The Arabs got millions of slaves to their countries and bred many more millions from African women. In some Arab countries, a generation ago, up to 20 percent of their population were direct descendants of slaves or were slaves. But there are other disturbing stats that are part of this slavery story. At a minimum two African slaves died for every slave that made it to the hell-here-on-earth Arab destinations.
African slaves got to the North Africa and other Arab countries after going through the African forest or savannah onto the Sahel and then onto and through the Sahara Desert. Alternatively, the slaves went through the African forest or savannah to the East African coast then onto ships sailing northwards or eastwards on the Indian Ocean.
After the initial spurt of slave capture, most tribes moved from the coast into the interior to avoid slavers. Slave raiders in the eastern part of central Africa were Arabs or their surrogates, the Swahili. Further inland, in present day DRC there were tribes like the Nyamwezi or Yeke led by Msiri and in collusion with the Swahili-Arab notorious Tippu Tip who terrorised the interior in search of slaves. In present day Zambia the Bemba, Lozi, Lunda, Chikunda, and Luvale were powerful ethnicities that in one way or another aided and abetted slavery.
On capture, the slaves were subjected to different scenarios, all with nutritional deprivation and psychological anguish as a baseline. From the interior, there were forced marches to the East African Coast or to the Sahel and then into the Sahara. During the pre-desert marches, malnutrition, because of nutritional deprivation would set in. This had serious consequences for the slaves during the other legs of their transportation to the Arab lands. The pre-desert marches had a high mortality.
The desert trek comprised of the baseline nutritional deprivation and psychological anguish followed by months of arduous physical exertion in an unbelievably harsh environment best suited for camels and desert rats and not physically puny humans in bondage. The slaves were forced to march through the Sahara Desert — the Desert Passage — in chains and in yokes. This stage had a very high mortality, even higher than the infamous Middle Passage. Some Arab traders recorded that they frequently lost up to half of the slaves. Some research shows that up to 80 percent of slaves in some caravans did not make it to the markets. This march could last from to three to six months.
The ocean journey on the Atlantic comprised of the same baseline of nutritional deprivation and psychological anguish followed by months of forced immobility in a hostile diseased womb, whose umbilical cord connected to a sick placenta in Europe. These European and Arab axes nourished a negation to humanity.
Arabs took men, women, children, and eunuchs. Stragglers in the slave caravans through the Sahara did not get a chance to die quickly, albeit by a spear, like the ivory porters from the interior to the Atlantic or Indian Ocean coasts; no. Firstly, all slaves slept out in the cold open desert every night for months, shackled. One can only imagine what that did to their weakened emaciated bodies. Then, during the day, just imagine what the desert heat did to the chafing on their skins caused by the yokes and the manacles. Arab slavers usually wore a litham, a turban-like veil that covers the head and face to protect from the sand. But for the slaves, the Arabs did not provide lithams, adding to their misery when crossing the desert. The slavers abandoned stragglers, or those who became too tired to carry on, and left them to die a slow, agonising death from the heat, thirst or starvation. The lucky ones would have their throats cut, their limbs chopped off or broken and left to bleed to death; those were the lucky ones. These gratuitous murders were to prevent anyone else benefitting from the slavers’ “cargo”.
The extent of evil visited on Africans south of the Sahara by the Arab/Berber/Tuareg/European axis of evil, together with their Black African accomplices is unimaginable and stomach-churning. According to Shakespeare, “the evil that men do lives after them, and the good is often interred with their bones.” It is very difficult to think of what good these evil people could have done in their lives.
For the slaves embarking into the Middle Passage, the Door of No Return was really the Gate to Hell, with millions fated to take their very last breaths on the ships. Their survival was on the knees of the gods. The Middle Passage was the mid-point in the Trail of Blood, which started in raided African villages, crossed the Atlantic, and went all the way to the “New World.” Another Trail of Blood crossed the Sahara Desert into all the Arab lands. Not only did these Trails of Blood cross oceans and deserts, they also crossed time itself. This is because in these foreign lands, to this day, many centuries after the blood trails first appeared, African blood still flows copiously at the hands of the descendants of the slave masters.
