Orville Taylor | Islam’s slavery debt

The expression varies from as salaam aleikum to something like as salaam waleikum.

Black populations such as Tanzania and its territory Zanzibar, the common salutation vary somewhat from the Arabic.

Islam carved a positive image in the face of black consciousness in the 20th and 21st centuries. With Malcolm X and later, Muhammad Ali, now epitomised in the persona of Louis Farrakhan, multiple American personalities discarded their ‘slave names’, adopting instead the more ‘liberating’ monikers revolving around the Nation of Islam, whom we affectionately referred to as ‘Black Muslims’.

Of course, if the history of the spread of Islam had been known at the time; the title would at best be gratuitous, because, like Christianity, Islam’s first apostle was the Ethiopian Bilal, who is the equivalent of Christian Peter and Paul in one body.

It was Bilal who spread Islam across the middle east and ‘reverted’ the Arabs, to the religion . The impact of his work, in his own lifetime, is still underappreciated.

As regards the Nation, my colleague, Ras Michael Barnett, has produced an impressive body of work outlining the seminal role played by the teachings of our own prophet, Marcus Mosiah Garvey in its formation.

But that is only a minuscule part of the story. And in fact, might just be the good part of the journey. Islam and Africans have not had the cushy kind of relationship, that we might think.

For the record, this is not a critique of the character or Elijah Muhammad, whose moral failings caused a rebellion, departure and ultimately the assassination of Malcolm. Neither is it a reproach to the blessed prophet Muhammad himself, whom detractors have vilified over his juvenile wives.

After all, nothing in any of the Holy books of the Bible or Quran, require a worshipping of a prophet of flesh and blood, who by dint of being human, is flawed.

It is deeper than that. Very puzzling was that in fewer than 200 years after the black man brought Islam to the Arabs, it was appropriated and like Christianity another quincentenary, later used to indoctrinate and subordinate millions of black Africans.

While it took around 1500 AD for the western European nations of Spain and much later Britain to get into the act, the Arabs had done so from around as early as the seventh century.

Hundreds of thousands of east Africans were captured and brought to slavery on tea plantations in India. Never repatriated, their descendants survive, with most of their African phenotype features on the sub continent. Right now the Siddhi number around 1.3 million

Arab enslavement of black Africans, regrettably with high levels of collaboration from other black Africans, is not dissimilar to the modality on the west coast.

While the transatlantic trade lasted 400 years, that out east had a duration thrice as long. Persisting at least 1,300 years with remnants enduring long after Jamaican independence, estimates are as high 18 million humans being trafficked.

Using multiple routes, such as the Sahara, and Indian ocean, it is painful to know that in the period after the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire, the Red Sea was used to spit in the face of Moses, in returning dark skinned Africans into slavery .

Africans were used in a multiplicity of roles. These include, women as concubines and house slaves, men doing similar chattel plantations work as in the Americas, but worse of all, those, who were required for domestic servitude or were too manly, were routinely castrated.

This inhumane process, not performed with the medical finesse exhibited with domestic mammals, itself had a high mortality rate.

Indeed, given that, as with west African enslavement, the captives had to travel hundreds of miles and then be housed in cramped rooms afterwards, the survival rate was sometimes as low as 33 per cent.

On another occasion, the activities in Darfur and Mauritania will be highlighted. However, the story of slavery in Zanzibar, the island a semiautonomous part of Tanzania, is a horror story, pretty much as bad as that which occurred on the other side of Africa, and which brought most of us here.

Many blacks were part of this nasty mark on our history. Most notorious was Tippu Tib, a ‘black Arab’ who, himself owned more than 10,000 in a almost century long enterprise, that traded close to a million blacks.

What makes Zanzibar so enigmatic is not that it was the hub of the Arab slave trade. It is when it was at its peak.

By the turn of the 1800s, the British, following France saw the smoke and ended their slave trade in 1807.

True, the ‘badass’ Jamaicans, not just the Maroons, kept rising up, in the form of Chief Takyi and others, culminating with Sam Sharpe in his 1830 rebellion, here.

But barefacedly, the Zanzibar hub began operating in 1830. No, not a typo, the precise year of Sharpe’s war. This nasty trade in human flesh lasted until 1873, when the British and Sultan of the island signed a treaty.

Even so, the internal enslavement continued until the end of the century and was visible until at least 1909, more than a century after it ended in the west.

The role of Tib, and his relationship with the despicable King Leopold of Belgium is also a subject of another commentary. However, Leopold himself is associated with unspeakable transgressions.

Still, a sad part of this less knows chapter, is the way in which the experience has coloured the minds as ours. Similar to how some of us hold on to British titles, many black Zanzibarians, actually call themselves Arab.

Mental slavery is not over.

Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.