminated enslavement in its home territory in 1970 (Miers, Citation2003, pp. 346–347). This was a decade after Saudi Arabia took a similar step (Miers, Citation2003, pp. 348–349).
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On the other side of the African continent, the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903) was also a major practitioner of indigenous enslavement, with Fulani primarily taking captives from the Hausa community. The scale was enormous.
As the history of the Sokoto Caliphate demonstrates, slavery was a byproduct of jihad and an ideology of subordination that subsequently was subjected to reform and ultimately suppression under European colonialism. Slavery was a long-established institution in the Central Sudan before the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate after 1804. Under the Caliphate, however, slavery became even more prevalent, to the extent that it can been argued that slavery was the backbone of this economy and society … It is even possible that there were as many slaves in the Sokoto Caliphate in the middle of the nineteenth century as in the United States at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860, when there were 4 million slaves in the United States. Certainly, the Caliphate was one of the largest slave societies in modern history, probably more than there were in Brazil or in all the colonies of the Caribbean at the time, either in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, certainly in excess of 2 million and perhaps more than 4.5 million. (Lovejoy, Citation2005, pp. 1–3)
These are by no means the only participants in the enslavement of Africans: across the continent there are examples of slavery before, during and after European colonialism. The Ottoman empire, and its colonies along the North African coast, the Barbary states, were also major participants in the trade. The Ottomans enslaved some 1,167,000 Africans, whom they brought to various parts of their empire, while the Barbary corsairs took at least 1,000,000 Europeans to North Africa. Algiers alone is said to have imported 625,000 Europeans between 1520 and 1830 (Clarence-Smith & Eltis, Citation2011, p. 153).Footnote15 Once on African shores, unless the Europeans were exceptionally lucky and were ransomed, they became African slaves and were generally treated as cruelly as any other enslaved person. They were worked to death in galleys, sent to work on the fields, or in the home, including the harems of the corsairs. It is important to remember that captives were transported in both directions: to and from Africa. Slaves from Africa were used extensively across Europe, although far fewer than the numbers that were transported to European colonies. Nations such as Portugal, France, Spain and the Netherlands used slaves at home, as well as on their tropical plantations. Slave caravans across the Sahara continued to be received by the Barbary states throughout this period.
Martin Plaut is with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, UK.
