Red Sea slave trade
The Red Sea slave trade, sometimes known as the Islamic slave trade, 'Arab slave trade, or Oriental slave trade', was a slave trade across the Red Sea trafficking Africans from Sub-Saharan Africa in the African continent to slavery in the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East from antiquity until the mid-20th century.
The Red Sea slave trade is known as one of the longest enduring slave trades in the world, as it is known to have existed from Ancient times until the 1960s, when slavery in Saudi Arabia and Yemen were finally abolished. When other slave trade routes were stopped, the Red Sea slave trade became internationally known as a slave trade center during the interwar period. After World War II, growing international pressure eventually resulted in its final official stop in the mid 20th-century.
The Red Sea, the Sahara, and the Indian Ocean were the three main routes by which East African slaves were transported to the Muslim world.
Overview history
The slave trade from Africa to Arabia via the Red Sea had ancient roots. While in Pre-Islamic Arabia, Arab war captives were common targets of slavery, importation of slaves from Ethiopia across the Red Sea also took place. The Red Sea slave trade appears to have been established at least from the 1st-century onward, when enslaved Africans were trafficked across the Red Sea to Arabia and Yemen.In the 9th century, slaves were transported from the Red Sea slave trade to Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina, and by caravan over the desert to Baghdad and slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate. The slave trade was still going on a many centuries later, when it was noted by Western travelers.
Richard Francis Burton described the slave market in Medina in the 1850s:
According to a British report, 320 slaves were shipped via the Red Sea slave trade to Jeddah in May 1879.
Slaves were marched in shackles from the West Lakes to the coasts of Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia, placed upon dhows and trafficked across the Indian Ocean to the Gulf or Aden, or across the Red Sea to Arabia and Aden, with weak slaves being thrown in the sea.
After World War I, the East coast of the Red Sea formed an independent nation as the Kingdom of Hejaz. Hejaz did not consider itself obliged to obey the laws and treaties signed by the Ottoman Empire in regard to slavery and slave trade. During the Interwar period, the Kingdom of Hejaz was internationally known as a regional slave trade center.
Supply sources and routes
The sources that supplied the slave trade across the Red Sea was mainly situated in Africa. They included routes directly across the Red Sea from mainland Africa, as well as a route connected to the Indian Ocean slave trade, in which the slaves were originally trafficked via the Indian Ocean slave trade and then in to the Red Sea past Yemen. The origin of the slaves were mainly African, but there were a minority of other ethnicities provided via the Indian Ocean slave trade, mainly Asians.East Africa
East Africa came to act as a supply source for slaves to the Arabian Peninsula via the Indian Ocean slave trade since at least the Middle Ages. While the majority of these slaves appear to have been shipped to the Arabian Peninsula via Oman and Muscat rather than via the Red Sea, the Red Sea was also a route for the slave trade between East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. It also acted as a route for slaves to Egypt.In the 12th century, Muhammad al-Idrisi trafficked African children from present day Kenya to Arabia.
The slave trade had two major routes to Hejaz. African slaves were trafficked from primarily South Sudan and Ethiopia. Primarily children and young women were bought or given as tribute by their parents to Ethiopian chiefs, who sold them to slave traders. The parents were told that their children were going to be given a better life as slaves in Arabia. The slaves were delivered to Arabian slave traders by the coast and shipped across the Red Sea to Jeddah.
Eunuchs, female concubines and male laborers were the occupations of slaves sent from Ethiopia to Jidda and other parts of Hejaz. The southwest and southern parts of Ethiopia supplied most of the girls being exported by Ethiopian slave traders to India and Arabia. Female and male slaves from Ethiopia made up the main supply of slaves to India and the Middle East.
Egypt and Hejaz were also the recipients of Indian women trafficked via Aden and Goa.
Since Britain banned the slave trade in its colonies, 19th century British ruled Aden was no longer a recipient of slaves and the slaves sent from Ethiopia to Arabia were shipped to Hejaz instead.
India
India was supply source of slaves to the Arabian Peninsula since Ancient times, although it was to a lesser extent than slaves from Africa.During the 13th century, Indian boys, women and girls intended for sexual slavery, were trafficked from India to Arabia and to Egypt across the Red Sea via Aden.
Madagascar and the Indian Ocean islands
Slaves were also trafficked to Red Sea ports from Madagascar and adjacent Indian Ocean islands, such as the Comorian Archipelago, after Arab Muslim traders, along with their Swahili allies, gained control of Zanzibar and the Swahili Coast in the 9th century. From the 9th to the 17th centuries, an estimated 2,000-3,000 East African and Malagasy slaves were trafficked annually from the Indian Ocean coast to slave ports along the Red Sea and other parts of Arabia. By the mid-17th century, this number had surged to over 3,000 to 6,000 slaves trafficked each year from just Madagascar to the Red Sea by non-European Muslim slave traders.Some historians estimate that during the 17th century as many as 150,000 Malagasy slaves were exported from Boeny in northwest Madagascar to the Muslim world including the Red Sea Coast, Hejaz, Arabia, Oman, Zanzibar, Kilwa, Lamu, Somalia, and possibly Sudan, Persia, and India. Given the racial diversity of Madagascar, which was populated by a mix of Austronesian and Bantu settlers, the Malagasy slaves included people with Southeast Asian, African and hybrid phenotypes.
European traders also took part in the lucrative slave trade between Madagascar and the Red Sea. In 1694, a Dutch East India Company ship transported at least 400 Malagasy slaves to an Arabian port on the Red Sea where they were sold to Arab Muslim traders to be enslaved in Mecca, Medina, Mocha, Aden, al-Shihr, and Kishn. To varying degrees, Portuguese, French, Dutch, English and Ottoman merchants were known to have participated in the Malagasy slave trade as well.
Pilgrimage route
A major slave route were connected to the Hajj pilgrimage. Already in the Middle Ages, the Hajj played a role in the slave trade. In 1416, al-Maqrizi told how pilgrims coming from Takrur brought 1,700 slaves with them to Mecca.The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, was biggest vehicle for enslavement. When the open Trans-Saharan slave trade died out, Muslim-African Hajj pilgrims across the Sahara were duped or given low-cost travel expenses by tribal leaders; when they arrived at the East Coast, they were trafficked over the Red Sea in the dhows of the Red Sea slave trade or on small passenger planes, and discovered upon arrival in Saudi Arabia that they were to be sold on the slave market rather than to perform the Hajj.
Slave traders trafficked primarily women and children in the guise of wives, servants and pilgrims to Hejaz, where they were sold after arrival. The victims of this trafficking route were sometimes tricked, and taken on Hajj under false pretenses. Slave traders trafficked women to Hejaz by marrying them and then taking them on the Hajj, where they were sold: afterwards, their families were told that their women had died during the journey.
In a similar fashion, parents entrusted their children to slave traders under the impression that the slave traders were taking their children on Hajj, as servants, or as students. This category of traffic victims came from all over the Muslim world, as far away as the East Indies and China. Some travelers sold their servants or poor travel companions in the Hajj, in order to pay for their travel costs.
The English traveler Charles M. Doughty, who visited Central Arabia in the 1880s, noted that African slaves were brought up to Arabia every year during the hajj, and that "there are bondsmen and bondwomen and free negro families in every tribe and town".
In the 1920s, action was taken against the Red Sea slave trade by the British during their campaign against slavery in Sudan by taking better control of the Hajj pilgrimage, establishing a clearinghouse in Port Sudan for slaves repatriated by the British from slavery in the Kingdom of Hejaz, resulting in over 800 slaves resettled between 1925 and 1935.
In the 1950s, in connection to the Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery and the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, Barnett Janner commented:
The shipping of slaves occurs in only one particular area of the world, in the seas around Arabia. The warships most likely to search such slavers would be British, and I feel sure that there would not be any abuse of the right to search. I am sorry that we gave up the fight for that right. As far as I know, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are the only States in the world where chattel slavery is still a legal institution. Only a year or so ago a French Deputy—the person, I assume, to whom my hon. Friend referred—investigated the situation and found that every year ignorant Africans are lured on by agents to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. They are not told, of course, that they need a Saudi Arabian visa. When they arrive in Saudi Arabia without a visa they are arrested and put into prison for a few days and then handed over to licensed slave dealers. In addition, raids are made in Baluchistan and the Sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf and people are captured and carried off by land and sea, taken to small Saudi Arabian ports and sold in slave markets.