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Atrocitology. Matthew White
Читать онлайн.Название Atrocitology
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isbn 9780857861252
Автор произведения Matthew White
Издательство Ingram
It wasn’t until the European exploration of Africa in the nineteenth century that detailed descriptions of slaving in the heart of Africa emerged. Every day, somewhere deep in Africa, slavers would select a vulnerable village and creep into striking distance. With a sudden attack, the raiders shot down any men capable of resistance and seized the women and children to be herded off to begin their new life of servitude.
On the exploratory safaris that opened up the Dark Continent, Europeans usually followed the slave trails into Africa, which were often the only trade routes that connected the coasts and the interior. Christian missionaries heading deeper into unexplored Africa encountered long columns of slaves, mostly women, scarred by whips, chained by the neck, being driven toward the coasts. Explorers retracing paths they had followed on an earlier trip often found districts that had lost half of their villages to slavers since the last visit. A British superintendent of missionaries estimated that “four or five lives were lost for every slave delivered safe at Zanzibar.”4
By the 1860s, the African slaver Tippu Tip was plundering an area deep in the interior, beyond the African lakes in the eastern Congo. His reach became a virtual kingdom, predatory and unstoppable, pillaging up and down the Congo River until Belgians carving out their own empire bought him off. In Kenya, near Lake Rudolf, slavers operated in the 1890s until the British established a protectorate over the region. One European reported that “an Arab who has lately returned from Lake Nyasa informed me that he has traveled for seventeen days through a country covered with ruined towns and villages . . . and where now no living soul is to be seen.”5
In the late nineteenth century, worldwide demand for ivory surged, as did the price, which temporarily made slaves more valuable as porters to carry the elephant tusks to the coast, rather than as a distinct commodity. Porters were taken from inland villages and sold overseas when their job was done.6
To feed the slave caravans crossing the Tsavo River region in Kenya, traders hunted the big game into local extinction. With their usual food sources gone and caravan trails littered with the bodies of exhausted slaves, the local lions quickly discovered that humans were good eating. Then after the slaves stopped coming, the lions of Tsavo satisfied their newfound taste for humans by eating dozens of railroad workers, which temporarily halted the expansion of British control in the colony. In 1898 the most brazen man-eaters were killed; the wild game returned eventually, and the remaining lions went back to avoiding people.7
Arriving at the coasts, the slaves were delivered to traders for shipment overseas. A British visitor described the slaves at a market on the Indian Ocean in the late 1860s: “. . . all young boys and girls, some of them mere babies . . . Skeletons, with a diseased skin drawn tight over them, eyeballs left hideously prominent by the falling away of the surrounding flesh, chests shrunk and bent, joints unnaturally swelled and horribly knotty by contrast with the wretched limbs between them, voices dry and hard, and ‘distantly near’ like those of a nightmare . . .”8
Small Arab trading vessels ferried the slaves from East Africa to the Middle East. A British captain on anti-slave patrolb stopped a local boat carrying slaves on the Indian Ocean. Male slaves were chained above decks, in the open. Below decks were the women. “On the bottom of the [boat] was a pile of stones as ballast, and on these stones, without even a mat, were twenty-three women huddled together, one or two with infants in their arms. These women were literally doubled up, there being no room to sit erect.”9
North Africa
When the Arabs introduced camels into North Africa in the Middle Ages, it became a lot easier to cross the Sahara and see what lay on the other side. Those who made the trip usually came back with slaves. Throughout the Middle Ages, the nomadic Bedouin in the Sahara raided the settled communities along the southern edge of the desert, in the band of savannah known as the Sahel, gathering slaves to be hauled to markets on the Mediterranean. By 1300, however, the Sahel had developed a line of powerful kingdoms, such as Ghana and Mali, along the edge of the desert that could stand up to the Bedouin. Unfortunately, rather than forming a barrier to slave raids into deeper parts of Africa, these kingdoms became the new middlemen, raiding farther south for fresh slaves to send north.
When raiding didn’t work, the Bedouin traded salt they found in the desert for slaves and gold from the Sahel. From the scattered records we have, it seems to have been a thriving business. In 1353, the Muslim travel writer Ibn Battuta returned to the Mediterranean coast on a caravan hauling 600 female slaves.
By the 1700s, at least 1,500 slaves per year were being taken north, the number peaking at as many as 3,000 per year in the late 1800s. As British warships closed off the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century, the slaves that would have been sent to America were sent north instead, across the desert. Because Libya remained free of European control longer than any other stretch of North African coast, Benghazi and Tripoli became the major outlets of the Saharan slave trade in the nineteenth century.
By the late 1850s, slaves accounted for two-thirds of the value carried on all of the caravans across the Sahara.10 The trade was so lucrative that most rulers would use any excuse to arrest a subject and sell her into slavery.
It was a brutal crossing. One European traveler crossed the Sahara in the 1800s on a large caravan that lost three or four slaves to exhaustion, disease, thirst, and heat stroke for every survivor who arrived at market. Entire caravans with hundreds of slaves often disappeared in the desert.
Even if we put aside morality for the moment and look at this from a simple profit motive, it seems wasteful to allow so many slaves to die. You would think the slave dealers would want to protect their investment, but as one contemporary explained, the slave trade was like the ice trade. A certain amount of melting away was acceptable because the final product fetched a high-enough price to cover the losses. It wasn’t even much of an investment to begin with. At their source, slaves were cheap. In the central Sahel, a single horse was worth twenty slaves.11
Abolition in the Middle East was imposed by outside forces, not by an upwelling of local goodwill. Europeans began to have moral qualms about slavery in the late eighteenth century, so when they took control of Africa in the next century, they put a stop to the international traffic in slaves. Local slavery persisted, however, even to the present day, and perhaps a couple of hundred thousand slaves are still being held in Mauritania and Sudan, although their governments deny it.
Eunuchs
Eunuchs were especially useful for guarding the harem—the large assemblage of wives and concubines that every Asian potentate collected. Eunuchs had all of the physical strength of men but none of the sex drive, so they could be trusted not to help themselves to the women and not to produce families to put on the throne in place of the emperor. The disadvantage is that the population of eunuchs was not self-sustaining. They had to be continuously resupplied from elsewhere.
Islam forbids the mutilation of slaves, but rather than let a mere technicality interfere with the demand for eunuchs, Muslims assigned that task to the infidels. The slaves were castrated either by pagans in Africa shortly after being caught or by the Jews and Christians living in the Muslim world.
Eunuch-using societies preferred to castrate boys before puberty. This left them childlike in sex drive, voice, and appearance, unlike castrated adults, who still looked and acted more like men. Slave boys were taken aside, supposedly to be circumcised—as was customary for all males in the Muslim world—but this was a trick to get the knife close enough to strike without the boy struggling. When the barber surgeon got the knife near, he would grab and sever the boy’s entire genitalia instead of just the foreskin.12
Eunuchs received a different procedure according to their race. White eunuchs had only their testicles snipped off, but black eunuchs had the whole apparatus—testes, scrotum, and penis—cut away and cauterized with boiling hot butter,