The History of the Arab Slave Trade in Africa

The world has heard a thousand stories of the trans-Atlantic Slave trade—of how strange men with skin like milk rampaged the rich foliage of Africa’s lands and took captive its inhabitants. Of how families were torn apart and entire societies were decimated. Of how millions were shackled, packed into ships like cargo, and carried across treacherous waters to a world where they would never again be free.

Yet, long before the first European set foot on African soil, another trade had already been in motion—a trade that would last for over a thousand years (7^th to 20^th Century)—The Arab Slave Trade. Also known as the Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean Slave Trade, this trade remains one of the most overlooked and least discussed chapters of African history, despite its devastating impact on the continent.

In this article, we finally tell its forgotten story—a history of stolen lives, lost homelands, and enduring pain.

Origins and Expansion of the Arab Slave Trade

With Africa’s rich history of trade networks that attracted merchants from all over the world, it is little surprise that the Arabs first ventured into Africa as merchants who went to source raw materials such as ivory and cloves. According to history, these merchants would buy large quantities of these raw materials and slaves along with them with the aim of using the slaves as porters. Slaves from as far as Sudan, Ethiopia, and West Africa were often brought to this slave trade hub, making Zanzibar, one of the most famous slave trade destinations in history. 

While the arrival of these Arab merchants served as an official introduction of Arabs to the African slave market, slavery was nothing new to Arabs. Slavery had long been entrenched in Arab culture and society, serving as both a means of accumulating wealth and expanding influence. 

The eventual mass subjugation of Africans into slavery was also encouraged by an ethnic ideology that prevailed among Arabs — an ideology that demonised black entities and equated their existence to slavery. 

Thus, when Islam was introduced to Arabic countries, and with it, a desire to conquer lands and expand the influence of the new religion, Africa bore more than its fair share of the exploitation necessitated by the desire to build caliphates, especially following the conquest of Egypt. 

This conquest would mark the beginning of one of the longest slave hauls known to mankind. This slave haul was particularly prominent in certain regions of Africa more than others, including the Horn of Africa, West Africa, and the Great Lakes region of East Africa. Africans captured from around the Horn and the Great Lakes region were transported by water to the shores of the Red Sea (Saudi Arabia, Egypt etc) and the Persian Gulf while those captured from West Africa (from the Niger Valley to the Gulf of Guinea), were transported across the Sahara desert. This led to the development of the Sahara Desert as a crucial artery for transporting slaves from the interior of Africa to Arab markets. 

Over the centuries, countless Africans from sub-Saharan Africa were captured in droves, marched across brutal landscapes and traded as commodities in the bustling slave markets of Mecca, Cairo, Baghdad, Istanbul etc. Many became labourers, sex slaves, eunuchs, concubines or soldiers, their identities erased as they were absorbed into foreign societies.

The Brutal Journey and Life in Slavery

As opposed to the transatlantic slave trade, a particularly striking trademark of the Arab slave trade was its preference for women and girls in the stead of men. Hence, while other regions sought to acquire slaves for intensive labour purposes, the Arabs were primarily interested in women who could serve as concubines, sexual slaves in harems and domestic slaves. The demand for the female sex was so high that Arab slave dealers would double their prices. This also meant more female slaves were captured, with the estimated ratio of captives being three women to one man. 

The male slaves, on the other hand, were often castrated into eunuchs, a process which had a less than 10% survival rate. Those who survived would be sent to guard harems or sent into the fields as farm labourers or miners. 

Over this period, over ten million men, women and children were trafficked through the Sahara desert and over the Indian Ocean to the Arab world. These journeys were usually so brutal that skeletons were described as marking the trail these slave caravans trudged. Typically, the journey from Africa to the Mediterranean—the home of the Arabs—took months through the desert, which meant slaves would often suffer from exhaustion, extreme heat and lack of water which was made worse by their physically bound conditions. Consequently, many slaves succumbed to hunger, disease or thirst along the way with estimates showing that about 50% of them never made it to the Mediterranean.

The Zanj Rebellion

In this gloomy tale, a rare flicker of defiance emerged in the form of the Zanj Rebellion—an unprecedented uprising of black slaves that shook the foundations of the Abbasid Caliphate in lower Iraq at the time. Between 868 and 883 CE, tens of thousands of slaves from the Great Lakes—known as the Zanj—rose in a brutal fifteen-year struggle against their Arab oppressors. It was one of the most ferocious slave revolts in history, and though ultimately crushed, it left a mark so deep that chroniclers of the time described it as a catastrophe unlike any other.

Led by Ali bin Muhammad, a man who exploited their suffering and promised freedom, the Zanj torched plantations, slaughtered slave owners, and seized Basra, one of the most important cities in the Abbasid Caliphate. They built their own stronghold, al-Mukhtara, and held their ground for fifteen (15) years, defying wave after wave of Abbasid attacks.

The rebellion pushed the empire to the brink. Entire towns were destroyed, trade routes collapsed, and thousands perished in the chaos. But in the end, the Abbasids retaliated with overwhelming force. After a prolonged siege, al-Mukhtara fell. The rebels were massacred, their leaders executed, and their movement erased from history—except as a grim reminder of how violently the oppressed would resist when pushed beyond their limits.

Long-term Impact of the Arab Slave Trade: Economic, Social and Cultural

From Egypt, to Zanzibar, Ghana and Mali, it was evident that African societies operated civilised structures that enabled them thrive. However, with the depletion of vital human resources, these societies began to degrade until they became ghosts of what they once were. 

Zanzibar, for example, which was a thriving hub for slave trade, and also served as the major source of ivory and cloves, faced drastic consequences after the abolition of the slave trade. Its economy had largely been dependent on the slave economy which fostered its myopia and hesitancy to invest in new industries.

Across other parts of Africa, the consistent depopulation and loss of labour and community made development impossible. Social structures had been more impacted than any other as the reproductive capacity needed to sustain any society became lacking across affected regions. This also meant the labour needed to build the continent’s agricultural industry—which Africa had thrived on—was lacking. Fear and instability also pervaded the continent as the fear of raids prevented inhabitants from building social cohesion and structure, leaving behind ghost villages and shattered families. 

Some African rulers, drawn by the wealth the slave trade brought, turned against their own people, selling captives to Arab merchants instead of investing in stable, long-term economic growth. The consequences were devastating—kingdoms that might have flourished collapsed under the weight of internal strife and external exploitation. The damage was not only economic but also political, as instability became the defining feature of many regions caught in the web of the trade.

The cultural impact was equally profound. Unlike the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which led to the formation of African diaspora communities in the Americas, the Arab Slave Trade often erased African identities through forced assimilation. Enslaved Africans were stripped of their names, languages, and traditions, absorbed into foreign societies where they had no claim to their past. Many were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into households as concubines, servants, or soldiers, with little acknowledgment of their African heritage. In many cases, African men were castrated, ensuring that their lineage ended with them.

Most of these captives were often either too young to have gone through the African cultural rites of induction that would have held them true to their roots or became too vulnerable after capture to stick with them. 

These factors combined, dramatically altered the continent’s demographic, economic and cultural landscape. By early 20th century, the Arab slave trade had officially came to an end, but its impact endures to today.

Modern Echoes

For centuries, the Arab slave trade persisted, largely unchecked. It was only in the 19th century, when European abolitionists like David Livingstone exposed its horrors, that the world took notice. Livingstone’s reports detailed the grim reality—thousands of Africans being chained together, forced on death marches, and sold in bustling slave markets from the Swahili coast to the Middle East. 

In one of the letters he sent home in 1870, David Livingstone details his experience: 

“In less than I take to talk about it, these unfortunate creatures — 84 of them, wended their way into the village where we were. Some of them, the eldest, were women from 20 to 22 years of age, and there were youths from 18 to 19, but the large majority was made up of boys and girls from 7 years to 14 or 15 years of age.

A more terrible scene than these men, women and children, I do not think I ever came across. To say that they were emaciated would not give you an idea of what human beings can undergo under certain circumstances. “Each of them had his neck in a large forked stick, weighing from 30 to 40 pounds, and five or six feet long, cut with a fork at the end of it where the branches of a tree spread out. “The women were tethered with bark thongs, which are, of all things, the most cruel to be tied with. Of course they are soft and supple when first stripped off the trees, but a few hours in the sun make them about as hard as the iron round packing-cases. The little children were fastened by thongs to their mothers. As we passed along the path which these slaves had travelled, I was shown a spot in the bushes where a poor woman the day before, unable to keep on the march, and likely to hinder it, was cut down by the axe of one of these slave drivers. We went on further and were shown a place where a child lay. It had been recently born, and its mother was unable to carry it from debility and exhaustion; so the slave trader had taken this little infant by its feet and dashed its brains out against one of the trees and thrown it in there.”

Recognising this crisis, the Europeans—major players in the African slave trade themselves—began attempting to abolish slave trade. In 1865, the United Nations officially put an end to it with the help of many revolts, internal pressure and trade disruptions. Yet, the Arab slave trade remained deeply entrenched, surviving well into the 20th century.

Even after the formal abolition of the trade in the 20th century, its effects lingered. Some regions of North and East Africa still bear the marks of this history in deep-seated racial hierarchies and lingering discrimination against people of African descent. The echoes of this brutal past remain evident in the structural inequalities that persist across societies once shaped by the relentless movement of human lives as mere commodities.

Saudi Arabia, for instance, did not officially outlaw slavery until 1962, and Mauritania—a major hub of the trade—officially became the last country in the world to abolish slavery from its lands in 1981. But abolition on paper did little to dismantle centuries of ingrained oppression, hence, slavery did not become criminalised until 2007. Yet, this offense is rarely enforced in the nation to date. Of its approximately five million citizens, 90,000 blacks still live as inherited slaves with 500,000 more living in one form of modern slavery or another. This seemingly non-displaceable culture of owning slaves is traceable to the nation’s history of black slavery introduced by migrant Arabs who dominated the land back in the late 7th century. To date, the nation is ruthlessly dominated by an Arabic-speaking Arab-Berber elite who self-identify as White. 

Riding on the back of its slave heritage, today, slaves are very much still being sold in Mauritania. As Mauritanian professor, Zekeria Ould Ahmed and scholar, Mohamed Ould Cire, put it, based on nomadic traditions, black slaves were chattels that could be loaned, sold, gifted or exploited. These slaves could not marry, own, inherit or testify in court without the permission of their owners. This ownership status also means that in contemporary society, enslaved blacks are still being traded, exchanged, rented, lynched, castrated, exploited and even trafficked to other countries. Zekeria further notes that there are still slave markets in Mauritania, especially in the city of Atar. 

Aside from outright slave systems, in countries like Sudan, Iraq and Libya, Afro-descendant communities continue to face systemic discrimination and marginalization. In Libya, a modern-day slave market operates in the shadows of political instability. Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, African migrants traveling through Libya in hopes of reaching Europe have been kidnapped, detained, and sold as slaves in open-air markets. In 2017, CNN released an undercover investigation showing African men being auctioned off for as little as $400. The revelation sparked global outrage, but reports indicate that human trafficking networks remain active.

Even where outright slavery has ended, deep-seated racial prejudices persist. In Iraq, the Afro-Iraqi community—descendants of enslaved East Africans brought to the region centuries ago—continues to face exclusion from political and economic opportunities. Despite making up a significant portion of the population in cities like Basra, Afro-Iraqis are still underrepresented in governance and are often seen as second-class citizens.

A similar situation exists in Sudan, where the historical divide between Afro-Sudanese and Arab-Sudanese populations has fueled long-standing racial tensions. The Darfur conflict, which erupted in the early 2000s, was deeply rooted in this ethnic divide, with the Janjaweed militia—an Arab-led force—targeting Black African communities in what the United Nations called genocide. Meanwhile, across North Africa, Qatar and the Middle East, Africans are considered as cheap labour or domestic helpers to wealthy families.

Conclusion

From these accounts, it is evident that the Arab slave trade not only reshaped Africa during its brutal heyday but also left a legacy that continues to affect millions today. The detailed narrative—from the early trade in Zanzibar to the staggering human toll endured on long, treacherous routes—reveals how deeply entrenched systems of exploitation and cultural erasure took root.

Today, descendants of those enslaved under this system still grapple with the echoes of a past marked by economic degradation, social fragmentation, and enduring racial hierarchies. While formal abolition came in the 20th century, modern manifestations—ranging from persistent racial discrimination in Iraq and Sudan to the grim reality of slave markets in Mauritania and Libya—demonstrate that the shadow of this history looms large.

By shedding light on this long-forgotten chapter, we not only honor the memory of the countless lives shattered by the trade but also confront the systemic issues that persist. Recognising this dark legacy is essential if we are to build a future defined by justice and true reconciliation, ensuring that the scars of the past inform efforts to create a more inclusive and equitable world.