In Africa there were a number of societies and kingdoms which kept slaves, before there was any regular commercial contact with Europeans, including the Asanti, the Kings of Bonny and Dahomey. Many societies in Africa with kings and hierarchical forms of government traditionally kept slaves. But these were mostly used for domestic purposes. They were an indication of power and wealth and not used for commercial gain. However, with the appearance of Europeans desperate to buy slaves for use in the Americas, the character of African slave ownership changed. GROWING RICH WITH SLAVERY ROYALTY In the early 18th century, Kings of Dahomey (known today as Benin) became big players in the slave trade, waging a bitter war on their neighbours, resulting in the capture of 10,000, including another important slave trader, the King of Whydah. King Tegbesu made £250,000 a year selling people into slavery in 1750. King Gezo said in the 1840's he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slave trade: "The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…" LIVING WITNESS Some of the descendants of African traders are alive today. Mohammed Ibrahim Babatu is the great great grandson of Baba-ato (also known as Babatu), the famous Muslim slave trader, who was born in Niger and conducted his slave raids in Northern Ghana in the 1880's. Mohammed Ibrahim Babatu, the deputy head teacher of a Junior secondary school in Yendi, lives in Ghana. "In our curriculum, we teach a little part of the history of our land. Because some of the children ask questions about the past history of our grandfather Babatu. Babatu, and others, didn't see anything wrong with slavery. They didn't have any knowledge of what the people were used for. They were only aware that some of the slaves would serve others of the royal families within the sub-region. He has done a great deal of harm to the people of Africa. I have studied history and I know the effect of slavery. The Anti-Slavery Society estimated that there were 2,000,000 slaves in the early 1930s Ethiopia (the only part of Africa not ruled by whites at the time), out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million. Slavery continued in Ethiopia until the brief Second Italo-Abyssinian War in October 1935, when it was abolished by order of the Italian occupying forces... (That's right: Mussulini, a member of the AXIS freed 2 million black-owned slaves. When will Steven Spielburg make a movie about THAT?) When British rule was first imposed on the Sokoto Caliphate and the surrounding areas in northern Nigeria at the turn of the 20th century (a century after Britain had outlawed slavery), approximately 2 million to 2.5 million people there were slaves. Another 2 million black-owned slaves freed by white people. You're welcome. In 'The Slave Trade Today', (on Amazon.com) Sean O'Callaghan toured the Mideast and Africa and covertly visited many slave markets. Since Islam allows for slavery and slave trading, he was able to see much of the real world of Islamic slavery. This all happened openly and legally as recently 1962: "Ten boys were ranged in a circle on the dais (used to display the slaves), their buttocks toward us. They were all naked, and I saw with horror that five had been castrated. The (slave dealer) said that usually 10% of the boys are castrated, being purchased by Saudi homosexuals, or by Yemenis, who own harems, as guards." p 75 "Why had the girls (female slaves who had just been sold) had accepted their fate without a murmur, the boys howled and cried?" "Simple" said the Somali, we tell the girls from a very early age - 7 or 8 that they are made for love, at age NINE we let them practice with each other, and a year later with the boys". Mecca: "The streets are full of slaves... we see a few old slave women. They are recognized by the poverty of clothing... but we see nothing of the younger women slaves who are kept in the houses of the city." "As we move along we see two or three very old men and women who look like black skeletons. If we go to the mosque at sunrise we shall see some of these, if we go at sunset they will be there too, and if we pass by at midnight, we shall see them there still .. Sleeping on the stones in their rags. They have no home but the mosque, and no food but what they receive in alms; (they were) turned out to seek the bounty of Allah, as their masters would say." Blacks started the African slave trade, Muslims exanded it and carried it to new heights of brutality, white people stopped it. Then Europeans gave blacks and muslims independence and blacks and Muslims restarted the African slave trade started all over. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/9chapter2.shtml

• published: 11 Nov 2015
• views: 579