Who sold the slaves? Everybody did.

Prompted by the topic discussed in the recent video from Senegal, H. Numan weighs in on slavery — who took the slaves, who sold them, and who owned them.

Who sold the slaves? Everybody did.

by H. Numan

A few days ago the Baron posted a video about slavery. I’ve written about it in the past, and I think it’s a good idea to elaborate on this revolting topic. There are so many of misconceptions about slavery. I actually met my very first slave a fortnight ago, here in Bangkok. Slavery is very much alive, even today.

First about that meeting. I met two businessmen from Ethiopia. One was well educated, and fluent in English. The other was an elderly gent who spoke only Ethiopian and was badly dressed. He hung at the back, and was sometimes spoken to harshly by the other guy. Not the way you would address an employee. He was treated much more like you would treat a beloved but not too bright dog. Only after they had left did I realize this elderly man was almost certainly a slave. Slavery still exists in Ethiopia, albeit illegal. “You’re not supposed to do that” sort of thing.

Slavery is practiced illegally in many nations, mainly in Africa and the Middle East. In some nations the practice is almost legal, for example in Mauritania. Theoretically slavery is illegal in the Middle East, but in reality it is widely practiced. The new soccer stadium under construction in Qatar is being entirely built with slave labor. People are recruited under false pretenses. Often they come from India, Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines, but also from Pakistan. There is no ban on keeping mohammedans as slaves within mohammedanism. They have to hand over their passports upon arrival, and are badly paid, badly treated and not allowed to leave the building site. Some do, and are dealt with very harshly. First they get a severe thrashing by the police, then they are returned to their owners (‘employers’) who punish them again in front of their colleagues to show what happens with runaway slaves. Oh, sorry. I meant ‘employees’, of course.

That’s sort of old hat. You should know that already. Much more serious is that new slave markets are appearing in Libya and the Islamic State. Yes, there is a fresh Arab Spring blooming in Libya. The problem is that Arab springs never bring anything new. Arab springs always wants to restore the revered old. Such as slavery. Talk with any mohammedan you like. Very few will openly oppose slavery. Slavery is sort of built into the religion. Wherever mohammedanism gains a strong foothold, slavery re-emerges.

Something you hear appallingly little about. Politically correct media and politicians don’t want you to know mohammedanism sees slavery as a cornerstone. They don’t have to, the religion can perfectly well survive without it. Christianity did, for example. Also in Judaism slavery no longer is acceptable. Israel does very well without it.

Regular readers know I’m not religious. Unless coffee is a religion, that is. I’ll believe I’ll have another cup! That does not mean to say I only see the bad sides of Christianity. Credit were credit is due: It was devout Christians who first realized that chattel slavery is an abomination. Long before it became mainstream or even economically feasible. No other religion until this very moment reached that conclusion. None at all. Christians figured this out in the 18th century, well before the invention of the steam engine make it economically possible.

Slavery has been practiced by all nations and cultures of the world after the first agricultural revolution, somewhere around 10,000 BC. It surely wasn’t love and peace for mankind before that. In order to keep slaves you need a certain surplus. You need to feed your slaves, lock them up, guard them and care for them. Before the first agricultural revolution people were hunters and gatherers. They simply lacked the resources to keep slaves. So what did they do with captives? They either killed them or ate them.

Every civilization that could owned slaves. Some more, such as the Mediterranean and Middle East civilizations, others less. Such as the Chinese empire. But all did, none exempted. The ‘noble savages’ of the Pacific islands, so revered by enlightenment thinkers and modern lefties, absolutely adored slaves. With some garlic sauce they tasted great!

Once people settled down and grew a regular supply of food it became possible to make other people do the jobs you don’t want to do yourself. In a nutshell, that’s what slavery is for. It’s expensive and dangerous. But at the same time it is prestigious and gives you a nice feeling of supremacy. Slavery doesn’t work economically. It never has. You need to feed your slaves and care for them. Provide them with living space. You can’t overwork them, that would reduce the useful lifespan. Eventually your slave will pass its expiration date and you still own it. Meaning you still have to feed and care for it.

That’s the difference with a machine. You turn it on only when you need it. When you don’t, you turn it off, which reduces the cost significantly. Machines don’t mind anything. Slaves do. A chattel slave has only one real incentive to work harder or better: the lash. Offering some extra food or a few trinkets is not really an encouragement. He’s still a slave and will remain so. Most people don’t like to be slaves, so they work as slowly as possible, run away at the earliest opportunity and can be highly aggressive toward their owners and keepers. That makes it economically unsound and highly dangerous.

One of the reasons why people kept slaves was for prestige and that feeling of supremacy. You can do whatever you want with a slave. Lust slaves were common in Roman times. The ‘beloved servant’ of the centurion cured by Jesus was almost certainly one of them. Centurions were upper middle class Romans; they could well afford such a luxury. We have inflatable dolls; Romans would find that rather primitive and perverted. As I said, you can do anything you want with a slave. And they better do what you want. Or else… That’s the reason why slavery exists today. Especially within mohammedanism. The supremacy part is for them the most important reason by far. Prestige comes as a close second.

How many people actually owned slaves in the Confederacy? About 10%. 90% of all slaves were, however, owned by only 10% of that number. That means that 90% of all southerners didn’t own slaves at all. 9% owned one or more slaves and only 1% owned hundreds of slaves. That was the top 1%, of course. They got the other 99% fighting for their property.

Most mohammedans don’t own slaves today. That doesn’t mean to say they don’t want to, or find the practice an abomination. If fact, a lot of mohammedans would dearly love to own slaves. Especially Westerners. Why? Westerners make notoriously bad slaves. They work very slow, argue everything, have a weak constitution (= need lots of medical care). So why? It’s really nice to actually own the people that make you feel inferior.

There’s a lot of talk about White Man’s Burden today. True. It was the burden of white men to abolish slavery worldwide. Because nobody else did it. Buddhists didn’t do it. Hindus didn’t do it. Shintoists didn’t do it. Mohammedans absolutely adore slavery. Only Europeans did. Of course they did it for their own benefit. The conquistadors conquered South America to get rich quick. Not to bring Spanish culture and civilization. That was simply an added benefit or side effect. The British colonized Africa just as everyone else did. A side effect was a much more peaceful continent, as warring tribes are very bad for business. Everybody gained.

If you visit north Mediterranean countries, you might notice lots of medieval towers in coastal areas. That was to prevent mohammedan slavers on raiding trips. Those towers were on guard 24/7 to give people warning of impending raids and offer a save refuge. Sometimes it even worked. Mohammedan slavers operated as far north as Iceland. Ireland and the south coast of England were often visited.

The biggest surprise for Livingstone was not the discovery of dark Africa. Dark Africa wasn’t dark. It wasn’t undiscovered and certainly not uninhabited. What he saw was a continent geared to one product only: slavery. Everything else was extra. The entire continent was a production line for slaves. Some black tribes specialized in catching slaves. Others provided way stations to rest slaves on the march towards the Middle East and North Africa. There was a lingua franca: Arabic. Everywhere he met Arabs who were managing some part of the slave network. His black guides and carriers all spoke Arabic. Livingstone didn’t have any maps. That’s why he went there to create them. Only to discover that the dark ‘undiscovered’ continent was much more of a busy company or factory entirely dedicated to slavery. Corporate headquarters were in Zanzibar. If you look at the map, you’ll see Zanzibar is very close to South Africa. Everything in Africa south of the Sahara was run like a colonial slavery empire by the Arabs. In reality, Arabs had colonized Africa long before and ran it as a merchant empire. What they didn’t do was shout it from the rooftops. They kept it secret for centuries. That was Livingstone’s surprise and his real discovery.

In West Africa they had sales offices for the export. That’s where European nations bought their African slaves. Most often trade was done not by Africans, but by Arabs. Those Arabs were able to speak the languages of the Western countries better, and after all: they managed the entire network. So why shouldn’t they do the sales bit?

For every slave that sailed across the Atlantic, at least three marched to the Middle East or North Africa. Why you see so many black people in the Americas and not in the Middle East and North Africa? A simple matter of management. The Europeans took much better care of their property. That made good business sense too: if you allow your slaves to breed you get the offspring for free. African slaves marched north were not so lucky. They were worked to death. Literally. Breeding was not on the Arab agenda. They simply marched a couple of slaves more, if they needed them.

Think about that when you hear White Lives Don’t Matter advocates whining about inequality and financial apologies.

— H. Numan

28 thoughts on “Who sold the slaves? Everybody did.

  1. Regarding slavery, I met a slave in Texas – a blonde, blue-eyed slave who never told people that is what he was. I was hired via internet to “schedule” work for him. All his earnings went to me. The people the money came from thought I was his friend. Never met the slave owner, but when his mother died he left the area, went to another state and took his slave with him. So much for that job – it lasted about a week.

    It was great for me, but not so good for the slave. I was told that he had to be broken, and that anyone who was easily manipulated was fair game. Some slaves (of all colors) have the word “slave” branded into their skin. The owner, does take care of them, the slave I was scheduling got poison ivy and had to be treated, so his treatment cost went to the owner.

  2. Excellent myth-mashing recapitulation; thank you.

    Whenever ABS reads of the Confederacy and slavery he remembers the 1860 census revealed more slaves in the North and, of course, northern fortunes (Faneuil Hall in Boston was built on the profits of the slave trade) were built on the backs of slaves, whites and blacks (Slavs were both white and the root of the word slave).

    In fact, as the Karl Marx backed Northern Invasion to stop Southern Liberty was percolating up, the mendacious Yankee were bellowing about blacks while their own factories were run by white slaves whom they had no desire of liberating.

    The Emancipation Proclamation freed as many slaves as Obama has honest bones in his body – zero.

    Anytime ABS reads about slavery, he always imagine he is hearing a chain of memory being dragged across the rocky floor of some long-forgotten Southern Sepulcher.

    And the chain is being dragged by a hated Haint, dressed in his ragged Confederate Gray Long Coat, and the chain he is dragging is comprised of the links of lies, enmity, and ignorance, forged in the minds of the Jacobinite North and imprisoning nearly the entire populace with its haughty and vindictive “memory,” and this Haint will haunt that sepulcher until America releases him from his bondage with the key of righteousness; a righteousness that, finally, after long last, gives the Southern Cause its due respect and honors the memories of the descendants of those who fought with such heroic courage.

    O, and Abe “Honest Abe” Lincoln got his name for the same reason a 400 lb mobster gets the nickname, Tiny.

    Here is a link to a Confederate Catechism

    http://www.florida-scv.org/Camp1599/news.htm

    • Cheers! Cheers!

      I almost spit out my Jack Daniels (Single Barrel today) when I read the silly about how the 1%-rich-100+slaves-slave-owners managed to get the other 99% to “fight for their property”!
      “Oh, yes, Master LaPierre, we shall gladly spill OUR BLOOD and welcome the spilling of OUR SONS’ BLOOD and wreak total devastation of our country (CSA) and our nation’s (CSA) economy so that YOU can maintain your property!”
      Said no Southerner EVER.

  3. I’m including an afterword similar to this unedited version at the end of my new novel, which is almost ready for printing. It deals with a modern corsair raid where 67 Irish girls are kidnapped from an elite boarding school and taken to Morocco for ransom or auction as sex slaves. Since the parents cannot afford the ransoms, they are destined to be sold. The novel is set a decade or so in the future during a continent-wide European civil war. To give it a historical ring, many of the names of the characters are taken from history. I’m also including this bibliography.

    Note to readers: William Rainsborough, Zymen Danseker, Thomas Pellow, John Harrison, Jan Janszoon/Murad Rais and Sidi Mohammed el-Ayyachi are all historical figures from the corsair era, and their real-life exploits far exceeded anything described in this novel. For example, the Dutch renegade Murad Rais (Captain Murad) did in fact lead the pirate cartel in the Moroccan port of Salé. In 1627, he led five ships and hundreds of Janissary troops to Iceland, and after days of plunder, rapine and mass-murder, the Muslim raiders kidnapped four hundred Christians into slavery. In 1631 he led another group of raiders to the village of Baltimore, Ireland and abducted more than a hundred villagers into slavery, most of them women and children. It’s estimated that a million Europeans were captured and carried to North Africa as white slaves between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. If you would like to learn about this untaught history, I recommend these books:

    Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800, (Robert C. Davis, 2003)

    Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the 17th-century Mediterranean, (Adrian Tinniswood, 2010)

    Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: the Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat, (Peter Hammond, 2005)

    The Stolen Village: A Thrilling Account of the 17th-century Raid on Ireland by the Barbary Pirates, (Des Ekin, 2006)

    Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates, (Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger, 2015)

    White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves, (Giles Milton, 2004)

  4. Give that man a cigar! You left out my wife’s people, the vikings, who also had slaves; and dead right about my brown countrymen in NZ! I remember a conversation in NZ many years ago, where a Dutchman said: “We discovered NZ”, and a Maori shot back: “Yes, and we ate you!”
    Excellent observation that slavery would have come into existence the moment it became economically possible to keep them.

    To think, when I was a child we were told slavery was Britain’s shame–they ‘invented’ it!!

  5. “….this revolting topic.”

    It’s true that slavery is “revolting” but only if you perceive the slave as a fellow human being. Perceive is too removed. Only if you have a gut sense of the slave as a fellow human being. Which is why the actual existence of an actual slave in the actual now is so gut wrenching.

    But you had to have been raised “a certain way” for the gut to wrench and hot shame to rise.

    The single good thing that comes of exposure to diversity and multiculturalism and all that tripe is the certainty that OUR WEST IS INCOMPARABLY SUPERIOR to the pit of Islam.

    • good of you to mention this! Islam has axioms totally opposed to our way of thinking.
      Example: when you complain of muslim criminals to a muslim, he would say: well why don’ t police give them a good spanking, it’ s your fault.
      Logic: it is our FAULT that WE do not use TORTURE.

      • “Logic: it is our FAULT that WE do not use TORTURE.”

        In fact it is.

        That’s the only way the learn and westerners don’t want to teach them.

  6. One reason that there are far more Negroes in America than in the Arab World is that male slaves that went to Arabia Magna were castrated.

    • Castrated not like Austrian “castrati” choir boys, but having the entirety of their genitalia cut off. One in ten survived the procedure and were then walked across the Sahara. It cut transportation costs enormously to perform the procedure in sub-Saharan Africa and import only the survivors. A myth has grown up that it was the Copts who did the actual castrating at the paid behest of the Muslim slave traders. That myth is on a par with the one that the Jews dominated the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

      And the female black slaves, sex slaves euphemistically called “concubines”, had their progeny murdered at birth by their owners.

  7. there is a minimal population of Negroes in Arabia Magna because the Arabs castrate their male slaves so as not to raise a non Arab indigenous population.

    • It’s sad how a bunch that wants to exist in the 7th century clearly understands the simple truth that demographics are destiny while the same concept is not even on the radar of our supposedly ‘advanced’ societies.

  8. Oh, this is disgusting beyond belief. Man’s inhumanity to man continues unabated, even though we should know better and be more civilized.

  9. OK guys, how about the guy with a mediocre job, a spendthrift wife and three kids. He is underpaid for what he does, Actually, he is paid just enough to keep him in debt but out of bankruptcy. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present the 21st Wonder! The chattel debt slave. Feed him corn flakes for breakfast, McDonald’s for lunch and sara lee for dinner. work him until he is 65 and then hand his social security benefits to his children leaving him homeless and on the societal trash heap.

    I see them every day of the week scrounging trash and watch their children become what they have been. Nice vicious cycle, isn’t it?

  10. I refuse now to live in a country where Muslims constitute more than 1% of the population. I’ve lived in Korea, Taiwan, and now Thailand (for 11 years). There is not a single aspect of Islam that is worthy of respect.

    It’s perverse how everything now seemingly gets twisted around, from daily news to academic research to broad historical themes (like slavery). Thus in 2017 I turned off broadcast TV permanently (DVD’s only), and scaled back internet news reading by 70%. Everything we think we know about slavery, global warming, Trump, whatever … the truth turns out to be about the opposite.

    Christianity = salvation & freedom
    Islam = perdition & slavery

  11. Reading this account reminds me of what finally prompted me to leave the UK and move to Thailand. A man with a beard tried to abduct my wife. When we reported the incident, the police did not want to know and refused to investigate.

    Reports of what happened to parents of young girls who fell victim to pakistani grooming gangs leads me to believe that, had the abduction succeeded, I would never have seen my wife again and she would have met an unspeakable end. Sex slavery abounds in London but the authorities are bribed to look the other way.

    • I know personally of two such cases in London. Both involving kidnapped Polish women.

      Police refused to investigate in both cases – and in one case arrested the boyfriend of one of the women and sent him to a psychiatric hospital.

  12. May I recommend that you read the book Negroes in Negroland . It is available free on google and will give you a good report on the barbarity and savage people in Africa at that time, including Arab slavers . It is based on reports by the likes of Livingstone and start about 250 years ago until about 120 years ago . Incredible stuff though heavy at times.

  13. You forgot to mention at the end, that islamics castrated the Black males immediately. Both boys and men. This was beneficial for two reasons, three really:
    – only the strong survived
    – gelding prevents rebellions
    -there was no danger of breeding more of their kind

    As a result, these castrated males, were used in islamic harems, for the obvious reasons.

  14. Since this topic seems to have migrated, I’m going to be so gauche as to repost my comment from the earlier thread about, Tidiane Ndiaye

    Although not explicitly stated by M. Ndiaye, he worthily manages to (however obliquely) distinguish a central truth. Namely:

    It is meaningless to view history through the lens of modern morality.

    This is one of Liberalism’s decisive failings and constitutes a large part of the slipshod foundations used in arguments made by today’s Social Justice Warriors. Such that, the farther back in time one goes, the more meaningless this sort of moralizing becomes. Even a single century can erode almost all relevance from observations made in this manner.

    In the most immediate context, M. Ndiaye represents a splinter group of scholars that struggle to unmask the monumental hypocrisy of modern minorities who seek to lay pandemic dysfunctionality in Third World countries at the feet of all Caucasians in Europe and America.

    Time and again, this ridiculous pretense is used to lash unwary Liberals into blubbering, self-flagellating apologists for their mere presence on earth.

    The profound hypocrisy involved most frequently manifests in three different-but-similar ways.

    — Black people converting to and extolling Islam even as they strenuously ignore how—as M. Ndiaye makes so clear—Muslim slavers ravaged many African cultures to the point of near-annihilation.

    — Feminists and homosexuals fulminating about the iniquities of Caucasian Western culture (especially historic offenses—is there a pattern emerging here?) all the while remaining deafeningly silent about how Islam would like nothing better to rape them all (males included) and kill every last gay there is.

    — Interminable squealing by modern day Muslims about Islamophobia and portraying themselves as perpetual victims amid the most deliberate obfuscation of Islam’s almost unbroken track record of violent predation upon and obliteration of every adjacent culture.

    Again, is there a pattern emerging here? Sincere congratulations to M. Ndiaye for his courage in challenging the accepted narrative and seeking to set the (much distorted) historical record straight. Still, while making many vital and laudable points, M. Ndiaye lamentably omits mentioning some of Islam’s most egregious crimes against humanity. As an example:

    — Slave ships crossing the Transatlantic “Middle Passage” between West Africa and the Americas typically saw a 15% mortality rate.

    — Muslim slavers who force-marched their captives overland to the Arabian Peninsula settled for a 15% SURVIVAL RATE. Straggling or otherwise hindering individuals were either summarily executed or simply left to perish in the Sahara desert.

    — When these in-transit fatalities are taken into account, M. Ndiaye’s estimate of 17 million enslaved by Islam abruptly skyrockets to somewhere around 100 MILLION VICTIMS. By comparison, Europe’s and the America’s total number of around ten million slaves suddenly becomes close to a rounding error.

    From: 10 Facts About The Arab Enslavement Of Black People Not Taught In Schools

    Some historians estimate that between A.D. 650 and 1900, 10 to 20 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders. Others believe over 20 million enslaved Africans alone had been delivered through the trans-Sahara route alone to the Islamic world.

    Dr. John Alembellah Azumah in his 2001 book, The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa estimates that over 80 million Black people more died en route.

    Arab Enslavers Practiced Genetic Warfare

    The Arab slave trade typically dealt in the sale of castrated male slaves. Black boys between the age of 8 and 12 had their scrotums and penises completely amputated to prevent them from reproducing. About six of every 10 boys bled to death during the procedure, according to some sources, but the high price brought by eunuchs on the market made the practice profitable.

    Arab Slave Trade Not Limited To Africa or Skin Color

    One of the biggest differences between the Arab slave trade and European slaving was that the Arabs drew slaves from all racial groups. During the eighth and ninth centuries of the Fatimid Caliphate, most of the slaves were Europeans (called Saqaliba), captured along European coasts and during wars.

    Aside from those of African origins, people from a wide variety of regions were forced into Arab slavery, including Mediterranean people; Persians; people from the Caucasus mountain regions (such as Georgia, Armenia and Circassia) and parts of Central Asia and Scandinavia; English, Dutch and Irish; and Berbers from North Africa.

    From: Islamic Slavery and Racism

    While Muslim propagandists have exploited the legacy of slavery in the United States to win black converts, slavery in the Muslim world began long before the United States and ended a century later.

    President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. By contrast, Saudi Arabia only abolished slavery in 1962. That same year Yemen abolished slavery and the United Arab Emirates abolished slavery a year later.

    Saudi Arabia’s ruling family did not embark on this course out of the goodness of their hearts, but [instead] under pressure from President Kennedy, at a time when the House of Saud did not yet have the United States economy and its foreign policy in a headlock. The abolition of slavery was a compromise. Kennedy had wanted representative government and civil rights. He had to settle for a belated emancipation.

    It merits noting that, almost without exception, Islamic nations were the very last to abolish slavery. Equally important is recalling that Islam routinely uses taqiyya to burnish its own self-image. Remember this article from just the other day?

    UAE princesses busted for keeping slaves in Belgian hotel

    Please keep in mind that all Muslims regard Mohammad as al-Insan al-Kamil (i.e., the perfect man) and, therefore, worthy of emulation in every way. This pretext is used to support terrorism, rationalize the taking of child brides, commit rape and sexual enslavement, and remains a continuing justification for modern slavery—taqiyya notwithstanding. A substantial portion of contemporary Western court cases involving slavery routine feature Muslim abusers.

    Go figure.

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