Before Europe came to Africa with chains, someone else had already been there.
Before Europe came to Africa with chains, someone else had already been there. Let me tell you about the Arab slave trade. The one nobody talks about. It started around 650 AD. Long before Christopher Columbus. Long before the first European slave ship crossed the Atlantic. Arab traders had already established extensive networks across East Africa, West Africa and the Sahara, capturing, buying and selling African people for over a thousand years. Between 650 AD and 1900 AD historians estimate that between 17 and 20 million Africans were taken through the networks of the Arab slave trade. That number is difficult to pin down precisely because unlike the transatlantic trade which was heavily documented for commercial reasons the Arab trade was less systematically recorded. But here is what we know. Arabs preferred female slaves over male slaves. Women were taken as concubines and domestic servants. Many were used for sexual exploitation in Arab households. Many male slaves destined for c...