Slave? What Slave? - Part 2

A Study of the Traditional Systems of African Servitude

November 02, 2003
by Ayanna Gillian
Self Empowerment Learning Fraternity, Trinidad and Tobago

The URL of this article is:
www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/021120032.html

"Here were gathered tens of thousands of East African slave laborers called Zanj. These Blacks worked in the humid salt marshes in conditions of extreme misery. Conscious of their large numbers and oppressive working conditions the Zanj rebelled on at least three occasions between the seventh and ninth centuries... The rebels themselves, hardened by years of brutal treatment, repaid their former masters in kind, and are said to have been responsible for great slaughters in the areas that came under their sway". (Rashidi)

The conditions described in this extract seem to resemble the chattel slavery of Europeans that Africans would be subject to in the Americas. It is important to mention as well the prevalent view that many Arab traders had of African people. While several scholars and humanitarians wrote tracts and treatises defending Africans, they could not stem the tide of the negative attitudes that many Muslim elites had towards Africans and other minorities. The strong influence of Jewish tradition on Islamic society can be partially blamed for this, given the exegetical works of the Jewish/ Babylonian Talmud that concur that black people were cursed with blackness by God as punishment for their ancestor Ham, son of Noah. (Willis 66) While extensive scholarship has not been able to fully determine the extent of this negative attitude, one can surmise that the combination of non-belief in Islam and the blackness of Africans did not auger well for future relations.

While in the 15th century the prized commodity traded between Arab and African traders was gold, by the jihads of the 18th century, slaves soon eclipsed gold as the primary commodity. Nehemia Levtzion details the swift change in the mode of the slave trade as well as the social and political relationship between states. Islam not only created divisions between the converted and the kufr, but it also introduced a different element, that of the superiority of some tribes over others." The Islamization of the people of Bagirmi southeast of the Lake Chad made them consider themselves superior to their neighbors; proud of their supposed preeminence and eager for the profits of the slave trade they raided their own neighbors" (Levtzion 183) Islam, as a military and political force to be reckoned with by this time, forced many tribes to appear Islamic or to convert to Islam to benefit from the protection of their forces against other tribes who also were eager to share in the spoils of the slave trade. What we observe here is a dramatic shift in the indigenous African systems of servitude, which operated on a much smaller scale, to a widespread raiding and trading spree. Large portions of the population, instead of being circulated to build and serve in African tribes, were shipped off the continent to labour on plantations in the West and the Far East. This period of Islamization altered the shape of African society, and paved the way for the European entrance.

By the time of increased western European intervention in Africa, the way had already been cleared for a major shakeup in the nature of indigenous African servitude systems. " It was the steadily increasing demand for slaves as a result of foreign intervention in the affairs of the continent which brought about a fairly substantial increase in the volume of the trade, hitherto restricted to transactions on a narrow local scale. The material advantages to be gained by trading in slaves were an incentive to some of the clans to intensify their raids on neighbouring tribes..." (Gueye 150) Contrary to the assertions of early European slavers, the domestic servitude systems did not fuel the Atlantic Slave Trade. To meet the increasing demand for labour by external forces, raiding between tribes increased tremendously during this period. The collapse of Songhai and the breaking up of the land into smaller principalities favoured bitter (often European-fueled) tribal wars in which the capture of slaves became the chief push factor. Traditional laws that governed who could be enslaved, the period of time, and for what offences, were significantly altered to meet the growing demand for slave labour. Petty offenses that would have resulted in fines could now be punishable by life enslavement and debtors, who enslaved themselves and would have been freed upon the settlement of their debt, could find themselves auctioned away from their societies and shipped to the Americas. A society that once treated its dependents with respect, sometimes with even more respect than freed men, now treated them as slaves, mere commodities, and shipped them in large numbers to European-run slave ports. The traditional trade routes were now pathways for gruesome slave trains made up of long lines of " haggard, emaciated men, worn out by lack of food, dazed by the blows they were dealt, doubled over with the weight of their loads; crippled spindled-legged women covered in hideous wounds..." (Gueye 154)

The term 'slavery' cannot be uniformly applied to the systems of servitude that existed in indigenous African societies before the increased intervention of Arab and European economic interests. While people did exist in varying states of 'unfreedom' and were often bound to households, clans, kinship groups or compounds at one time or another, the distinction between a bonded servant and a free man was often so precarious that one could not be told from the other. The level of humanity, rights and privileges, and the possibility of manumission that existed in the African servitude systems were completely absent in the chattel slavery systems of the Americas. Any attempt to equate this distinctly European slave system with the African systems of servitude is not only erroneous, but when taken in the context of the various elements of this 'conventional view,' seems an attempt at willful distortion. It has been shown that the increased involvement of foreign powers significantly altered the nature of these systems and it is then that they began to take on the character of what the West understood as 'slavery'. The Atlantic Slave Trade and its outgrowths defied and altered all other traditional concepts of servitude within a community setting. What existed before in Africa was not comparable. The widespread effects of European chattel slavery ushered in a new and monstrous period of African history.

Continue to:
Islam, Colourism and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders


Works Cited:

Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart, London, Heinemann Educational, 1971.

Akomolafe, Femi, On Slavery, 1994

Inikori, J. E, Forced Migration: the Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies (ed) Hutchinson University Library for Africa 1982

Gueye, Mbaye, "The Slave Trade Within the African Continent", The African Slave Trade from the 15th to the 19th Century, Reports and Papers of the meeting of experts organized by Unesco at Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 31 January to 4 February, 1978

Miers, Suzanna, Kopytoff, Igor, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives - University of Wisconsin Press; July 1977

Parson-Lynn, Kwaku, Christianity, Islam and Slavery, Published: June 7, 1999

Parson-Lynn, Kwaku, Afrikan Involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade

Rashidi, Runoko, The Zanj Revolt, The Largest African Slave Rebellions

Willis, John Ralph, "The ideology of Enslavement in Islam" Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, Volume I Islam and the Ideology of Slavery, ed John Ralph Willis, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd 1985

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