THE SLAVE TRADE: UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS, THEN AND NOW
In my historical novel, The Boys from Umgazana (https://frankcollierauthor.com/), the slave trade appears largely in passing.
While researching the broader historical backdrop, I realised how shallow my own understanding of the slave trade had been.
Like many people, I assumed the issue had been settled long ago — neatly wrapped up when Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807.
That belief is wrong. Seriously wrong.
Slavery did not end. It sanitised its name. Today, we call it human trafficking.
Slavery predates recorded history and has existed in almost every civilisation known to man.
This article focuses on slavery in Africa because Africa sits at the centre of several of the world’s largest and longest-running slave systems.
THE SLAVE TRADE – THE IMAGE WE PREFER TO REMEMBER
In the modern Western imagination, slavery has become almost synonymous with the transatlantic slave trade:
Black Africans packed into the holds of ships, crossing the Atlantic in conditions so brutal that many never survived the journey.
The villains seem obvious: European ship owners, brutal captains, sadistic plantation owners, and overseers armed with whips and dogs.
From the mid-eighteenth century onward, abolitionists rightly condemned these men and eventually forced Britain to deploy the Royal Navy to hunt down slave ships across the Atlantic.
However, this familiar story focuses almost entirely on the final two links in the slave supply chain: the transporters and the buyers.
It rarely examines the first link.
WHO SOLD THE SLAVES?
Slavery in Africa did not begin with Europeans.
For centuries before the first Atlantic slaver sailed, traders exported human beings from Africa:
Northwards across the Sahara to North Africa and the Mediterranean.
Eastwards through the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
And later, westwards across the Atlantic.
The numbers remain staggering, even when historians use conservative estimates.
Between 700 and 1900 AD, traders sold roughly 12 million Africans through trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean routes — an average of 10,000 people per year.
Between 1500 and 1900 AD, traders shipped a similar number across the Atlantic — closer to 30,000 per year.
During the eighteenth century alone, slave traders removed 6.5 million people from sub-Saharan Africa — about 12.5 percent of the population at the time.
These figures exclude the countless deaths caused by forced marches through jungles and deserts, as well as the bodies dumped overboard during ocean crossings.
Astonishingly, most enslaved Africans never left Africa.
Here lies the uncomfortable truth.
SLAVERY WAS NOT A ONE-WAY TRADE
So who supplied the slaves?
The answer remains unavoidable. African tribal chiefs and elites did.
They captured, sold, and traded other Africans through long-established systems of warfare, tribute, and commerce.
Why does no one condemn these so-called sacred ancestors?
THE BARBARY STATES AND THE SLAVE TRADE
While traders sold Africans to the south, east, and west, in the northern hemisphere Europeans were the target.
From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, pirates and slavers operating from the Barbary states — modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya — captured an estimated one to one-and-a-half million Europeans.
These victims were not only sailors and fishermen.
They included farmers, women, and children dragged from coastal towns in Italy, Spain, France, England, Ireland, and even Iceland.
THE SACK OF BALTIMORE, 1631
In June 1631, raiders emptied the small Irish town of Baltimore in County Cork.
Barbary corsairs led by a Dutch renegade, Jan Janszoon — better known as Murat Reis — arrived under cover of darkness.
More than two hundred armed men crept ashore.
They torched houses.
Terrified inhabitants fled their beds.
Within minutes, the raiders forced over 200 men, women, and children onto ships and carried them to the slave markets of Algiers.
Only two or three ever returned to Ireland.
The captives faced a grim fate: galley slavery for the men and sexual slavery for the women.
ENDING THE BARBARY SLAVE TRADE
After the Napoleonic Wars, the American Navy — followed by British and Dutch forces — attacked Algiers and freed many captives.
Moral arguments failed.
Naval gunfire succeeded.
However, slavery in North Africa only ended decisively in 1830, when France invaded Algeria and dismantled the system by force.
MODERN SLAVERY: THE TRADE CONTINUES
Fast-forward to the present.
According to the International Labour Organization, between 45 and 50 million people worldwide live under conditions of slavery.
Modern slavery includes forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and the sale of children.
The defining feature remains simple: the removal of choice — the inability to walk away.
In South Africa alone, the Global Slavery Index estimates that around 158,000 people lived in modern slavery in 2021.
Strong evidence suggests that the problem persists — and continues to grow.
SO WHAT IS BEING DONE?
South Africa, like many countries, has strong laws on paper.
In practice, authorities enforce them weakly, inconsistently, and often corruptly.
Political interference and institutional incompetence cripple the machinery of justice.
Slavery, like many other forms of crime, flourishes where consequences disappear.
And it will continue until voters install an honest and competent government.
The good news is that we have local government elections later this year!
There is a famous quote: “In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve”.
I think we deserve better than the current sorry lot!
Make sure your show up and vote!
