Slavery in Africa

Slavery in Africa has historically been widespread. Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa in ancient times, as they were in much of the rest of the ancient world. The Arab trans-Saharan slave trade and Indian Ocean slave trade and the European Atlantic slave trade were supplied by many of the pre-existing local African slave systems with captives for slave markets outside Africa. Slavery in contemporary Africa is still practiced in some countries.

Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah

 * Franz Rosenthal, trans., Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddimah, Vol. 1 (New York, 1958), pp. 118-19, 301
 * Leon Carl Brown, "Color in Northern Africa". John Hope Franklin, ed., Color and Race (1969), pp. 190, 201


 * To the south of the Nile [Niger] there is a Negro people called Lamlam. They are unbelievers. They brand themselves on the face and temples. The people of Ghana and Takrur invade their country, capture them, and sell them to merchants who transport them to the Maghrib. There, they constitute the ordinary mass of slaves. Beyond them to the south, there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.
 * Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.