SLAVERY IN NORTH AFRICA

Mostly, when we think of slavery, we think of it in terms of the Africans who were forcibly shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas to work the sugar, rice, tobacco, and cotton plantations there. Moreover, we tend to think of things as they were in the eighteenth century and after: large-scale plantations worked by hordes of African slaves who spent their entire lives toiling away miserably with no possibility of ever being liberated, kept under control by ruthless methods of repression, the whole system buttressed by a brutal, institutionalized racism.

Slavery in North Africa—in Barbary corsair cities like Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Salé—wasn’t like that.

In the Americas, slavery was fundamentally an economic enterprise. The great plantations of the Americas served as primary economic drivers. In order to succeed, they needed a cheap workforce. The value of plantation slaves was their contribution to the economic viability of the plantations, and thus to the large-scale viability of the New World colonies those plantations were a part of.

There was no equivalent to this in North Africa.

Slaves in cities like Algiers or Salé did indeed serve an economic purpose, but it wasn’t a monolithic purpose, as was the case with the great plantations in the Americas. And slaves weren’t kept isolated out in the fields. Rather, they were interwoven throughout the social and economic fabric of the city. Some did indeed serve as agricultural laborers, but others worked on building projects, or as domestic servants, or as carpenters, or shipwrights, or tailors, tavern keepers, doctors, book keepers, or translators. In short, slaves in North Africa did almost everything.

Another difference was that North African slaves were not necessarily doomed to servitude for life. The Barbary corsair enterprise, like all privateering, was, basically, legalized piracy. Barbary corsairs stole merchandise and people and made a profit by selling their booty in markets back in their home ports. The real profits in the human trafficking, though, came not from selling captives into slavery in the local slave markets, but in negotiating exorbitant ransoms for them. There were exceptions, but, in general, anytime a slave could manage to arrange ransom, he or she could be liberated.

A slave in North Africa could also improve his or her condition by converting to Islam. This did not necessarily guarantee the slave’s emancipation, but it did provide options that would otherwise not exist (like marrying into a local family), and could very well lead, in time, to freedom.

There was also no institutionalized racism supporting North African slavery.

In the New World, everything was new. Europeans worked stuff out as they went along. Plantations in the Americas ended up relying on African labor, for it turned out that Africans could survive the brutal conditions of plantation life better than Amerindians or Europeans. As a consequence, racism emerged and developed to became a fully formed, entrenched ideology that buttressed the economically necessary institution of slavery: if Africans were not fully human, then enslaving them was not a problem.

In North Africa, slavery had a different genesis.

Slavery had been part of the cultures of Europe and North Africa for millennia. When Islam came into being, slavery was a standard practice. Mohammad and his followers, being, like all of us, creatures of their own particular time and place, accepted slavery as one of life’s givens.

Islam is more than just a spiritual practice; it is a social contract, containing instructions for all aspects of life, including institutionalized slavery. Under Islamic law, people could only be legally enslaved in two ways: 1/ if they have been defeated in a ‘just war’ (that is, a war that was permitted under sharia law), and 2/ if they were the children of two enslaved parents. In other words, under Islam, the only legal slaves were prisoners of war and their descendants. Race didn’t play any significant role in this.

The Koran not only limited the definition of legal slavery, it also stressed that slaves should be treated decently. Verse 4:36, for example, states:

“To parents do good, and to relatives, orphans, the needy, the near neighbor, the neighbor farther away, the companion at your side, the traveler, and those whom your right hands possess.”

The phrase “those whom your right hands possess” (ma malakat aymanukum) is one of the common ways in the Koran of referring to slaves.

The above might make it seem that Muslims had a fairly benign attitude towards their slaves. They did, when compared with some other peoples’ attitudes, but slavery is, after all, slavery, and there is very little that is genuinely benign about it.

Look, for example, at the following from the Hadith (a collection of tales recording the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad):

“The Apostle of Allah sent a military expedition to Awtas on the occasion of the battle of Hunain. They met their enemy and fought with them. They defeated them and took them captive. Some of the Companions of the Apostle of Allah were reluctant to have sexual relations with the female captives because of their pagan husbands. So Allah the exalted sent down the Koranic verse [4:24]: ‘And all married women are forbidden unto you save those captives whom your right hands possess’” (Hadeeth In Sunan Abu Dawud 2:2150).

In other words, it’s perfectly okay to rape captive women, even if they’re already married.

So institutionalized slavery in Islamic North Africa certainly wasn’t by any means a benign institution. But it wasn’t the sort of brutally repressive, pitilessly dehumanizing system that existed in the Americas either.

There were rules:

• slaves could own property (including other slaves)
• slaves could enter into business enterprises on behalf of their owners
• slaves could marry (with their owners’ consent)
• female slaves were not supposed to be separated from their young children (those under seven)
• female slaves were not to be forced into prostitution
• slaves were not supposed to be mistreated or overworked
• slaves could initiate legal action if they felt they had been mistreated

These sorts of rules mitigated the worst excesses of slavery—if they were adhered to.

Slavery confers absolute power upon the owner, though, and we all know the old adage: power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

There was, inevitably, a lot of blatant abuse.

On the whole, though, being a slave in Muslim North Africa was a less disastrous fate than being a plantation slave in the Americas. In North Africa, there was at least the possibility of bettering your lot and/or gaining your freedom.

Some Europeans enslaved in North Africa were actually able to build better lives for themselves there than they would have been able to in their home countries. Cities like Algiers or Salé were more meritocratic than their European counterparts, and an intelligent, ambitious slave could rise quite high.

Such successful slaves were the minority, though.

Despite the mitigating factors introduced by Islamic law, slaves in North Africa mostly led the same sorts of lives that slaves led everywhere: constrained by their servitude, at the mercy of their owners, longing for their freedom.

Slavery, after all, is slavery.