From: kdr7-AT-columbia.edu
Subject: On Arab Slave Traders
Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 10:41:02 -0400 (EDT)




I was just reading through parts of "King Leopold's Ghost," by Adam 
Hochschild (Houton Mifflin: 1998), which is a history of the Anglo-
Beligian genocide in the Congo in the late-19th and early-20th 
centuries. Given certain recent claims made on this list, and knowing 
little about the issue of Arab involvement in the African slave 
trade, I found the paragraphs below very informative... (p. 28):

"Significantly, most British and French antislavery fervor in the 
1860s was directed not at Spain and Portugal, which allowed slavery 
in their colonies, or at Brazil, with its millions of slaves. 
Instead, righteous denunciations poured down on a distant, weak, and 
safely nonwhite target: the so-called Arab slave-traders raiding 
Africa from the east. In the slave markets of Zanzibar, traders sold 
thier human booty to Arab plantation owners on the Island itself, and 
to other buyers in Persia, Madagascar, and the various sultanates and 
principalities of the Arabian peninsula. For Europeans, here was an 
ideal target for disapproval: one "uncivilized" race enslaving 
another.

"Arab was a misnomer; Afro-Arab would have been more accurate. 
Althought their captives often ended up in the Arab world, the 
traders on the African mainland were largely Swahili-speaking 
Africans from territory that is today Kenya and Tanzania. Many of 
them adopted Arab dress and Islam, but only some were of even partly 
Arab descent. Nonetheless, from Edinburgh to Rome, indignant books 
and speeches and sermons denounced the vicious "Arab" slavers -- and 
with them, by implication, the idea that any part of Africa might be 
colonized by someone other than Europeans."



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