ARAB SLAVE TRADE Slavery has been part of every epoch of human existence on earth since the advent of agriculture as a unit of the society. Every group of people in history had had a word that represented slavery and enslavement. The trans-atlantic slave was Unequal in its cruelty and dehumanization but it was not the first in history. There was the Arab Slave trade that preceded it. The moslems were known to have captured millions of people from Europe and sold them as slaves in North Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Slavery was not a state institution then, it was like the lucrative drug enterprise of today; 'a large but lawless society' that was not instituted by the state, although some bad kings and rulers participated in it. In the 15th century, kings, especially in Europe began to introduce laws on the enslavement of one by another; like a kind of rules of engagement. This helped in freeing Europe from the shackles of the Arab Slave trade and gradually slavery was focused on the southern Sahara and the Sudan. Slavery became a state institution only when Europeans joined-in, after the discovery of the Americas, with the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British royal houses in the forefront. But it wasn't the Europeans that made it possible, it was the Arabs, with an islamist agenda and some African kings, mostly those that had embraced Islam, that made it much more easier for the Europeans to successfully re-focus slavery on Africans... For example, Mansa Musa of Mali had over 12,000 slaves he owned and exploited as of 1325 CE. Mulai Ismail of Merknes had over 25,000 Europeans as slaves. This was before the Portuguese first sailed to Africa. Among the Igbo people of the Bight of Biafra in present-day south-east Nigeria, a cast of enslaved people were known as 'osu', the descendants of these 'osu' are still known Among these people till date. Deception through religion and brutal force made it possible. Europe, had stepped out of the dire conditions of the 'dark ages'... hungry and desperate, took Slavery 'over the fence' with the dehumanization and cruelties that characterized the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not every African society knew slavery before the coming of Europeans, but the anthropological fact that there had existed a word for slavery in their languages, suggested that slavery had existed among them, in one form or another before the coming of the Arabs in the 7th century CE and the Europeans in the 15th century CE. #Africa

History trivia: Did you know that 400 years ago, before the Transatlantic slave trade where nearly 12 million people (mostly west Africans) were enslaved and forcefully shipped to the US, Muslim Arabs were involved in the same trade but sent slaves from East Africa to North Africa and the Middle East? However there is little discussion over that period experts say. What could be the reason for that?🤔 #Africa

Ancient Ethiopian prayer book #Africa