The Origins of the Slave Trade

scaruffi.com ^ | Piero Scaruffi

[paltz]

The civil rights movement of the 1960's have left many people with the belief that the slave trade was a European/American phenomenon and only evil white people were to blame for it. This is a simplicistic scenario that could not be farther from the truth.
Thousands of records of transactions are available on a CDROM prepared by Harvard University and several books have been published recently on the origins of modern slavery (namely, Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade and Robin Blackburn's The Making Of New World Slavery).
What these records show is that the modern slave trade flourished in the early middle ages, as early as 869, especially between Muslim traders and western African kingdoms. For moralists, the most important aspect of that trade is that Muslims were selling goods to the African kingdoms and the African kingdoms were paying with their own people. No violence was necessary to obtain those slaves. Contrary to legends and novels, the white traders did not need to savagely kill entire tribes in order to exact their tribute in slaves. All they needed to do is bring goods that appealed to the kings of those tribes. The kings would gladly sell their own kins.
This explains why slavery became "black". Ancient slavery, e.g. under the Roman empire, would not discriminate: slaves were both white and black (so were Emperors and Popes). In the middle ages, all European countries outlawed slavery (of course, they retained countless "civilized" ways to enslave their citizens, but that's another story), whereas the African kingdoms happily continued in their trade. Therefore, only colored people could be slaves, and that is how the stereotype for African-american slavery was born. It was not based on an ancestral hatred of blacks, but simply on the fact that blacks were the only ones selling slaves, and they were selling their own kins.
Then the Muslim trade came to a stop when Arab domination was reduced by the Crusades. The Christians took over. The first ones, apparently, were the Portuguese, who, applying an idea that originally developed in Italian seatrading cities, started exploiting sub-Saharan slaves in the 1440's to support the economy of the sugar plantations (mainly for their own African colonies of Sao Tome and Madeira).
The Dutch were the first, apparently, to import black slaves into North America, but black slaves had already been employed all over the world, including South and Central America. We tend to focus on what happened in North America because the United States would eventually fight a war over slavery (and it's in the U.S. that large sectors of the population would start condemning slavery, contrary to the indifference that Muslims and Europeans always showed for it).
Even after Europeans began importing black slaves to America, most trade was just that: "trade". In most instances, the Europeans did not need to use any force to get those slaves. The slaves were "sold" more or less legally by their (black) owners. Scholars estimate that about 12,000,000 Africans were sold by Africans to Europeans and 17,000,000 were sold to Arabs (most of them before 1776, when the USA wasn't even born). The legends of European mercenaries capturing free people in the jungle are just that: legends. A few mercenaries certainly stormed peaceful tribes and committed horrible crimes, but that was not the rule. There was no need to risk their lives, so most of them didn't: they simply purchased people.
As an African-american scholar (Nathan Huggins) has written, the "identity" of black Africans is a white invention: sub-Saharan Africans never felt like they were one people, they felt (and still feel) that they belonged to different tribes. The distinctions of tribe were far stronger than the distinctions of race. Just like a French and an Italian would antagonize more fiercely between each other than against, say, a Chinese.
Everything else is true: millions of slaves died on ships and of diseases, millions of blacks worked for free to allow the Western economies to prosper, and the economic interests in slavery became so strong that the southern states of the United States opposed repealing it. But those millions of slaves were just one of the many instances of mass exploitation: the industrial revolution was exported to the USA by enterpreuners exploiting millions of poor immigrants from Europe. The fate of those immigrants was not much better than the fate of the slaves in the South. As a matter of fact, many slaves enjoyed far better living conditions in the southern plantations than European immigrants in the industrial cities (which were sometimes comparable to concentration camps).
The more we study it, the less blame we have to put on the USA for the slave trade: it was invented by the Arabs (its economic mechanism was invented by the Italians and the Portuguese), it was mostly run by western Europeans, and it was conducted with the full cooperation of many African kings. The USA provides free criticism of the phenomenon: no such criticism was allowed in the Muslim and Christian nations that started trading goods for slaves, and no such criticism was allowed in the African nations that started selling their own people.
To this day, both Arabs and Europeans maintain that the slave trade was a USA aberration, not their own invention.

[Capt. Tom]

I remember reading that Swahili was not an indigenous African language but a contrivance of Arabs as a universal language to communicate with the disparate tribes they were commiting to slavery

Swahili (also known as "Kiswahili" -- "ki" is a prefix that means "language") is a complex language spoken in East Africa. The language has ancient roots in the Bantu language family that extends across Central Africa.

Swahili grammar is based on a complicated Bantu structure that learners often find difficult to master. Many words have entered Swahili from Arabic, the result of centuries of interaction between peoples along the coast.