African Slave Trade

In evaluating the African slave trade, there was another "Middle Passage" often neglected by most scholars—the Arab slave trade. It is often forgotten that the Arab slave trade in East Africa and the slave trade from North Africa into Inner West Africa was protracted and ruthless. Sometimes the Arabs from the north who were Moslem enslaved Africans in the south who were also Moslems, thereby violating one of the most basic customs of their faith—that no Moslem should enslave another Moslem.^[1]

The African so-called slave "trade" was a demand-driven market out of Europe and America, not a supply-driven market out of Africa. We did not seek to sell captives to the Whites as an original act.^[2]

Also, economist Thomas Sowell writes: "More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States."^[3]

Notes[edit]

1. ↑ The African Holocaust—The Slave Trade
2. ↑ Did We Sell Each Other Into Slavery?
3. ↑ Black History Month: Why Don't They Teach About the Arab-Muslim Slave Trade in Africa? By Larry Elder - Published Feb. 20, 2020