The History Scrutineer

“Enslaved people were transported across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean for centuries. Like its translatlantic equivalent – which it outlasted – this slave trade changed societies and tore many Africans from their roots.” So reads the strapline of page 149 (chapter: The Eastern Slave Trade) of the exceptionally beautiful book: ‘Africa. The definitive visual history of a continent’; published by DK, 2024, with its foreword written by the celebrated British-Nigerian historian/filmmaker David Olusoga.

The following statements are extracted from the same page in order to provide some background to this particular topic.

1. Slavery in Africa dates back at least 3,000 years, to ancient Egypt.
2. As the caliphates of the Middle East and North Africa grew in the 8th and 9th centuries CE, Muslim merchants began to buy enslaved people along a commercial frontier that stretched across the Sahara and into the Horn of Africa.
3. Empires such as the Wagadou and Kanem-Bornu enslaved people in raids, while Amazigh (Berber) and Arab enslavers led captives on gruelling marches across the Sahara.
4. On the east coast, Arab and Swahili enslavers used the Indian Ocean and Red Sea to ship people.
5. The trade in enslaved people shattered communities and was used to build powerful empires, especially in West Africa.
6. By the 18th century, the transatlantic trade was under pressure from abolitionists, and it was banned by the British Empire in 1807. But in East Africa it thrived as it had never done before.
7. Zanzibar became the richest sea port in tropical Africa, and enslaved people laboured in its clove plantations in the Persian Gulf.
8. In 1873, the British shut down the slave markets in Stone Town, Zanzibar.
9. The impact of the slave trade across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean was immense.
10. Huge numbers of people were taken from their communities and forced into servitude. While individual traders and rulers became wealthy, the suffering of some populations was horrific.

The History Scrutineer recommends all featured videos to anyone seeking a truthful, non-biased, zero-hidden-agenda version of human history.

Time for a case-study or perhaps better said – a character study. A real-life one, that is.

Tippu Tib.

Taken from ‘Britannica’: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tippu-Tib

Tippu Tib (born 1837—died June 14, 1905, Zanzibar [now in Tanzania]) was the most famous late 19th-century Arab trader in central and eastern Africa. His ambitious plans for state building inevitably clashed with those of the sultan of Zanzibar and the Belgian King Leopold II. The ivory trade, however, apparently remained his chief interest, with his state-building and political intrigues serving as means to that enterprise.

Tippu Tib’s first trading trip to the African interior was in the late 1850s or early 1860s, accompanied by only a few men. By the late 1860s he was leading expeditions of 4,000 men, and shortly thereafter he began to establish a rather loosely organized state in the eastern and central Congo river basin. Ruling over an increasingly large area in the 1870s, he either confirmed local chiefs or replaced them with loyal regents. His main interests, however, were commercial; he established a monopoly on elephant hunting, had roads built, and began to develop plantations around the main Arab settlements, including Kasongo on the upper Congo River, where he himself settled in 1875.

In 1876–77 he accompanied the British explorer Henry (later Sir Henry) Morton Stanley partway down the Congo River, and later he sent expeditions as far as the Aruwimi confluence, 110 miles (180 km) downriver of Stanleyville (now Kisangani, Congo [Kinshasa]). In the early 1880s he threw in his lot with Sultan Barghash of Zanzibar, who hoped to use him to extend Arab influence in the Congo region against the threat of Leopold’s International Association Of The Congo (the king’s private development enterprise). Tippu Tib returned to Stanley Falls in 1883 to try to take over as much of the Congo basin as possible on behalf of Barghash. He remained in the Congo until 1886, when he again went to Zanzibar with more ivory.

By that time Leopold’s claim to the Congo basin had been recognized by other European nations, and Tippu Tib had apparently decided that an accommodation with the International Association was inevitable. In February 1887 he signed an agreement making him governor of the district of the Falls in the Congo Free State (now Congo [Kinshasa]). It proved to be an impossible position: the Europeans expected him to keep all the Arab traders in the area under control but would not allow him the necessary weapons, and many Arabs resented his alliance with the Europeans against them. In April 1890 he left the Falls for the last time and returned to Zanzibar.

End of extract.

We scrutinizers find it ‘curious’ at best and indeed ‘unjust’ at worst, how the discussion of slavery is almost always immediately displayed with a ‘background image’ of the transatlantic slave trade or to put it maybe a little crassly – white men from Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Holland (principally) enslaving black Africans – treating them terribly. This did of course occur, and it was a reprehensible movement in world history. Beyond revolting. That said, again, it is curious how the media focuses 100% on this one particular angle of historic slavery when there are so many other angles – that (interestingly) intertwine with the European enslaving of Africans. Africans in positions of power and dominance sold fellow Africans into the hands of European buyers.

Africans enslaved other Africans, Arabs enslaved Africans, Europeans enslaved other Europeans (a lot of the French and Irish who reached the Americas where in fact taken across as indentured servants – as just one example), Arabs/North Africans enslaved Europeans from as far away as Iceland (Barbary Corsair raids), Native Americans enslaved other Native Americans – etc, etc.

Human beings have forever treated each other abhorrently. Slavery to this day, still abounds, dear readers…

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

Frederick Douglas.