Posted on 05/25/2012 9:41:06 AM PDT by Titus-Maximus
Islam's Black Slaves: A History of Africa's Other Black Diaspora Ronald Segal 241pp, Atlantic Books, £20
At a time when the United States, crusading Christianity's last outpost, is again mounting its mangy charger, along comes another book documenting a dark, half-forgotten and deeply unsavoury aspect of Islam. Until Ronald Segal, author of the excellent and similarly panoramic survey of the Atlantic slave trade, The Black Diaspora, began to pick at the scars Arab raiders and their black African outriders left on large parts of the continent over 14 centuries, this had been one of the great untold stories.
/..../
Unlike the millions of west Africans who were crammed on to coffin ships bound for plantations in the Americas, those dragged through the Sahara or down to the Indian ocean at Zanzibar were mostly women. Zanzibar was a black Belsen, a clearing house of shackled humanity, where the stench of death was masked by the cloves on which the island's Omani emirs built a great trading empire.
Without a nascent industrial complex to feed, many of the men were castrated for domestic service or drafted into slave armies that emptied the lands around the great lakes of their peoples. One in 10, by some estimates, survived the trek from the interior. By the mid-19th century, when east African slave magnates - many of them the free sons of Arab slavers and their black concubines - ran out of infidels and animists to enslave, they, and the expanding black Islamic empires that supplied them, circumvented the scruples set out in the Koran and carried off their own on the flimsiest of criminal pretexts.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
It is amazing how few in the West know this detail.
Do you think Arab nations are teaching their high school students about the African slave experience and their very own complicity?
It is amazing how the British fought slavery all over the globe and into the 20th century and yet never received recognition.
The lesson - there is too much history, even very recent history, that is being hidden for ideological purposes. This book pulls back the covers and shows a hideous past that is never discussed in the conventional history of the African slavery experience.
My library actually has this - so I reserved it.
As slavers.
(The Arabs preferred their black slaves castrated)...
“Mangy charger”? - Nope....the correct term is “mangy dogs”....like those found writing at the guardian newspaper.
This all was extremely well known at the time - the 19th century - and was a staple theme of the popular press of the day. There were anti-slavery societies and many of the missionary societies had this as a theme also. Many Victorian celebrities - Stanley, Livingstone, Gordon, Burton, etc. - made their reputations on this. Popular authors (Dickens, Thackeray) publishing their serialized novels noted this sort of thing numerous times, and sometimes lampooned it - see Bleak House. Even thoroughly despicable people like King Leopold of Belgium used this as a partial justification.
The modern interest in slavery is not really a matter of historical understanding but of current politics. It is a mine of themes to use in politics and its goal of rent-seeking.
It is amazing but if Segal wasn’t a communist, the Guardian never would have reviewed it.
That said, Segal constantly says that the Western slave treatment was worse, but I find those words are window dressing to his leftist reviewers because when the cases are laid side by side, I actually found the Islamic trade more barbaric - and worse - still continuing.
The British, the evil white empire builders of all time, were actually on the forefront of fighting the slave trade, and hanged Arab slave traders. Their heroic actions in fighting the slave trade are never discussed in academia since it runs contrary to the racist oppressive land grabbers that they are forever painted.
Were it only in the past. The queeranimals haven't stopped. Only when isSlime is shunned, outlawed, and defeated will they stop doing satans handiwork.
No doubt about it, the Obama clan was on the wholesale end of the business. Neither was all that long ago. Mombasa was shipping slaves right up until the end of the 19th C.
In Kenya's interior, the British were still fighting/negotiating with local slavers into the 1930’s.
Just read an account of that a few months back, but the source escapes me at the moment.
Only World War 2 put an end to that righteous effort.
All true, but let’s not forget that it was British subjects who brought slavery to the U.S.
Let’s get some references out there - this would be interesting to expose. Clearly, from the book, Arabic-Africans were trading black Africans as slaves, with vigor - so it would be an interesting piece of journalism to connect the dots. A beautiful man-bites-dog story.
(This was done to McCain in 2008 if anyone recalls, articles about his ancestral roots in the South and that his family did own slaves!)
Obama:
He eats dog.
He bullies girls.
And now Obama owes reparations for slavery - personally.
Also the British outlawed slavery early in the 1800’s, which helped reduce the available markets for slaves.
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