Free Republic

The Arab slave trade lasted over 1,300 years — yet most people know little about it. This video exposes the atrocities committed against Black Africans during the Arab slave era, including mass castration, forced conversions, and cultural erasure. It's time to uncover a hidden chapter of history that shaped the continent and its people.

The National Museum of Denmark has confirmed that two 18th-century shipwrecks in Cahuita National Park, long thought to be pirate ships, are the Danish slave ships Fridericus Quartus and Christianus Quintus, which sank in 1710. The identification was announced on Sunday, resolving decades of speculation about the wrecks off Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. The ships were identified through underwater excavations in 2023, which analyzed ship timbers, cargo blocks, clay pipes, and other artifacts. In 2015, U.S. archaeologists from East Carolina University discovered yellow bricks, specific to Danish manufacturing in Flensburg, among the wreckage, prompting renewed investigation. The wrecks, located on...

Ndola is one of the most prominent towns in Zambia's Copperbelt province. Today, the numerous copper mines in the region provide the region's wealth. But in the past, a darker industry spurred the settlement. Still standing near the center of town, the Slave Tree was the central location where Swahili slave traders met to discuss their gruesome transactions. Under its shade, Swahili traders such as Chipembere, Mwalabu, and Chiwala held councils of war and sold enslaved people to the Mambundu from Angola. Much of central and southern Africa, including modern-day Zambia, was crisscrossed by slave traders transporting human captives...

For the first time, analyses determine that some present-day Kenyans who identify as Swahili are genetically very different from medieval residents of the same region, while others have retained substantial medieval ancestry...The researchers found that the initial waves of newcomers were mainly from Persia. These findings align with the oldest Swahili oral stories, which tell of Persian (Shirazi) merchants or princes arriving on the Swahili shores."It was exciting to find biological evidence that Swahili oral history probably depicts Swahili genetic ancestry as well as cultural legacy," said Esther Brielle, research fellow in genetics in the Reich lab.Brielle is co-first author...

President-elect Donald Trump’s victory bodes well for US-Morocco relations. As King Mohamed VI recalled in his statement congratulating Trump on his election win, during his first term, Trump recognized Rabat’s full sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara. Trump made this recognition with a presidential proclamation on December 10, 2020, in exchange for Morocco reestablishing diplomatic relations with Israel. In his statement, Mohammed VI went on to say that “the Moroccan people will forever be grateful” for this recognition, calling Washington “our longstanding friend and ally.” While Morocco hopes to pick up where it left off in negotiations with...

Last Updated: Fri Oct 05, 2012 07:26 am (KSA) 04:26 am (GMT) Film ‘Stolen’ exposes modern-day slavery in Polisario camps Friday, 05 October 2012 The film, Stolen, the story of a Sahrawi girl called Fatim Sellami, herself a slave, who was reunited with her mother after 35 years of separation with the help of the United Nations. (Image grab from film Stolen By KHADIJA FATHI AGADIR / MOROCCO A controversial documentary film that exposes slavery in the Western Sahara camps controlled by the Polisario front has been screened in Morocco’s coastal resort city of Agadir. The film, directed by Violeta...

ARAB SLAVE TRADEWhile the Goliath Arab Islamic slave trade was immense and its lingering effects and discrimination are still in various areas:Arab slave trade covers various periods in which a slave trade has been carried out under the auspices of Arab peoples or Arab countries.Such as:- Al-Andalus slave trade.- Barbary slave trade.- Trans-Saharan slave trade.- Indian Ocean slave trade.- Comoros slave trade.- Zanzibar slave trade.- Ottoman slave trade.- Red Sea slave trade. Hentz, James J. (2013). Routledge Handbook of African Security. p.294Unfortunately these racist attitudes were to persist, given slavery's twin legacy, that of Arabism and Islamism. ____Lawson, Edward H....

King Ghezo ruled Dahomey from 1818 to 1858, a period marked by military conquests and the transformation of the region's economy, heavily reliant on the slave trade. The kingdom of Dahomey, with its capital at Abomey, was a dominant power in West Africa, known for its aggressive raids on neighboring regions to capture slaves. These captives were either traded for European goods, forced to work on royal plantations, or sacrificed in elaborate voodoo ceremonies.Local legends claim that several structures within the palace complex in Abomey, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, were constructed using a mortar that included the blood...

"The View" host Sunny Hostin was shocked to discover her family's hidden history in a new episode of the PBS documentary show, "Finding Your Roots." The documentary show researches prominent figures' family histories through historical records and DNA testing. On the February 6 episode, show host Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed one of Hostin's ancestors on her maternal side was likely involved in the slave trade in colonial Spain. Her third great-grandfather also "owned at least one human being," he said.

Dozens of congressional Republicans traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas on Wednesday to get a firsthand look at the illegal immigration crisis resulting from what they argue are the Biden administration’s failed policies. “It’s been an eye opener,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, who led the delegation of more than 60 GOP lawmakers to Eagle Pass, Texas. The trip came amid ongoing negotiations on Capitol Hill to strike a bipartisan deal on border security. Lawmakers toured a Border Patrol processing center and heard from local residents and sheriffs as well. “We’ve learned a considerable amount of what’s going on...

Are you a Christian? Are you pro-life? Do you have think books in school libraries should be age appropriate? If the answer is yes, MSNBC’s Joy Reid used her Tuesday show to compare you to slave traders. During a segment entitled “the origins of white supremacy,” Reid also gave a family history lesson, “Among those who did survive was my own maternal ancestor, a Fulani Muslim woman named Yhara Waboosia, later a converted Christian renamed Mitchie Johnson. She was born in 1800 in Ghana and as a six or seven-year-old was incarcerated in one of those slave castles in Ghana...

A report published by India’s Union Home Ministry last week revealed that over a million women and girls disappeared between 2019 and 2021. 250,000 of the disappearances involved girls under the age of 18.Roughly 80,000 of the women went missing in the national capital of New Delhi.India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which provided data for the report to parliament, blamed “forced marriage, domestic work, sexual exploitation, and child labor” plus “mental illness, miscommunication, misadventure, domestic violence, and being victim of a crime” as the main reasons for the huge number of missing women.The NCRB said many of the women...

...When on December 20th German foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock headed a large delegation to Abuja, she handed over a second small batch of the 1,130 pieces her country's five leading museums gifted to Nigeria in 2022... Little did she (one hopes) or the German public suspect what Buhari and the NCMM would do, just three months later. Gifting the restitutions to the Oba, who is bound to no enforceable curatorial standards, is controversial in the West; not least because of the campaign by black Americans who descend from slaves, and who demand that the artworks stay safe in the museums...

I don’t mean to bash Mr. Yerby, who opined that “North American slavery [was] indisputably the most abysmally cruel system of bondage in the whole of human history,” but his opinion is objectively disputable. See what you think. The following is from 2010. I was reminded of it when a guest in this post pointed out that Americans were not the first to export black Africans as slaves. I share it every now and then, usually when someone assumes that I know nothing about the 1400-year-long sacking of my father's home continent. But, with past slaving and slave-holding being all...

Although presented in the film as an underdog, the real-world version of the kingdom is notable for its vast contributions to the Atlantic slave trade, and its brutality toward its captives from its subjugated neighbours.Viola Davis’ latest action film, “The Woman King,” glorifies the Agojie, the female fighting force of the west African Kingdom of Dahomey in the 19th century. Although presented in the film as an underdog, the real-world version of the kingdom is notable for its vast contributions to the Atlantic slave trade, and its brutality toward its captives from its subjugated neighbors. The movie, which is currently...

A UAE-led heritage project is shedding new light on the origins of Zanzibar’s Stone Town.Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an original settlement at the Unesco World Heritage site in Tanzania that dates back to the 11th century.It proves the town — previously thought to be an 18th century Omani Arab town — was actually established much earlier by local Swahili people, archaeologists believe.During a major dig this summer, they unearthed traces of homes, cooking pits and significant amounts of pottery from this era.They were then able to pinpoint the settlement’s transition to stone buildings by the 14th century...Stone Town became...

Women and children captured by Russians in Ukraine are being sold into sex slavery in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to the Daily Mail, American officials confirmed that there are “lost” women and children that were targeted at either Polish refugee camps or taken from Ukraine directly to Russia where they are bartered into UAE servitude. The revelation comes from a report titled “Modern Slavery In Dubai,” published by the Washington Institute For Defence And Security and the New York Center For Foreign Policy Affairs.

My great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, was what I prefer to call a businessman, from the Igbo ethnic group of south-eastern Nigeria. He dealt in a number of goods, including tobacco and palm produce. He also sold human beings. "He had agents who captured slaves from different places and brought them to him," my father told me. Nwaubani Ogogo's slaves were sold through the ports of Calabar and Bonny in the south of what is today known as Nigeria. People from ethnic groups along the coast, such as the Efik and Ijaw, usually acted as stevedores for the white merchants and...

The Biden-Harris administration has lost track of at least 45,000 unaccompanied minors who were brought across the southern border illegally — and President Joe Biden has yet to issue a statement about it.

The 1619 Project was developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times that supposedly focuses on the cause(s) and consequences of slavery, etc, but does this "project" miss the target intentionally or otherwise? Before anything like this "project" (opposed by President Donald Trump and numerous other politicians, educators, etc, across the United States) should have even been attempted, much less potentially taught within classrooms in high school or beyond, were the times before the 1600's explored or even much less considered? Those origins could be covered in a "1400's Project" that deals with how the slave trade began in...