Pilgrimage to Follow "Route of Slaves of Sudan"

Pilgrimage in the Sudan following the "Route of Slaves of Sudan:" a recipe for martyrdom or, perhaps, the pilgrims will themselves become slaves.

There are too few accounts of the genocide in the Sudan. Many of those that do exist soft-peddle the Islamic aspect. Here is one essay on the subject that seems to try to deal with the Islamic aspect.
Obviously, without dealing with it you cannot understand what is really going on.

http://www.think-israel.org/green.sudan.html

I applaud the courage of the Roman Work of Pilgrimages. We can only hope that this daring pilgrimage into the heart of darkness will bring light to the tragic lives trapped within it.

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May the REAL God (NOT 'allah') bless these people and grant them success in their mission of light and hope and genuine compassion.

Years ago, Al Sharpton went to the Sudan and witnessed the active slave trade and the wholesale murder of entire Christian villages. He came back to the US very upset and pressed US officials to do something now.

I don't know what happened or if something convinced him to drop the subject, but US politicians don't seem to focus on Sudan for very long. It's a huge tragedy.

These are the true Crusaders of Christ. They carry not the sword but the cross. Surely this will be a spectacle to behold.

It was the British who suppressed the Arab slave trade in East Africa. That trade had supplied black slaves for many uses, but particularly sought were male children who were castrated on sight, where seized. Those who survived the primitive operation (with of course no anaesthetic) were then taken by slave coffle from the interior and marched either all the way up to the Muslim slave-markets of Egypt and North Africa from Tripolitania to Mauritania, or taken by dhow to the coast, often of Muscat, and from there to the slave-markets of Arabia, Riyadh and Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, even as far as Constantinople and Smyrna. In “The Hideous Trade” Jan Hogedoorn has calculated that the mortality rate due to the castration and subsequent forced marches, ended with barely 10% of those initially taken actually managing to reach those slave markets alive.

This wreaked havoc all over East and Central Africa, but even had consequences in West Africa. V. S. Naipaul has noted that the Muslim conquest of Hindustan left the Indians with a “wounded civilization.”Similiarly, in his short monograph on “The Wanderings of Peoples” the British historian A. C. Haddon notes that in Africa “"the slave trade, as carried on under Arab influence...contributed powerfully to the dislocation of tribes."

Such dislocation that followed upon the activities of the Arab slavers (think of Tippoo Tib, whom Stanley writes about has received little attention, though it was by far the worst of the calamities visited by outsiders upon black Africa. Even though, under Western pressure, slavery has been officially abolished in Muslim countries (which cannot permanently reject slavery as it is recognized in Islam) the blacks of sub-Saharan Africa are, whenever they come into contact with Arab or even local Muslims, are still being exploited, massacred (as the Biafrans) or sold into slavery (as in the Sudan), most notably in the Sudan, which a hundred years ago was still mainly black, and overwhelmingly non-Muslim, but thanks to steady Jihad encroachments, has been taken over by the dominant northern Arabs. Unlike the European colonialists, the Arabs who use Islam as the vehicle for their own imperialism, have never had to account for this, never ceased to press forward, to make demands on black Africa. They helped encourage the “Jihad” – as Colonel Ojukwu called it in his Ahiara Delcaration – that led the Christian Ibo in Nigeria to fight for their independence from the Muslm north; with Egyptian pilots strafing Ibo villages, and the entire Western world ignoring the Biafrans (only Ghana and Israel recognized Biafra diplomatically), and with a million civilians massacred, the Muslims of the north, with that Egyptian help, managed to suppress the Biafran movement and continue, to this day, to divert the oil wealth from the largely Christan south and divert it to support the Muslim-controlled army and the depressed, inshallah-fatalistic economy of the Muslim north.

Why then do not, at long last, the countries of black Africa make some demands for reparations on the Arabs, awash in money? Black Africa is poor, and made poorer still by the cutting off of relations with the most successful foreign aid program, that of Israel, that was cut off at Arab insistence after the Six-Day War; made poorer still by the rise in oil prices; made poorer still by the havoc played by the Arabs wherever they can, from Khaddafy’s pressure on Chad, to the Sudanese government’s massacre of blacks in the Sudan, to the enslavement of black by Arab Muslims in Mali and Mauritania, to the pressure of Muslims from outside putting steady pressure on the Christians in such formerly secure Christian countries as the Ivory Coast.

If Black Africa is poor, the Muslim Arabs are fantastically rich. They have done nothing to deserve that wealth; it is merely a question of sitting on top of oil and gas reserves. An accident of geology. The black Africans have for nearly forty years done the diplomatic bidding of the Arabs. What have they gotten for it? A few of the Big Men may have been paid off to become Muslims – one thinks of Idi Amin, turning Muslim and then retiring for life to Saudi Arabia. Similar stories of others who “reverted” for a payoff could be told. But what about the permanent damage done to black Africa by that “dislocation” and that vast slave trade, and the continuing pressure of the Arabs which one can see, for example, in the not-so-veiled threats made by Egypt to Ethiopia, a country that has endured intermittent famine, and that wishes, quite naturally, to at long last divert some of the headwaters of the Nile for irrigation projects. But Egypt mutters darkly that this must not be attempted, that the Nile belongs to Egypt alone, and Egypt will deign to “permit” Ethiopia only so much water, only so much prosperity.

Is it beyond the wit of the Infidels in the West, in Europe and America, to back up black Africa as it makes demands for reasonable reparations from the Arabs, whose slave trade did so much damage and which, unlike Americans and Europeans, have never publicly recognized their own role, much less attempted to offer the kind of grants to Africa that have come from Euroipe and Ameica? Why should the billionaires of Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Kuwait, be allowed to pretend to be members of the “Third World” as they have been, ever since Bandung? Why is the farce not exposed, and demands made, and unless those demands are met, the states of black Africa end their imposed role of dutifully echoing whaever those rich Arabs demand of them?

Somewhere, in all of those schemes and pan-African dreams, there must be some black African leaders willing and able to demand that the Arabs make upo for the millennium of their slave trade, and do so in the only coin that is now recognized – that is, coin.

If Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E., were forced to disgorge to black Africa every year $50 billion (for the three of them together, that is about 2-3 weeks income from oil), it would be at least one way of compensating for the damage inflicted by the Arab slave trade on black Africa, and would also use up some of the money that otherwise, inevitably, goes to fund mosques, madrasas, propaganda, Da’wa, arms acquisition, and other instruments of the Jihad.

Why should not black Africa put those undeservedly and fantastically rich Arabs, who have never once apologized or even felt they had to discuss the extensive Arab slave trade, nor to admit that where that slave trade was finally suppressed, it was not because of any moral prompting by the Arabs themselves, but purely from outside pressures from Infidels, chiefly the British.

Suppose the Arabs refuse to come through with the sums being asked. The very act of raising the issue may force them to come through with something. In any case, the truth about Arab supremacism, and the continued recognition and validation of slavery, through its appearance in the Qur’an, and its being practiced by Muhammad and therefore permanently legitimized, may make it just a bit harder for Da’wa to be conducted, quite so successfully, among carefully identified black populations both in Africa, and still more important, within Europe and North America. And that result would be highly desirable. It requires only the truth.

Sadly, the slave trade as an issue is strictly reserved for bludgeoning the West, the exertions of the Royal Navy and the Union Army notwithstanding.

The approved Narrative--the authors of which shall remain nameless to avoid rankling (though you'll find such authors at the non-ideological New Duranty Times, in fashionable Soho salons and in the ivy'd halls of Harvard)--does not allow for slave trade as a sin to be attributed to non-Europeans.

It's a shame to be deprived of the slavery angle, because it's a good one--but it's a small price to pay for keeping our thinking in acceptable lanes.

Part of the route they will follow is the one on which St Josephine Bakhita was taken on her journey as a slave child into Italy in 1885.
Knowing nothing about her I looked her up this afternoon. She was born in Olgossa in Darfur probably in 1868 or 9. She was kidnapped from her family aged about 7, 8, or 9 and sold several times in the markets at El Obeid and Khartoum. She was so traumatised by the experience that she forgot her real name but the slave traders named her Bakhita which means "fortunate". Eventually in 1883 she was bought by the Italian consul and she became the companion and nurse of his friends daughter, eventually staying with that family when they returned to Italy in 1885. She accompanyed her charge to convent school and there she became a Christian, taking the name Josephine. She discovered a vocation to become a nun. With the support of the nuns and the Patriarch of Venice the Italian courts declared that, as there was no slavery in Italy, she had been free since 1885 and there was no problem about her entering the convent.
For 50 years she worked in the community at Schio, where she became known as "Our Black Mother" She died in 1947 after a painful illness. In her pain she must have remembered her childhood as she would plead “Please, loosen the chains... they are heavy!”
She was beatified in 1992 and canonized in 2000 by John Paul II.

Hugh, what you say makes a lot of sense. But that's the trouble. What makes sense is not acceptable nowadays. We're all supposed to forget about the genocide in the Sudan, or the ethnic cleansing in Kashmir, or Beslan or the Park Hotel in Netanyah or the murder of Copts in Egypt.

And to ask the Arabs to share the wealth, why that sounds positively right wing -- or maybe when a left-wing-sounding proposal is a demand upon the Arabs or would cost the Arabs some money or some prestige, why then it becomes right-wing. Golly, a lot of [dis]honest folks in acadummiyah are going to get angry if you spoil their party. It sounds so culturally insensitive or historically oxymoronic. After all, how dare anyone impute mean treatment of slaves to Arabs. I insist that the Arabs be seen as equal opportunity enslavers. They enslaved white folk too. And that makes it all right, doesn't it, if they now enslave black folk? You can't call it racist! And here some right-wingers complain about Arabs gelding male slaves, including men below the age of puberty. Just bear in mind what Father Stalin said, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs" [shney beytsim]. Consider that if a 17-year old Arab who throws a firebomb at an Israeli or burns a car in Paris, is just a child, then a 10-year old slave is a already a man and there's no moral reason not to geld him. Then again, an activist is a resistance fighter who slaughters 40 civilians with one bomb, whereas a terrorist is a soldier who tries to stop him.

Sorry I got started. But these things do get under your skin.