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Thomas Small
Most people, when they think of slavery, think of Europeans taking Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. True enough, that happened and it was shameful. However, the story of slavery in Africa is much more complex than that and goes back much further in time, back before Europeans had even ventured out of their caves. Martin Plout is a venerable BBC journalist and historian originally from South Africa. Martin's knowledge of the African continent is truly comprehensive. And in his fascinating new book, Unbroken, a 5,000year history of African Enslavement, Martin tells the whole story of of how absolutely everyone, everywhere was implicated in the moral slime that is human chattel slavery, not least Africans themselves. And what's even more disturbing, beyond university seminar rooms and flame wars on the Internet, slavery in Africa continues unabated, unaddressed, almost entirely ignored by those with the power to put an end to it. I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted conversation with Martin Plout.
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Interviewer (Host)
Hello Martin. It's so nice to see you, sir. Thank you so much for coming back onto Conflicted.
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Martin Plaut
It's lovely to be with you again
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Interviewer (Host)
when we last had you on. And honestly, Martin, your episode is one of my all time favorites and we got lots of really positive feedback on it from listeners, which is why I was desperate to get you back on. When you were last on, you told us all about your personal story growing up in South Africa under apartheid, your beginnings as a political activist, a labor activist. Before moving into journalism. You became the BBC's man in Africa, basically. And that's why you came on last time to tell us about Ethiopia and specifically the Tigray War that broke out there a few years ago. And you've come on today to talk to us about your latest book entitled Unbroken, a 5,000 year history of African Enslavement. You were kind enough to give me an advanced copy. And dear listeners, let me tell you, you gotta read this book. Martin, last time you told us the reason you set out to write this book is that no one had ever really written the whole story of slavery as rooted in and from the perspective of the African continent itself.
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Martin Plaut
That is correct. I mean, there are any number of books about African slavery, but they don't begin in Africa, so to speak, or very few of them do. And, you know, the first indication of slavery in Africa is etched into the rocks on the Nile and goes back to 2900 B.C. there's absolutely no way you can talk about, you know, Africa and you can't talk about slavery except in rooting it in Africa and, and by Africans, because that is where it begins. And I mean, you know, the Europeans only get involved in the 1440s A.D. so, you know, it's way beyond this period. So it's a very, very different way of looking at it. Not because I wish to deny anything, any role of the Europeans, but because you need to understand the slave perspective. And that is where I begin. I begin from the perspective of the slaves.
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Interviewer (Host)
And how would you sort of, for the listener, describe that perspective in general? What would it have been sort of in the worldview of the average sub Saharan African person, subject for millennia to the predications of slavers? When you read this book, Martin, you get a real sense of how totally endemic, how totally definitive the slave trade has been for huge swathes of Africa. What do you think this did to the African person's perspective on the world?
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Martin Plaut
Well, I think for most Africans, of course, they lived in their village or in their town, and, you know, Africa is, you know, bigger than the whole of Europe. And I only think the United States put together just to give it some kind of perspective. We talk about huge areas here, and generalities, of course, are always dangerous. But, you know, people would come from the next town, the next village over the hills across the river, and they would grab you, or they'd grab your children and they'd fight you, and then you would be a conquered person. And just as the Romans considered every single person whom they ever conquered either a slave or a potential slave, so Africans have behaved in exactly the same way, and they have enslaved people from one end of Africa all the way down to the other. I mean, there are instances of African enslavement going from Morocco right down to the Cape. You know, sometimes it involved outside powers, whether they were Europeans or Arabs, but almost always the actual process of enslavement was done by Africans who then traded them on.
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Interviewer (Host)
I mean, definitely you give a sense throughout the book of agency to Africans. Africans played a role in the global slave trade from an early era, they weren't simply on the receiving end of a process, they were part of that process as agents. As you said, you start the book by going right back literally to ancient Egypt and you make the case that enslaving Africans northwards across the Sahara is the oldest and most enduring slave system in the world. We'll get to the enduring aspect of that slave system at the end of this episode. Because, you know, newsflash, dear listeners, it's ongoing. But once the camel makes the desert crossable, these slaving routes link west and East Africa. They link them into North Africa and the Mediterranean. And after the Arab conquests, especially, slavery becomes woven into successive Islamic empires through treaties like the Bakt, which I was interested to learn about, a 7th century treaty where the Christian kingdom of Nubia, which we've talked about on Conflicted, effectively paid an annual tribute of enslaved people to Muslim ruled Egypt in exchange for peace, to states in the Sahel, like Mali and Songhe, that are both raided and raiding, enslaving their neighbors while being plugged into this wider economy. And what really struck me is your point that this wasn't a system that relied on reproduction, certainly not assimilation, cultural assimilation, but on constant extraction, people dying in huge numbers on the roots, which is why North Africa ends up showing so little visible descent from millions of enslaved Africans. Given all of that, Martin, the scale, the longevity, the brutality, and the fact that this is happening for centuries before Europeans even show up, why has this ancient trans Saharan and Islamic slave trade been so marginal in how we remember African slavery today?
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Martin Plaut
I think there's a simple reason for it, and it goes back to this point, which is that most of the academic work and most of the publications have focused on the Atlantic. And for a very good reason, because African Americans rightly wanted to know their own origins and rightly wanted to understand what their ancestors, their great grandparents, whoever it was, had gone through and the terrible, terrible suffering that they had endured on the transatlantic route. And they demanded to know, and they put their backs into it. And they have researched this for years now. And it is absolutely extraordinary, the scale of the research that has gone into it, the detail that we now know about it, and how almost every single trade can be looked at and charted. I mean, there's still a lot of work to do, but, you know, it's really been worked at. While, as if you look at the Arabic world, it is entirely the opposite point of view. There's almost no interest in looking at enslavement in Africa by the Arabic world and Arabic Scholars have done very little work on it. This has meant that, for example, the role of the Ottomans, who are today the descendants of the Turkish state, they had a huge empire that went all the way down to Somalia and across North Africa, massive empire, and they were engaging in enslavement for centuries, but nobody's really interested in looking at it. The only person, there's only one person who has done serious work on it, and he's not an Arab, he's actually from Israel, he's an Israeli scholar. But nobody questions the value of his work. It's excellent. And the other thing is that the attitude of states like Saudi Arabia, who, again, were involved in enslavement for centuries. I mean, in fact, we don't even really know when it began. They took people mostly from the Horn of Africa, particularly Ethiopia, and they used them in their harems, they used them in their fields, and they used them as soldiers. And this has gone on forever. The response, it was only ended in the 1960s. And the response of the Saudi government to questions about this is to close the archive. They don't want you to know.
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Interviewer (Host)
It's interesting that, you know, because when you talk to Muslims about slavery, if they're honest and they, you know, they're, they're, they know that within Sharia law, like, you know, let's be honest, like every law code in the ancient world and up to the very, very early, you know, the last century or so, every law code had room for slavery as a perfectly legitimate kind of institution within, within life. You know, the Sharia law is one of those codes, and they're honest. Often Muslims will say, but no, you have to see this in context. Actually, the Sharia mitigated some of the worst excesses of the slave trade that had predominated before the coming of Islam. And so we have to see it in context. Sharia represents a step forward. I mean, that's often argued by Muslim friends of mine. What's your view on that? I mean, is there. Can we see an incremental improvement in the legal status of slaves as a result of the coming of Islam?
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Martin Plaut
I think that's difficult to argue because it is a bit like Christianity. I mean, if you look at Christianity in its sort of purest form, being a question of brotherly love and an acceptance of the other and acceptance of the stranger, which is at the heart of Christianity and sometimes had an impact on the way in which Christian slave owners behaved towards their slaves, but. But very frequently did not. Now, there were all these injunctions in Christianity similarly, there are all these injunctions in Islam. Now, if I'm going to be honest, I think in some senses there is an element of truth to what your Islamic friends say. And there were certainly attempts from time to time to enforce the injunctions that were inside the Islamic faith which told you had to treat people properly and you had to. After, for example, if a woman gives birth to the son of her master, she herself becomes free. And it certainly happened. But there are also examples where it didn't happen. So you end up thinking, well, yes, up to a point, and it didn't end the system. And that is the problem. And there are examples that you can find everywhere, whether it's in the holds of British ships taking people from, shall we say, guinea to the Caribbean, or whether it's in the treatment of men and women taken on the 40 day march across the burning sands of the Sahara up to the Nile to get to Egypt. I mean, where the rates of death were 30, 40%. I mean, unbelievable. And these people were allowed to die.
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Interviewer (Host)
Yeah. You paint this remarkable picture. At one point in the book of skeletons dotting this route. People just knew they were on a slave route because you could see skeletons in the sand where slaves had just perished and been allowed to decompose there unburied. A very, a very bracing image. I'm also glad you brought up Christianity because I don't mean at all to suggest that Islam is a greater offender in this regard. Though in the 4th century, I'm a bit of a nerd about these things. In the fourth century there was, I think, the first ever case of a person is a thinker. His name is Saint Gregory of Nyssa. He's the first person ever to argue, based on theological reasoning, that slavery was an evil in itself. Despite that, it's not like his argument carried much water. I think like in Islamic civilizations, the Christianized Roman Empire tried to incentivize manumission of slavery as a virtue. It sort of preached that kind of ethic that it's a good thing to, to free your slaves if you have them. But the slave markets of Christendom continued all the way throughout the Middle Ages, including in, and certainly in places like Byzantium, Constantinople, which was a real supermarket on the way between, you know, slavery up in the, in the Russian areas, through the Caspian Sea and slavery from Africa and all over the place. So I don't mean to say in any way that Muslims are worse slavers than Christians. Everyone was slaving.
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Martin Plaut
Yeah. I mean, I think that if that is the one lesson I think I would take away from having written this book, that is the lesson that everybody is involved. We are up to our elbows in the sweat and blood of slaves, all of us, and nobody is free of that, whether they are, you know, a Portuguese enslaver or a. Or an Indian who took slaves to India or anybody else. I mean, everybody is involved in this ghastly business, and there is no such thing as good slavery.
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Interviewer (Host)
I'm glad you mentioned India, because I think this is where a lot of listeners may really have to sort of recalibrate what they think they know. You show in the book that long before Europeans arrived on the scene, the Indian Ocean is already this dense commercial world linking East Africa to Arabia, Persia, India, even China. And that alongside ivory and spices, enslaved Africans are being traded and sold along those routes. You talk about Swahili port cities, Arab traders, Africans ending up not just as laborers, but as soldiers and guards in places like India, with figures like Malik Ambar, someone who's enslaved as a child and ends up effectively ruling a state, which is extraordinary, but it obviously doesn't make the system benign. And then you layer on Iran, Iraq, the Zengj rebellion, which we've talked about on conflicted before. A massive 9th century slave uprising in what's now Iraq, where enslaved Africans rose up and nearly broke the Abbasid caliphate. And your survey includes Arabia, Oman and Zanzibar. They play a big role. Caravans pushing deep into central Africa. All of this carrying on well into the 19th century, even as Atlantic slavery is supposedly winding down. And yet, compared to the Atlantic Indian Ocean, slavery is much less known.
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Martin Plaut
It is. I think that that has changed in the last decade. There begins to be a serious literature on all of these things. You can find books about it. But, I mean, I'll just give you one very small example of how imperfect our knowledge is. You will be aware that the Royal Navy, the British Navy, went to try to halt enslavement after it became outlawed in Britain and then across the British Empire. So for most of the 19th century, they put ships in the Atlantic and were trying to free slaves. But what is less understood is that the same process went on in the Indian Ocean. I mean, they weren't very effective at doing it. Let me be honest with you. They did stop some of the Arab dhows, but the dhows were effective at getting away from these rather cumbersome old ships that Britain put down there. But they did save people, and people were freed. But we know, for example, that in the Atlantic, 17,000 Royal Navy sailors died mostly from things like malaria and cholera. But they died sometimes fighting, trying to free the slaves. We have no similar figure for the Indian Ocean. And although I have asked the Royal Navy, I mean, in Brittany, their historical branch, do they have a figure? They've said, no, we don't. And in fact, one of the things I intend to do is to try and find a figure. So that we can at least say comparably. What it was that it took to halt slavery in the Indian Ocean.
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Interviewer (Host)
If you could talk a little bit about Oman and Zanzibar. That is a very important maritime empire stretching down the east coast of Africa. It's often little known by people outside, you know, specialists and people who have a keen interest in the subject. But it was a very important empire. And played a big role in Indian Ocean slavery.
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Martin Plaut
It did. I mean, the Portuguese, the French, the British were all there as well. But the Omanis were there first. They were there longest, and they were there in a sense. They took themselves, took as many slaves in the Indian Ocean area as all the other slavers did. And they did this by working their way down the coast of East Africa. And establishing ports and little fortresses there. That sometimes they traded, sometimes they fought for land. Then they discovered that in Zanzibar you could grow cloves. And this was an enormously profitable industry. And eventually it became so profitable that the sultanate was transferred from Arabia down to Zanzibar, from Muscat down to Zanzibar. And they established themselves there. And they trade in two commodities, essentially, or three commodities. One was cloves, the second was ivory, and the third was slaves. And they become the great slaving power. And unlike the Europeans, except the Portuguese. Let's leave just the Portuguese to one side. The Europeans, mostly in West Africa, did not enter Africa. They established little ports, and they trade for slaves. It's not true. The Portuguese did go into Angola, so that is the exception. But mostly that's not how slavery was happened in West Africa, but in East Africa. The Omanis then sent their caravans deep into Africa. So deep into Africa that they came out on the Atlantic. They crossed the entire continent. And then came back with slaves who were themselves a product and carrying ivory. Some of these caravans would take two to three years to continue the whole process. And they then export it to Zanzibar. And from Zanzibar to Reunion, where they were used by the French, to Arabia and to India. And this is where the slaves end up. It's an extraordinary trade and goes on for centuries, both before, during, and Then after European slavery takes place.
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Interviewer (Host)
And it's not just that Africa is exporting slaves. It's not just that Africans themselves are enslaving fellow Africans and using them as slaves. But Africa is also importing slaves in a weird way. We'll talk about the so called white slavery a bit later. From Europe by the Barbary coast pirates and things. But if I remember correctly, when you were last on Conflicted, you told us that in South Africa, where you grew up, there were communities of Indians there who had initially been brought as part of an Indian Ocean slave trade. Is that correct? Do I remember that correctly?
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Martin Plaut
Oh, you're absolutely right. And that was the Dutch East India Company, which established a settlement in Table Bay in Cape town in the 1550s. And they then bring slaves to work the land. I mean, they also brought Dutch settlers who worked the land, but they went beyond that and brought slaves from. They are generally in the Cape are called Malays. Very few of them actually came from Malaysia. Some of them came from Indonesia, But I think the largest number came from Bengal or Goa. And so they were brought down. We're not talking about huge numbers. Something below 20,000 people were brought down there. And if you think about the numbers that crossed the Indian Ocean, in total, it's more than 12 million. So you can see it's not a vast number, but it is very important. No, the Indian Ocean, the figures for the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic are comparable. Both are over 12 million.
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Interviewer (Host)
Incredible. You spend a lot of time on Ethiopia in the book, showing how slavery there was long carried out by Christians, I should add, as a brutal tool of empire. Christian rulers in the Abyssinian highlands, enslaving people from the south and west, especially Oromo communities, using them as labor, as status symbols, even as currency to buy weapons. You talk about children being taken, marched enormous distances, sold multiple times, and how under figures like Emperor Menelik ii, state expansion and slave raiding are basically happening together.
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Martin Plaut
Yeah, that's absolutely right. You know, the memories of those continue to this day. I mean, there are certainly examples of slavery which continue into the 1960s and 70s. But I remember at the end of the Tigray war, which we talked about at the beginning, there was a meeting in Washington and Naromo from the south of the country got up and he said to the audience, you must understand that I have been treated like a slave all my life. One of the things that I discovered after I wrote the book, but I found absolutely extraordinary, is that if you live in the highlands of Ethiopia or even in Eritrea, and you want to get married to somebody, they will then trace your heritage, partly for very good reasons, because they don't want to check. You don't want to intermarry with somebody who's too close a relative. But one of the things that they check out is whether there's any slave blood in your family back seven generations. And that's how allergic people are to the idea that you could even vaguely be related to a slave. That is how people looked upon these people. They were expendable. And, you know, there were products. They could be sold, they could be traded for, for example, with India, with cloth, or they could be sent to Arabia, where they were then castrated. The figures for castration deaths are just unbelievable. Beyond 60%, some say as many as 80 or 90% of young boys who were castrated then died of septicemia in the most appalling circumstances. Somebody wrote that he would go to his death remembering what he had seen of the castration process. This was just so that you could have eunuchs in the harems and in the homes who would not serve as a threat to the ruling alliance or the elites who employed them because they, of course, couldn't have children.
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Interviewer (Host)
We did a series of episodes on the emperor Haile Selassie. So I was intrigued, slightly disheartened, given his reputation as something of a modernizer, to read that there were slaves in his royal court. And also the fact that, you know, racialism plays a role in this. The enslaved people from the south, the borderlands bordering Abyssinia or Ethiopia to the south, are darker skinned than the northern highlanders, the Ethiopians or Abyssinians proper. And a kind of racial hierarchy based on pigmentation plays a role within Africa, within African slavery. As powerful a role as it played outside of Africa. The ones that we are familiar with when we make of slavery, quite literally a black and white issue.
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Martin Plaut
No, it's absolutely correct. And, you know, it's not just in Africa. I mean, I spent a year in Delhi working actually for the BBC on India. Every single week there would be in the Times of India, the Sunday supplement. There'd be a thick inset which was people frankly advertising for wives. These were men advertising for wives. And they'd not only make clear what their caste was and their qualifications and their wealth, but also the color of their skin. It would be, you know, ma Brahmin with green card, American green card, with wheaten complexion. And right at the other end of the scale would be charming, pleasant young man who's a Dalet, dark skinned Everybody knew what people were talking about. So I'm afraid racism is by no means an exclusively European predilection or plague.
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Interviewer (Host)
No, that's something that your book really brings out. And, you know, in places, it's depressing. I think in the end, it's not depressing, and I'll explain why later. But some of, you know, just being forced to confront, to contemplate this dark side, Forgive the pun there, this dark side of human nature. It's very sobering. I mean, maybe no more so Than when you talk about the sokoto caliphate. This is a caliphate that dominated parts of west africa. You describe it as one of the largest slave societies. Of the 19th century. It had plantations, slave armies, Entire economies built on forced labor. And, you know, this is, like, not just a side part of the empire. It was foundational to it. Jihad had created the state, but slavery then sustained it. And millions of people are caught up in that sokoto caliphate slave system. Feeding both saharan and atlantic markets. And their own internal domestic markets. So what does this tell us about how slavery actually functioned. Inside African states? How slavery shaped power relations, hierarchy, Imperial expansion within africa? And why do you think that internal history is essential. If we want to understand African politics. And conflicts that are still with us today?
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Martin Plaut
Well, the second question is a complex one, and I only have an idea of how it may be. But. But let's begin with the actual sokoto caliphate. These were fulani, who came from the desert, or the semi desert areas of the sahara. And they attacked the hausa, Predominantly the hausa, who were the sedentary people, the people who actually planted things and grew things. And they came out of the desert, and they were effectively knights who were on horseback. They were incredibly effective warriors. They had armor, and they crushed anybody that was in their way. And they were amazingly effective. And although they were muslim. And said that they would not enslave anybody who was a muslim, they also had a neat way of getting around that. The leader who began it, and we're talking about the early 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, over that hundred year period. I mean, he basically said, look, I've heard that people say that they are muslims, they're not good muslims. I've heard they're not good muslims, Therefore they're not muslims. So he just got rid of the idea that you should not enslave them. Because they were not right. Just as christians have always denigrated other christians.
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Interviewer (Host)
That part of the book made me think about the fact I've long known. Everyone knows that the the kind of insider, outsider distinctions within religious communities, Adjudicating between heretics and orthodox believers of any religion, or any variation of any religion. Everyone who knows anything knows that this often follows political lines. I mean, to speak of christianity, Is it just a coincidence that the major branches of Christianity, Protestantism in northwest europe, the roman catholic world, the eastern orthodox world, the oriental orthodox world, and the nestorian christian world all happen to map quite neatly over imperial polities over time, as they rose and fall. It doesn't strike me as coincidental. So I always knew that that political dimension. Pertained when it came to orthodoxy and heresy. But your book has made me wonder how often heresy, orthodoxy dynamics. Have been invoked. To justify enslavement of others. Because islam and christianity, both on paper, say it is against God's law to enslave a fellow christian, a fellow muslim. So you're very incentivized to begin defining quite narrowly. What a christian or a muslim is.
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Martin Plaut
Yeah, that is exactly the point. The other thing that's really interesting about the socrate caliphate. Is that they use their slaves. In ways which mirror the united states. So, for example, they have plantations, they have dye pits. They use slaves in huge numbers, Both in agriculture and as an export industry. They send them down to the coast, either via ghana. And the ashanti. Didn't make all their gold Just by mining it. They traded it with the interior powers, including the sokoto caliphate, and they then exported them across the atlantic, Mostly to brazil. So a lot of the people who arrived in brazil Were nigerians. Who had already been traded several times in that process. Because these were never just a one off. You traded them along the route. You got money, you sent the money back. So that was one thing. The other thing that's really interesting Is that there's a suggestion, and nobody can be absolutely certain, but there's a suggestion that in 1860s, at the time of the american civil war, which, after all, let's cut to the chase, Was about slavery. I mean, I know it was also about state rights and all sorts of other things, but slavery was at the heart of the american civil war.
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Interviewer (Host)
It was about the states rights to be slave states.
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Martin Plaut
Exactly. So, you know, at exactly that time, There were about the same number of slaves. In the sokoto caliphate as there were in the united states.
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Interviewer (Host)
It's just incredible.
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Martin Plaut
Yeah. And people kind of know nothing about it. I didn't know anything about it Until I started working on it. And there are books very well researched by eminent historians who make all this point, but they've Kind of kept it a bit quiet.
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Interviewer (Host)
Well, I asked you about what this tells us about modern Africa, contemporary Africa, its politics, its culture, its history. But let's hold back a second because before we get to the now, let's stay with the history. At one point you flip the direction of the story, as I said, and you talk about internal slavery, slaves coming to Africa from outside of Africa, and you've spent some time talking about this so called white slavery. So the Ottoman Empire and North African powers through the Barbary Corsairs, which always have this kind of romantic ring in my imagination, Barbary pirates, although, my goodness, they were up to no good, these powers are enslaving huge numbers of Europeans, sailors, fishermen, villagers, including women and children. And it's not just piracy, it's a whole economic system involving galley slavery, which I think of as a Roman thing, like an ancient thing. But it lived on and entire coastal regions traumatized with states subjected to this practice, either paying tribute or going to war to protect their people. And alongside that, along North Africa, you know, the Ottoman Empire is still importing and exploiting African slaves on a massive scale as well. So, you know, when we're talking about the centuries of early modernity, I think more than ever we associate that with Portugal and Spain and of course with England and then in American plantation slavery. But really across that whole period, slavery was a totally normalized part of every early modern imperial power.
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Martin Plaut
Yeah, it's absolutely true. And the Barbary pirates, or Corsairs, are established by the Ottoman Empire. They extend their rule from the east of the Mediterranean along the north coast and establish in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria these states which gradually become more and more self governing and independent, but still pay allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. And they are at war with everybody across the Mediterranean. So they are at war with France, with Spain, with Italy. And although these states also attack and kill them and occasionally enslave them, most of the time it is the other way around that the Barbary pirates are relying on the slaves that they capture and that they put into their galleys, as you say, and that they then use in the harem or on their lands. They use them everywhere and they're incredibly effective. Now the interesting part about this is that there's also a link to the way in which the North Europeans behave, because when the, the Armada was crushed
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Interviewer (Host)
by the English, this is the Spanish Armada.
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Martin Plaut
The Spanish Armada.
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Interviewer (Host)
So this is what, 1588?
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Martin Plaut
Yeah, it's the 16th century. I can't get my dates right. But they, you Know, after that, there is huge unemployment amongst sailors from the Netherlands, from France, from Spain and from England, because you don't need them anymore. I mean, England's one, hands down, end of. And a lot of the captains and ordinary sailors then think, well, where the heck can I go for a job? And they go south and they join the Barbary pirates. The term was going Turk. They took Islam, and they then explained to the Barbary pirates how to move from galleys to ships with sails. And this is completely transformative because instead of only being able to, shall we say, row your way across the Mediterranean, which was extraordinarily hard and very, very tough, most galley slaves only lasted three or four months, and then they were thrown overboard. These new systems were much more technologically advanced, and they went all the way around the British Isles. You can find attacks in Scotland, in Ireland, and particularly along the south coast of England, where for weeks and weeks it was too dangerous for fishermen to go out sea. But the other thing that they do is they go so far north, they go to Newfoundland, they go to Canada, and they attack the United States operating in the Caribbean. And the very beginning of the United States Navy extraordinarily comes from this, because the Barbary pirates posed such a threat to the United States that when the United States was properly united, they actually found the American Navy. In order to fight the Barbary pirates, they land in North Africa, they march 500 miles along north Africa employing Greek and other mercenaries, they attack the Barbary pirates and they are successful and eventually vanquish them. It is an extraordinary story. And that's why the Marine Corps of the United States still have, in their
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Interviewer (Host)
song, from the Shores of Tripoli to the Halls of Montezuma, the Marines hymn. You know, I wonder how many Americans actually, when they hear those words, know what they. What they stand for.
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Martin Plaut
That is exactly where it comes from. And it comes from this relationship with fighting the Barbary pirates because they were taking treasure and American slaves. And at one time, I can't remember, it was something like a quarter of the entire American budget was being paid to pay them off.
- [37:47]
Interviewer (Host)
Slavery really is a global story, there's no question about it. But when you talk about the galley slaves on the Mediterranean, I always immediately think of that extraordinary scene in my favorite film, the Old Ben Hur from 1959, where you see Charlton Heston sweating his guts out as a galley slave. And you see the galley slaves just passing out from sheer exhaustion and then being just chucked overboard by totally brutal, you know, Roman soldiers. And again, to think that for centuries and centuries and centuries, many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people were subjected to treatment like that, not just in galleys in the Mediterranean, but in plantations, in mines, it is truly disheartening. I mean, it's truly shocking. You almost understand why we don't tend to think about it or we tend to repress it. And in your book, After 5000 Years of History, you end by refusing really to let us 21st century humans off the hook. Because, Martin, slavery isn't something that just happened in the past. It isn't something abstract. It is still happening in very recognizable forms. In Mauritania, where slavery by descent still structures society despite multiple attempts at banning it. In Mali and Nigeria, where whole caste systems trap people into permanent dependency. In Sudan, where war has allowed slave raiding, sexual slavery and racialized violence to re emerge openly, especially in Darfur, but not only there. And in Libya, where migrants, often Eritreans, are literally being sold, rented out, or forced into labor through detention centers that everyone knows about. This is just in Africa. It's still happening, I'm afraid.
- [39:51]
Martin Plaut
It certainly is. And if anybody is doubting this, they should actually look at the work of the UN Special Rapporteur on slavery, who, I think it was a couple of years ago was in Morocco and he made a report, having been there, that there were 200,000 people who were chattel slaves today. This is not modern slavery. People who are in, you know, nail bars and can't get their passports back and, you know, spend a few years in terrible conditions, you know, being paid a very, very small sum of money. These are people who are bought, sold and owned or inherited. It's a completely different system. And this has been published by the United Nations. Has anybody done anything about it? Have they? Heck. I mean, the extraordinary thing is that the African Union and the Arab League, which are the organizations which are supposed to be representing Africa, and don't forget that the Arab League has, I think, 11 African members all across North Africa, says nothing about this. Absolutely nothing. They do not want to get involved. They do not want to investigate it. They do not want to discuss it at all.
- [41:07]
Interviewer (Host)
But even UNESCO seems far more comfortable commemorating slavery in the past and associating it with Europeans and the transatlantic route than confronting it in the present. This is a big problem. You know, lots of people are implicated in not paying attention to this problem.
- [41:24]
Martin Plaut
I'm afraid that is the case. I mean, this year, the African Union commemorated in one of its days the repression of Africans. And they talked about things like apartheid, which was an absolutely appalling system, and slavery. But they make it clear. The transatlantic slave trade. And they mean it in the past, they do not mean it in the present. They do not want to discuss it. That is why it is so disheartening that people are left to rot in these conditions and that people are still, as you pointed out, from Sudan to Libya, are being trapped in slavery today. This, to my mind, is the most pressing story that should be told about Africa because it is one that is so little known about and there's so little done about it.
- [42:17]
Interviewer (Host)
This is why everyone should read your book, Martin. Now I want to address the elephant in the room and I want to talk about this delicately. But highly ideologically charged accounts of slavery, often associated with the left, the political left, and in recent years, what people call wokery and all that stuff. These, as I say, highly ideologically charged accounts, by making the question of slavery literally a black and white issue, a Europe versus the non white world issue, and by downplaying the truly global and truly historically comprehensive nature of African slavery, which involved everyone, black and white and brown, Christian and Muslim, the Atlantic and the Indian oceans and the South China Sea, by obscuring the true story which you've told so well in your book, a story which is universal in my view, these, let's say, faddish leftist accounts of slavery actually diminish the way this tragic history which continues into the present, actually unites us all in a shared shame and therefore a potentially shared unifying moral perspective to end this terrible exploitation. Does this make sense? Reading your book was terribly depressing, but weirdly encouraging in the sense that nobody gets off scot free in this story. Every human being and every human society and every human civilization is equally implicated in the abomination of African slavery. So this should be bringing us together, not dividing us. Does that make sense?
- [44:00]
Martin Plaut
Oh, absolutely. But let me end on a slightly more optimistic note because, you know, there is one example of a group of Ethiopians, they were Oromos who were captured by the Arabs. They're being taken by Dao across the Red Sea and were then freed by a British captain. And they were taken to Aden and then some of them were taken down to South Africa because Aden was a tough place to survive in. And these poor children, and they were children, had been so brutalized, it was extraordinary. But amazingly, the mission station in South Africa documented them immaculately. They took individual photographs of them, they took group photographs of them, they did systematic interviews with them about what had happened to them. And years later they were then offered the opportunity of returning to Ethiopia if they wanted to. Some did. A lot remained in South Africa and extraordinarily one of the people who was the grandson of one of these Oromo slaves ended up fighting apartheid and joining, although he was in a different organization. He joined Nelson Mandela on Robben island and is actually still recalled to this day as somebody who stood up to apartheid. And he remembered when his grandmother who had been this slave, was a really old person. She stopped speaking English or Afrikaans, the other South African language, and she returned to Oromia, the Oromo language. And he used to ask his mother about this and she said, said, don't worry, she's speaking to God. That was Neville Alexander.
- [45:44]
Interviewer (Host)
What a wonderful story. Martin Plout, thank you for coming back on Conflicted to talk to us about your latest book. A really wonderful work, very Valuable Unbroken A 5000 Year History of African Enslavement. I really recommend everyone read this book. It helps make things clear and as I say at the end, I feel it can bring us together, work all in this together. It's a story of human shame and human misery. It unites us all. Thank you Martin for coming on.
- [46:14]
Martin Plaut
It's a great pleasure to be with you.
- [46:17]
Thomas Small
That was Martin Plaut. His new book, Unbroken Chains is available from all good booksellers. Please do purchase a copy and read it. Dear listeners, it's almost a life changing experience. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message Heard Production Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lynn Lizzy Andrews.
- [47:15]
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