The trans-Saharan slave trade is one of the least discussed dimensions of African slavery, largely because it does not fit the narrative that frames slavery as primarily a European phenomenon.
Arab merchants began trading in enslaved Africans at least as early as the seventh century, following the expansion of Islam across North Africa and into the Sahel. The trade routes crossed the Sahara from West Africa to North Africa and the Mediterranean, and from East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, and India. These routes were active for over a thousand years, substantially longer than the Atlantic trade.
Estimates of the total number of Africans enslaved through Arab and trans-Saharan routes vary, but most historians place the figure in the range of ten to seventeen million people over the full duration of the trade. This is comparable in scale to the Atlantic trade, which is estimated to have transported around twelve million people. The trans-Saharan trade also had a particularly high mortality rate, as enslaved people were marched across the Sahara under brutal conditions.
The Arab slave trade in East Africa continued well into the nineteenth century and in some areas into the twentieth. The Sultan of Zanzibar, an Arab ruler who controlled much of the East African coast, was still actively trading in enslaved people when the British Navy was intercepting Atlantic slave ships. Britain eventually pressured the Sultan to end the trade in the 1870s, adding another dimension to the British record on slavery that the reparations narrative rarely acknowledges.
The existence of the Arab slave trade does not diminish what the Atlantic trade did. But it does challenge the framing that slavery was something Europe did to Africa. Slavery was a global phenomenon with many perpetrators. Focusing exclusively on European, and specifically British, responsibility is a political choice, not a historical one.
