by Peter Fernandez
The revisionist history of American slavery doesn’t tell the whole story.
Without the historic context of global slavery, Vermont students are exposed only to the European Trans-Atlantic market, 1514-1866, when 11 million Africans were enslaved in the Americas. But, according to Statista.com’s Katharina Bucholz, and many historians, ninety percent of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade found its way into the Caribbean, South America, and especially, Brazil.
“Only about six percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America,” writes historian George Pavlu in a March 27, 2018 issue of NewAfrican Magazine.
Are Vermont students even being taught the 1300-year record of the black slave trade beneath the whip of Arab-Moslem masters? If the Biden Administration, and American Federation of Teachers’ President, Randi Weingarten, have their way, it will not. “CRT is not taught in elementary schools or high schools,” Weingarten said last week. But, at the same press conference, she added, “Our union will defend any member who gets into trouble for teaching honest (CRT) history.”
According to Tidiane N’Diaye, a Franco-Senegalese anthropologist and author of The Veiled Genocide, “The Arabs raided sub-Saharan Africa for thirteen centuries without interruption. Most of the millions of men they deported disappeared as a result of inhuman treatment. This painful page in the history of black people has apparently not been completely turned.”
Arabs were the first and last of the slavers to ship millions of black Africans to Europe and back to their own lands. According to an article written by Bob Koigi, “White European merchants were interested in strongly built young men as laborers in their farms, the Arab merchants were more focused on concubinage capturing women and girls who were turned into sex slaves while living in harems.” Koigi also noted that women were captured at a 3-1 ratio.
In the same NewAfrican Magazine article, historian Paul Lovejoy esti-mated that “some 9.85 million Africans were shipped out as slaves to Arabia and, in small numbers to the Indian subcontinent. Between AD 650 and 1600, an annual average of 5,000 Africans were shipped out by the Arabs. This makes a rough total of 7.25 million while between 1600 and 1800, another 1.4 million Africans were shipped.”
The apex of the Arab slave trade was during the 19th century when 12,000 Africans were shipped out every year. The total figure for the 19th century alone was 1.2 million slaves to Arabia.
In his book, The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa, Ghanian professor/minister John Azumah writes, “While the mortality rate of the slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as 10% the percentage of the slaves dying in transit in the Trans-Saharan and east African slave market was a staggering 80-90%.”
“Africa became a source of slaves for the cultures of the Mediterranean world many centuries before the discovery of the Americas,” writes historian, Duncan Clark, in his 1999 book, Slaves and Slavery.
There were also white European slaves, according to Clarke (and other historians), as it was predominantly the Arabs’ market open for such ivory pelts: “The most important source of slaves in medieval Europe, ‘was the coast of Bosnia on the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea. The word ‘slave’ and its cognates in most modern European languages is itself derived from ‘sclavus’ meaning ‘slav’, the ethnic name for the inhabitants of this region.”
It was these inter-tribal, Moslem/Christian conflicts in Central Europe that made it convenient for the victors, the Turks, to sell their captured enemies to the opportunistic Arab slavers. Decades after slavery was banned in the states, white Europeans were still bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire.
In FairPlanet News, Liberty Mukomo, a lecturer at the University of Nairobi Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies, stated that “even as the rest of the world realized the harm slavery did to an entire continent and made a declaration to abolish it, the Arabs protested it and it took a lot of international trade and revolt by the slaves for them to end it.”
According to a well-researched article, Black Slavery Exists Today in Muslim Nations – Geller Report News, 6/20/2021, some Arab slave masters are still open for business. Katrina Sumner of Regent University’s Center for Global Justice also composed an excellent article, 1/5/2021, regarding this abominable practice. Slavery Still Exists Today – Center for Global Justice (regent.edu).
Peter Fernandez is a Citizen Columnist for Vermont Daily. He lives in Northfield. Photo credit Unsplash.