The trans-Saharan slave trade was a Muslim slave trade across the Sahara, from the 7th century until the early-to-mid-20th century. Slaves, primarily from West, Central, and East Africa, were sold throughout the coastal Maghreb, Egypt, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and regions of West Asia.Amin, S. (1997). Trans-Saharan Exchange and the Black Slave Trade. Diogenes, 45(179), 31-47.La Rue, George, 'Slave Trades and Diaspora in the Middle East, 700 to 1900 CE' (26 May 2021), in Thomas Spear (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (New York, NY, online edn, Oxford Academic, 27 Feb. 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.904
Estimates of the total number of black slaves moved from sub-Saharan Africa to the Arab world range from 6 to 10 million from the mid-7th century until the 20th century when it was abolished. While Europeans managed the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in West Africa with West African tribes and kingdoms, Arabs managed and operated the East African and trans-Saharan slave trade. Berber elites and Arabized Berbers were also actively involved in the enslavement and trade of slaves.
Early trans-Saharan slave trade
Records of slave trading and transportation in the Sahara date as far back as the 3rd Millennium BC during the reign of the Egyptian king Sneferu who crossed the fourth cataract of the Nile into what is today modern Sudan to capture slaves and send them north. These raids for prisoners of war, who subsequently became slaves, were a regular occurrence in the ancient Nile Valley and Africa. During times of conquest and after winning battles, the ancient Nubians were taken as slaves by the ancient Egyptians.Redford, D. B.. From Slave to Pharaoh: The Black Experience of Ancient Egypt. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Project MUSE
The Garamantes relied heavily on slave labor from sub-Saharan Africa. They used slaves in their own communities to construct and maintain underground irrigation systems known to Berbers as foggara. Ancient Greek historian Herodotus recorded in the 5th century BC that the Garamantes enslaved cave-dwelling Ethiopians, known as Troglodytae, chasing them with chariots.Austen, R. (2015). "Regional study: Trans-Saharan trade". In C. Benjamin (Ed.), The Cambridge World History pp. 662–686. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139059251.026
In the early Roman Empire, the city of Lepcis established a slave market to buy and sell slaves from the Bantu African interior. During the 5th century AD, Roman Carthage traded Black slaves brought across the Sahara. The empire imposed customs tax on the trade of slaves. Black slaves seem to have been valued as household slaves for their exotic appearance. Some historians argue that the scale of slave trade in this period may have been higher than medieval times due to the high demand for slaves in the Roman Empire. However the slave trade through the Sahara in antiquity may have been small and rare as Saharan trade didn't reach large dimensions until the Arabs and Berbers introduced large numbers of camels into the desert.
The ancient Garamantian caravan trade route between the coast of Tripolitania across the Sahara to Lake Chad transported foremost circus animals, gold, cabochon and raw material for food processing and perfume manufacture, but also slaves; the African slave trade was however likely limited prior to the Islamic period, and African slaves appeared to have been few in the Roman Empire, where they were viewed as exotic luxury slaves.Wright, J. (2007). The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. Storbritannien: Taylor & Francis. p.15-16
Over several centuries, the trans-Saharan slave trade contributed to a mass movement of sub-Saharan Africans into the Maghreb, Egypt, and the wider Near East. Notable Islamic caliphs and rulers with varying degrees of sub-Saharan ancestry include Abu al-Misk Kafur, al-Mustansir Billah, Yaqub al-Mansur, Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman, and Moulay Ismail Ibn Sharif.
Trans-Saharan slave trade in the Middle Ages
Paul Lovejoy estimates that around 6 million black slaves were transported across the Sahara between the years 650 AD and 1500 AD. The trans-Saharan slave trade, established in Antiquity, continued during the Middle Ages. Following the early 8th-century conquest of North Africa, Arabs, Berbers, and other ethnic groups ventured into Sub-Saharan Africa first along the Nile Valley towards Nubia, and also across the Sahara towards West Africa. They were interested in the trans-Saharan trade, especially in slaves, as there was a constant demand for slaves in the eastern Arab nations and Constantinople. The Muslim slave traders distinguished themselves from the peoples on the other side of the Sahara, referring to these African populations as Zanj or Sudan meaning "black".
Arabs would routinely acquire slaves through violent raiding, followed by capturing them and sending them on dangerous forced marches across the Sahara to slave markets where they would be treated as chattel i.e. as personal property that can be bought and sold. In North Africa, the main slave markets were in Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli, and Cairo. Sales were held in public places such as souks. During the era of the Fatimid Caliphate (909–1171), the majority of slaves were Europeans taken along European beaches during conflicts.
The Sahel Sanhaja Berbers would import horses from Morocco in exchange for slaves from the Jolof Empire (Wolof, Senegal).
Duarte Pacheco Pereira noted that African slaves were imported from Mali, and Jalofo (Senegal) by Arabs and the Sanhaja, with a poor horse being worth ten to 12 slaves
Aside from raiding, slaves could also be obtained by purchasing them from local black rulers. The 9th century Arab historian Ya'qubi states:
Indeed, few sub-Saharan African rulers would resist the slave trade, while many chiefs would become middlemen in the trafficking, rounding up members of nearby villages to be sold to visiting merchants. The 12th-century Arab geographer al-Idrisi noted that Sub-Saharan Africans would also participate in slave raiding stating that:
Al-Idrisi would also describe the different methods Muslim merchants would use to enslave blacks, recording that some would "steal the children of the Zanj using dates...lure them with dates and lead them from place to place, until they seize them, take them out of the country and transport them to their own countries". In 1353, the Berber explorer Ibn Battuta would record accompanying a trade caravan to Morocco which carried 600 black female slaves who were to be used as domestic servants and concubines. When Battuta visited the ancient African kingdom of Mali he recounted that the local inhabitants vied with each other in the number of slaves and servants they had, and was himself given a slave boy as a "hospitality gift."Noel King (ed.), Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, Princeton 2005, p. 54.
The routes taken by slave caravans transporting slaves depended on their destination. Slaves headed to Egypt would be carried by boat down the Nile and slaves headed to Arabia would be sent to ports on the Red Sea such as Suakin and Assab. Slaves headed to North Africa would have to take the Saharan trade routes which had been in use since around 1000 BC. These include routes such as the ones from Tripoli–Ghadames–Ghat–Hoggar–Gao connecting modern-day Libya to Nigeria, the Tripoli-Fezzan-Bornu route, connecting Libya to areas of what are today Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, and the east–west route connecting Egypt to Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. Kanem–Bornu–Zawila was another route to North Africa as the Kanem–Bornu Empire in the eastern part of Niger was an active part of the trans-Saharan slave trade for centuries, and the trade formed the basis of the empire's prosperity.
Passage through the Sahara required the expertise of ethnic groups whose lifestyles were uniquely adapted for survival in scorching, arid environments, namely the local Berber tribes and the foreign Bedouins from Arabia. For example, the Tuareg and others who are indigenous to Libya facilitated, taxed and partly organized the trade from the south along the trans-Saharan trade routes. Various nomadic peoples played critical roles as guards, guides, and camel drivers. As a result, they were granted autonomy and treated as allies by governments of North Africa. Oases were vital waystations for caravans and those such as Awjila, Ghadames, and Kufra in Libya allowed both north–south and east–west travel. Even with expert help the passage could still prove deadly to merchants and slaves. Sometimes whole caravans of thousands of people could disappear without a trace.
The goods exchanged in the trans-Saharan slave trade varied. In the 10th century, the Muslim scholar Mutahhar ibn Tahir al-Maqdisi described the trade between the Islamic world and sub-Saharan Africa as consisting of food and clothing being imported into sub-Saharan Africa while slaves, gold, and coconuts were exported out of sub-Saharan Africa. Later, the 16th century Andalusian writer Leo Africanus wrote that traders from Morocco would bring horses, European cloth, clothing, sugar, books, and brass vessels to Sudan in order to exchange them for slaves, civets and gold. According to Africanus, the sultan of Bornu would accept payment for slaves only in horses, with an exchange rate of up to twenty slaves for one horse.
The range of tasks given to slaves was varied and included servile labor utilized for "irrigation, pastoralism, mining, transport, public works, proto-industry, and construction." In general black slaves were used as laborers, servants and eunuchs. Some female slaves could be used for labor, but most would be used for domestic chores and concubinage. Eunuchs, who were around seven times more expensive than non-castrated males could be used as harem guards, administrators, tutors, secretaries, commercial agents, and even concubines. Due to strictures within Islamic law, slaves would not usually be castrated within Muslim territory and therefore would be castrated before being sent across the Sahara. Sometimes slaves were castrated after purchase in North African slave markets. Conditions within the mining industry were notoriously harsh especially the salt mines of Basra where tens of thousands of black slaves toiled in extremely miserable conditions living on insufficient amounts of food. This poor treatment led to the bloody Zanj Rebellion or "black revolution". Ya'qubi records that both male and female slaves were employed in the copper mines of Upper Egypt. The Qarmatian Republic of eastern Arabia is said to have employed 30,000 blacks slaves to perform all difficult labor. Some black slaves served in the military forces of North Africa. For example, the Zirid dynasty used black slaves imported from Sudan via Zawila.
In some instances, Christians in Africa would acquiesce to Muslims' demands that they be provided with slaves. In 641 AD during the treaty known as the Baqt was signed establishing an agreement between the Nubian Christian state of Makuria and the new Muslim rulers of Egypt, in which the Nubians agreed to give Muslim traders more privileges of trade in addition to sending 442 slaves every year to Cairo as tribute.Jay Spaulding. "Medieval Christian Nubia and the Islamic World: A Reconsideration of the Baqt Treaty," International Journal of African Historical Studies XXVIII, 3 (1995) This treaty remained intact for 600 years all while the slave trade within Nubia continued unimpeded.