The African Slave Trade

10 Pages 2416 Words

The course of human history is marked by terable crimes. How was it possible? How could it have gone on for so long, and on such a scale? A tragedy of such dimensions has no similar effects in any other part of the world. Here is how it became.

The African continent was stripped of its human resources by all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries. Then more than four centuries of a regular slave trade to build the Americas and the prosperity of the Christian states of Europe. Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, possibly as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty across the Atlantic Ocean (1). Of all these slave routes, the "slave trade" in its purest form, i.e. the European Atlantic trade, attracts most attention and gives rise to most debate. The Atlantic trade is the least poorly documented to date, but this is not the only reason. More significantly, it was directed at Africans only, whereas the Muslim countries enslaved both Blacks and Whites. And it was the form of slavery that indisputably contributed most to the present situation of Africa. It permanently weakened the continent, led to its colonisation by the Europeans in the nineteenth century, and engendered the racism and contempt from which Africans still suffer.
While specialists squabble about the details, the basic questions raised by the enslavement of the Africans have scarcely varied since the eighteenth century, when the issue first became the subject of public debate as the result of the efforts of abolitionists in the Northern slave states, the demands of black intellectuals, and the unremitting struggle of the slaves themselves. Why the Africans rather than other peoples? Who exactly should be held re...