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Fitzgerald: Black Africa and the Arab Muslim slave trade

Nov 24, 2005 7:34 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the peculiar dhimmi attitude that black African states have up to now displayed toward Arab states, and why this must be changed:

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, still being exploited, massacred (as the Biafrans) or sold into slavery (as in the Sudan). This is happening 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.

It was not Muslims, but 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 they were seized. Those who survived the primitive operation (with of course no anesthetic) 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 to 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, and even had consequences in West Africa. V. S. Naipaul has noted that the Muslim conquest of Hindustan left the Indians with a “wounded civilization.” Similarly, 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 followed upon the activities of the Arab slavers. Think of Tippoo Tib, whom Stanley writes about. His depredations have received little attention, though those of him and other Arab slavers were by far the worst of the calamities visited by outsiders upon black Africa. Unlike the European colonialists, the Arabs who use Islam as the vehicle for their own imperialism have never had to account for this. Yet they have never ceased to press forward, to make demands on black Africa. They helped encourage the “Jihad” — as Colonel Ojukwu called it in his Ahiara Declaration — that led the Christian Ibo in Nigeria to fight for their independence from the Muslim 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. They continue to this day to divert the oil wealth from the largely Christian south 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; it is made poorer still by the cutting off of relations with the most successful foreign aid program, one based on encouraging self-sustaiining agricultural development,that of Israel, which was cut off at Arab insistence after the Six-Day War. It is made poorer still by the rise in oil prices, and made yet even poorer by the havoc played by the Arabs wherever they can — from Khadafy”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 Muslims from outside who are putting steady pressure on the Christians in such formerly secure Christian countries as the Ivory Coast and Togo.

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 Egyptian officials mutter 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? The Arab slave trade did so much damage; yet Arabs, 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 Europe and America. 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 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 whatever 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 up for their slave trade in black Africa, which began earlier, ended (if it ended at all) later, and was far more extensive, than the European slave trade — and to do in the only coin that is now recognized — that is, coin.

If Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E., were forced to disgorge, as pentitential pence, to black Africa every year, say, $50 billion (for the three of them together, that is only 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. It 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.

Suppose the Arabs refuse to come through with the sums requested. 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 Muslim recognition, validation and permanent legitimization of slavery (because of its appearance in the Qur’an and its being practiced by Muhammad), may make it just a bit harder for Da”wa to be conducted quite so successfully as it is now 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.

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