Arab-Islamic slave trade
BLACK AFRICANS IN THE EASTERN SLAVE TRADE
01. THE ROAD TO ZANZIBAR
Men, women and children were captured deep inside Central and East Africa, chained together and forced to walk hundreds of kilometres toward the coast.
One of the best documented routes ran roughly 1,200 km from Ujiji to Bagamoyo, opposite Zanzibar. UNESCO states that many of the slave hunters and traders operating in this region were Arabs. Captives reaching the coast could then be sold onward to Zanzibar, Arabia, Persia and India.
By the nineteenth century, Zanzibar had become one of East Africa's major slave-trading centres. UNESCO records that by the mid-1800s more than 20,000 enslaved Africans were being imported into Zanzibar annually, many destined for the island's clove plantations.
These people were not statistics.
They were merchandise.
Chained. Transported. Priced. Sold.
the numbers
20,000+ enslaved people entering Zanzibar per year by the mid-19th century.
East African captives rescued from a slave-trading dhow by HMS Daphne, 1868. The Royal Navy intercepted slave vessels operating off the East African coast and Zanzibar. — The National Archives, FO 84/1310.
SLAVERY DID NOT END AT THE MARKET
02. THE PLANTATION BEHIND THE PALACE
The slave market was only the beginning.
Thousands of captured Africans remained in Zanzibar itself, where enslaved labour became an important part of the clove plantation economy.
UNESCO records that around half of the enslaved people imported into Zanzibar in the mid-nineteenth century were absorbed by local plantations. Others were re-exported toward Kenya, Somalia, Oman and still farther east.
African captives were used as agricultural workers, domestic servants, concubines, soldiers and labourers across parts of Arabia and the wider Indian Ocean world.
UNESCO's General History of Africa documents African slaves in southern Arabia working in households, armies, ports and plantations.
The slave trade was officially prohibited in Zanzibar in 1873 under British pressure, although clandestine trading continued afterwards.
A HUMAN VOICE
Robert Adams, an African-American sailor shipwrecked in 1810, was himself enslaved in North and West Africa before eventually being ransomed. His published narrative describes being repeatedly transferred between owners and markets. Cambridge notes that his story became one of the important nineteenth-century captivity narratives.
THE BARBARY SLAVE TRADE
03. EUROPEANS FOR SALE
Slavery did not move in only one racial direction.
For centuries, corsairs operating from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco captured Europeans at sea and during raids on European coastlines.
Men and women were taken south across the Mediterranean and sold.
Academic estimates remain debated, but a recent Cambridge review cites an estimate of around 1.25 million predominantly European captives between 1530 and 1780 in the Barbary system.
British archival material describes the system directly: Islamic corsairs from Rabat-Salé captured Christian sailors and sold them into slavery. The same archive correctly notes that Christian Mediterranean powers also enslaved Muslim captives; slavery crossed religious frontiers in both directions.
That nuance does not erase the victims.
It makes the history more complete.
THE NUMBER
≈1.25 million predominantly European captives, 1530–1780
Reproduction of Christian prisoners sold as slaves in Algiers, 1684 — inspired by the engraving by Jan Luyken. Rijksmuseum, public domain.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES IN ALGIERS
04. FIVE YEARS A SLAVE
One captive has a name almost everyone knows.
Miguel de Cervantes, later the author of Don Quixote, was captured by North African corsairs in 1575 while travelling back to Spain.
He was taken to Algiers and sold.
He remained captive for roughly five years.
His family repeatedly tried to raise money for his ransom. After several failed attempts, Trinitarian friars finally secured his release in 1580, for approximately 300 ducats.
Cervantes survived.
Many others disappeared into galleys, workshops, households and forced labour without leaving famous names behind.
Cambridge notes that as late as the 1640s there were reportedly more English slaves in North Africa than Africans under English control in the Caribbean.
That fact does not diminish Atlantic slavery.
It reminds us that slavery was never the property of one race.
Original document from 1579 recording the redemption of captives from Algiers, including Miguel de Cervantes, who was freed in 1580 after five years of captivity. — Archivo Histórico Nacional.
THE CHILDREN WHO DISAPPEARED
05. ARMENIAN CHILDREN, WOMEN & FORCED ASSIMILATION
ABDUCTION, FORCED CONVERSION & THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
During the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1916, Ottoman authorities did more than deport and kill Armenians.
Children were taken too.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents that tens of thousands of Armenian children were forcibly removed from their families and converted to Islam. Many were placed in Muslim households or institutions and absorbed into Turkish Muslim society.
Women and girls were especially vulnerable during the deportation marches.
Convoys were attacked repeatedly. Young women and girls were abducted, raped, forced into marriages or taken into households. Some survived only by losing the family, religion and identity they had been born with.
This matters because genocide is not only about killing.
It can also mean destroying a people by breaking the link between one generation and the next.
THE NUMBER
Around 1.5 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenian men, women and children died during the genocide.
Image in connection with the Armenian massacres and deportations of the late Ottoman period.
Image in connection with the Armenian massacres and deportations of the late Ottoman period.
WHY THE GNŌX BROTHERHOOD REMEMBERS BOTH
05. NO MONOPOLY ON MEMORY
We are not interested in replacing one memory with another.
The transatlantic enslavement of Africans happened.
It was enormous.
It deserves remembrance.
But so do Africans enslaved through the Sahara, Red Sea and Indian Ocean networks.
And so do Europeans captured and sold around the Mediterranean.
UNESCO itself argues for breaking the silence surrounding the different histories of slavery and transmitting that memory across generations.
For the GNŌX Brotherhood, that leads to a simple position:
Anti-racism cannot mean remembering victims according to their colour.
And opposing Islamism does not mean hostility toward Muslims.
It means refusing to give religious doctrines, historical empires or political movements immunity from the same scrutiny we apply everywhere else.
Our project therefore remembers black and white victims together.
Not to compete over suffering.
Not to rewrite history.
But to widen it.
