Arab slave trade

East African slave trade, refers to the slave trade, under which people from East Africa were largely beside it sold in the Arab-Islamic world also in other parts of Asia, islands in the Indian Ocean and to Brazil as slaves.

History

Plantation slavery and Zanj revolt

First peak reached the East African slave trade with the development of the wetlands in southern Iraq under the Abbasids. These large plantations were established exclusively by black slaves from East Africa - has been made for the management of arable - the so-called Zanj or Zanj. These slaves lived under similar conditions as the poor slaves on the plantations in the "New World ". In the year 869 there was a great uprising of the Zanj in southern Iraq, which was only 883 finally defeated by Al- Muwaffaq, with most slaves were killed. Then there was hardly larger plantations in the Islamic world, which has been cultivated by slaves. Instead, male slaves were mainly used as eunuchs and slave girls as concubines.

Sultanate of Zanzibar

From the 17th to the 19th century, the island of Zanzibar formed under the rule of the Sultan of Oman, a center of the East African slave trade. Also traded for slaves were the more northerly islands of Lamu and Pate.

In the 19th century, the East African slave trade reached its peak. On the one hand the fishing grounds were depleted for slaves on the West African coast, which prompted European slave traders to relocate to the east coast and from there to procure slaves for the Americas and islands in the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, the significant demand from America and the Indian Ocean later decreased gradually ( ban in France in 1848, in the United States in 1865, in Brazil, 1888), which in the whole of Africa the price of slaves fell and buyers possible within Africa and in the Arab- Islamic world was to buy more slaves. So slaves were increasingly exported to the Middle East, but also on the East African coast on plantations, such as the scale under Said ibn Sultan clove plantations of Zanzibar, are used. Through extensive slave raids whole areas of East Africa were depopulated. A well-known slave traders was the Zanzibaris Tippu Tip, who penetrated in his expeditions into the Central African Congo Basin.

Abolition of the slave trade and slavery

The effort to combat the slave trade, was one of the motivations and justifications for the colonization of East Africa by European colonial powers.

From the 1860s sought fleets of the Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean by Daus, in which slaves were transported ( dhow - chasing ). In 1875 Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar to pressure Britain's slave trade in East Africa, this trade was illegal, however, until the 20th century on. In part, it shifted from the sea on caravan routes that led to the Benadirküste in southern Somalia, from where the slaves were shipped to Arabia.

While the British vorgingen against the slave trade, they tolerated the keeping of slaves, especially in private households, initially. Slavery itself was abolished in the British protectorate of Zanzibar in 1897, 1907 followed by a ban in the concession British East Africa (later Kenya).

In Saudi Arabia, there were up to the 1930s public slave markets. 1956 witnesses reported from a public slave sale in Djibouti, were sold at the allegedly from Chad native people. 1924, slavery was officially abolished in Iraq, 1937 in Bahrain, Kuwait and in 1949 in 1952 in Qatar. In Yemen, slavery was abolished after the fall of the monarchy in 1962. In the same year the abolition by Prince Faisal in Saudi Arabia, where, however, of the 100,000 to 200,000 mostly African slaves only a few thousand were released at once took place. In Oman, Sultan Qaboos bin Said abolished slavery as part of a general modernization of the country.

Presence

Relatively little is known about the descendants of East African slaves. Possible reasons for this are high mortality rates, the fact that many male slaves could testify as eunuchs no descendants, or that the slaves and their descendants went up in the majority population.

In southern Somalia slave descendants today live as " Somali Bantu ". In Turkey, Mustafa Olpak caused a stir when he published the life story of his grandfather, who had been sold as a slave from Kenya to the Ottoman Crete. The Siddi in India and Pakistan are mostly from slaves, but also partly of free Africans.

Slave raids as in earlier times occurred in the context of the Civil War in South Sudan.