Slavery in Africa
Slavery within sub-Saharan Africa includes slavery and the slave trade within the countries of black Africa and existed before the arrival of Arab and European slave traders.
Accurate data is hard to obtain because in contrast to the Atlantic slave trade no records and statistics exist. However, there are estimates that the intra-African slavery about 10-15 million people affected.
Dissemination
According to reports, Arab traveler and European observers was slavery in the West African empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai, in the Ashanti kingdom in what is now Ghana, widely used in Dahomey (Benin ), in the Hausa and Yoruba in Nigeria today and in the Congo region.
The Ethiopian kingdoms of the Gibe region exported annually about 7,000 slaves in the rest of Ethiopia and abroad, with mutual assaults and attacks on neighboring tribes as slaves procurement source served.
Position of the slave
Slaves worked in the household, in agriculture but were also integrated as a docile public official in the traditional state apparatus.
Most slaves were prisoners of war who were captured in wars and targeted raids against other tribes. There were also slaves who were asked of tributary tribes as tribute, and it could also lead to debt slavery within their own tribe. Occasionally there were also children who had been sold by their families into slavery, and there was rarely, slavery in the context of religion ( see, for example: Trokosi ).
Slaves were allowed to marry, raise children, own homes and belongings. Releases came before. The exact modalities of slavery before the 19th century are difficult to elicit because of the often problematic source location and the size and diversity of the area concerned.
Importance for the Atlantic slave trade
For the white slavers, the slaves imported from Africa from the 15th century to the 19th century in order to use these in their colonies in America, the existence of intra- African slave trade was one of the conditions of their work. So they went barely even on slave hunting, but people could Goods in African ( and Arab ) slave traders and rulers shopping. These were given in return " luxury" goods such as firearms, textiles, cowrie shells and alcohol from Europe.
Importance for the Oriental slave trade
Even the older and numerically more extensive trans- Saharan African and East African slave trade developed on the basis of African fishing practice. He was mostly run by Arabs and was concerned exclusively captured in West Africa by Africans people. Only in the nineteenth century Arabs attacked also massively in Sudan and attachments rust Africa in the slave purchasing one.
Inner African slavery today
As part of the European colonization of Africa intra-African slave trade as well as the slave trade of the Arabs was (see East African slave trade ) gradually pushed back, but was still far away in secret.
Traditional forms of slavery still exists today in Sudan, Mauritania and Mali and in Niger ( Iklan - offspring among the Tuareg in the last two countries ), partly they overlap with the modern children, affected by the in West Africa, according to Unicef 200,000 children are.