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Slavery is an
emotive issue – and necessarily so too. Although it has been part of
every society since time immemorial, its late-modern manifestations
typified by the mass enslavement of millions of Africans on the
plantations of the Americas (the African Holocaust) is generally
regarded as the worst form of this strain of man’s inhumanity to his
fellow human.

Naturally,
discussions about slavery and its continued impact have been localised
more in the Americas than in Africa – after all, majority of the
descendants of this cruel dislocations are still located in these
climes. Plus, Africans had been too occupied with their fight for
freedom from colonialism and entrenching the benefits of their
independence to pay too much attention to this.

In the late 80s,
the late Moshood Abiola led a spirited campaign to redefine the terms
of slavery. This twisted the narrative from a search for meanings
behind the slave trade to one of confronting the beneficiaries of the
system. Reparation was top of the agenda – and it was being vigorously
pursued, to the discomfiture of some large corporations in the West,
especially in the United States. Of course there was always the tension
within the movement of who should benefit from this reparation if it
were ever to become a reality – the descendants of slaves still reeling
from its after-effects in the Americas or their kiths on the mother
continent who are, in several instances, materially worse off than they
are?

The fightback

Then the fightback
started. Part of the conspiracy theories surrounding Abiola’s inability
to assume the presidency he clearly won in 1993 was that some Western
agencies were not comfortable with a promoter of reparations assuming
the leadership of the world’s most population black nation. That is
probably fantastical.

But there is no
doubt that the slant of slavery scholarships took a sudden outwards
look in most campuses – with the US once again leading the charge.
Suddenly, attention is beamed on the roles played by the ‘others’ in
this sorry episode in the evolution of human society. Up for censure
were the African chiefs and their aides who sold away their people;
African kingdoms which were themselves slave keeping societies; and the
Arab slavers who equally took away large numbers of Africans to the
Arab peninsula and beyond.

No one could fault
the need for this. But it is apparent that the comparisons are not
quite the same. Take the age-long slavery customs in African societies.
This is little different from practices in other pre-modern societies
across the world and does not possess the calculated malevolency of the
modern one. In the Yoruba society, for instance, a number of received
idioms and proverbs would show that the practice was regulated to avoid
undue harshness to slaves. The system was also fluid, as a slave could
not only regain his/her freedom, but actually could become a leader of
the community.

It is not easy to
shrug off the complicity of African chiefs in the Western-run slavery
that ran from around the 15th century. Although some of them might be
little better than simple minds easily controlled to, at first get rid
of their enemies and criminals in their society for a little stash of
trashy materials, others were willing accomplices who actively sought
out people to sell – waging ruinous wars against their neighbours and
raiding their own subjects to feed the maw of the waiting, ever -hungry
ships. Some of them, such as the Jaja of Opobo, even fought western
government seeking to put a stop to the practice. Perhaps the best that
could be said to assuage this collective guilt is that the forces
acting upon the chiefs makes them little better than marionettes being
controlled by forces they neither understood nor could resist. For,
after all some chiefs less amenable to the trade were also rounded up
and added to the human cargo of the raiders.

Slavers from Arabia

The third leg of
these ‘others’ is the slavers from Arabia. These have received a lot of
attention lately from American scholars and some major African
intellectuals – including Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, Chinweizu and Naiwu
Osahon.

Mekuria Bulcha
estimates that over 17 million Africans were sold to the Middle East
and Asia between the sixth and twentieth centuries. This would appear
to be even more than the estimated 13 million people transported to the
Americas in a massive dislocation dating from the 1400s. Little wonder
the author also stated that the difference between slavery perpetrated
by the West and those of the Arabs (now usually referred to as ‘Islamic
slavery’), is largely figurative.

Ronald Segal wrote
in Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Diaspora, that the ‘islamic’ slave
trade began eight centuries before the Atlantic trade. He kindly
explained that this was motivated more by the need for domestic help –
including sex – and military service.

It quickly becomes
apparent that there is more to this than detached scholarship. For
instance, it beggars belief that more Africans were sold into Arabia
than those taken to the West, the timeframe notwithstanding. Two easy
factors would appear to support this. Take the mode of transportation
and the needs which the trade in slaves is organised to meet.

Logistics and economics

From around 1619
when a Dutch-run ship berthed at the Virginia colony at Jamestown with
20 enslaved Africans to 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S.
Constitution officially ended slavery in the US – a period of nearly
240 years – thousands of ships were deployed to move people to the new
world from Africa. Although Arab slavers also targeted ocean bounded
East Africa, they hardly possessed the technology or the means to move
humans on any particularly large scale. Even the more established trade
with Africa – which was in goods and minerals – was mostly carried out
on the back of camels across the forbidden wastes of the Sahara.
Dealing with the logistics of moving large numbers of people and
provisioning for their needs would seem to be beyond the ken of even
the most determined slaver, unless the profit makes this unavoidable.

This is not so. As
some of the promoters of the myth of ‘Islamic slavery’ themselves
agreed, slaves were not the engine behind Arab economies. Dry and
mostly uncultivable, Arab societies lack the equivalent of huge sugar
plantations where American slaves are forced to toil to the lash of a
whip. It is difficult to understand how the then equally backward Arab
society could digest the influx of millions of needy slaves.

Castrated development

Which also raises
the question: where are the people? The presence of millions of
Africans in the Americas is a lasting legacy of the Atlantic slave
trade. It is hard to find such large traces in Arabia. Scholars of
‘Islamic’ slavery have a ready answer: the men were castrated and the
women used as sex-chattels, such that over generations the offspring of
slaves – descended largely from the women – merged into general Arab
society. That must have involved a lot of castrations. Or it might be a
pointer to a truth that is difficult to accept for people trying to
shift the blame or spread the guilt – the level of slavery in Arabia is
too miniscule to shift attention from the industrial scale enslavement
perpetrated in the West. Not only are there no ghettos or prisons
holding African people in Arab society, there is no institutional
hindrance to the aspirations of descendants of slaves.

Of course there
are racist Arabs, such as Hanns Vischer who believed African “black”
skin made them a slave-race. But books such as ‘Tanwir al-Gabbash fi
fasl al al-Sudan wa al-Habash’ by Ibn al-Jahiz, and ‘Black and their
Superiority over Whites’ by Ibn al-Marzuban also affirmed the respect
that blacks enjoy in Arab society.

Scholars of
slavery should therefore stop chasing the red-herrings and concentrate
attention on the defining face of slavery in the modern area. That is
to be found mostly in the Americas.

‘The International
Colloquium on Slavery, Slave Trade and Their Consequences’ holds at the
Royal Park Hotel, Iloko-Ijesa, Osun State from August 23 to 26.