Trans-Saharan Slave Trade

Abstract

Trans-Saharan slave trade was conducted within the ambits of the trans-Saharan trade, otherwise referred to as the Arab trade. Trans-Saharan trade, conducted across the Sahara Desert, was a web of commercial interactions between the Arab world (North Africa and the Persian Gulf) and sub-Saharan Africa. The main objects of this trade were gold and salt; gold was in abundance in the western part of Africa, but scarce in North Africa. On the other hand, while salt remains indispensable to human societies, it was not producible in sub-Saharan Africa, but was abundant in North Africa. This created a rationale for trading between these two regions, separated by a vast and hostile terrain. Subsequently, there developed an intricate web of trade routes, powered by caravans of camels, between different sub-Saharan societies and the Arab world. It was during the course of trading that human beings gradually became items of exchange as the need for manpower grew on the north side of the Sahara. Trans-Saharan slave trade was the trade in “human commodity,” sourced from different places in sub-Saharan Africa, destined for locations north of the Sahara Desert, the Mediterranean shores, and the Middle East. Unlike its later trans-Atlantic variant, trans-Saharan slave trade took place within the context of a larger exchange relation between black Africa on the one hand and the Maghreb and the rest of the Arab world on the other. It has been argued that perhaps one of the most significant effects of the transSaharan trade was the establishment and proliferation of the trade in human beings (Brett 1969). Sub-Saharan African slaves were bartered for bars of salt and other Mediterranean goods.