This is the story of the conversation with a Haitian Taxi-driver and his call for reparations by the White or European colonial powers needs a rebuttal, which will at the very least, brings to the fore all of the issues concerned. That story of President Hugo Rafael Chavez of Venezuela being in real danger and the overthrow of President Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, got me thinking enough to do my research and point out the many facets of the issue.
If we go back in biblical times and even before that, slavery has been the normal attitude of conquerors. If we go back to beginning of the Islamic period, we will note that slavery began in earnest after 632 A.D. When the Arabian Caliph sent an agent named Mohammed Ali to Africa to capture and bring back slaves to Arabia soon after the 7th century. Because at that time the Arabs did not consider Africans as humans, but only as chattel.
The beginnings of slavery date back to the period of the Muslim conquest and forced conversion of Buddhist Afghanistan, Assyrian Christian Mesopotamia, Zoroastrian Persia, the Christian Kingdoms in Aram (Lebanon and Syria), Asia Minor, Roman occupied Jewish Palestine, Coptic Christian Egypt, Christian Nubia (Sudan), Algeria, Morocco, Christian Carthage (Tunisia today) and Libya, and reached into the heart of darkest Africa, through the lands of the Tauregs and into Timbuktu, Nigeria, Musabenbeque (Moçambique), Zanzibar (which was under the Al-Busaid dynasty of Oman till January 1964), Somaliland, Cote d'Ivoire and into Uganda. If we go even further, the countless Muslim invasions of Hindustan (India), the first by Mahmud of Ghazni from Afghanistan into the territory of Raja Dahir of the Scinde, followed by the Mughal (Mongol) invader Taimur-the-Lame into Hindustan where they forced the conversion to Islam of thousands upon thousands of Hindus there, does not speak well of Islam.
It was in Africa that all the big Arab slave markets began, and they traded with Portugal, Spain, Holland, France and Britain. On the South-East African coast the biggest slave trader was a Principe Henri of Pondoland, an African Christian who traded in slaves with the Portuguese. The U.S. came into the slave trade much later after its independence in 1783. Even in the case of New France, the Governor Louis de Buade, sieur de Frontenac, comte de Palluau et Forest was the first to bring African slaves to far North America in November 1689, which was considered a great triumph of France. In most of Africa Tribal Chiefs did big business by capturing neighbouring tribes and selling them as slaves to Arabs or Europeans. This has been the bugbear of the unknown Africa, and has been denied by many of today's Africans themselves, but there is historical data that can prove all of this to be true. Arab Dhows can still be found hugging the East African coast in search of slaves in this very day and age.
There never has been any doubt that Spain created the Amerindian slaves in the Americas, and later brought in African slaves to work in the Gold mines of the Spanish colonies in America. But Spain and Portugal which had thrown off the yoke of centuries of Islamic (Moorish) occupation in 1492, since its invasion by the Berber Chieftain Tariq Ibn Zayyed of Mauritania who landed his army at Calpe (now Gibraltar or Jebel Tariq) on July 9, 711 and renamed the country ANDALUS and who forcibly converted Christians to Islam, now started to build its own colonial empire in the Americas. Nor is there any doubt that the British and other colonial powers brought African slaves to the Americas and the Caribbean, having bought them from Muslim (Arab) slave-traders on the West African coast, but the British also brought in indentured slaves from India. These were people who were kidnapped and brought to Demarara (later British Guiana) and Trinidad and Tobago.
Go to Java, and other parts of Indonesia and see the many Buddhist Temples, which are now derelict because of the Islamic conquests and forced conversion to Islam. Of course Bali is the only part of Indonesia that retained its Hindu identity from Asokan times. In Afghanistan an ancient Buddhist land, one can see the giant statues of Lord Gautama (Buddha) carved into the stone cliffs of Bamiyan by ancient artisans, but all this fell to the to the onslaught of the invading Muslim armies, which forcibly converted the country to Islam. The fanatical Taliban (Muslims) of Afghanistan attempted to destroy these archeological sites with dynamite. It should be noted that no history book on Asia and Africa blames the Arabs outright for their enslavement of the African people. The reasons are evident. Many of the African and Asian countries are Muslim, or have alliances with Islamic states and it would not serve their interests to expose it. Thus the blame for slavery is conveniently laid at the feet of the European colonial powers.
It was Islamic conquests after the 7th century that brought about a great influx of slavery. Of course it was Salau-ud-Din (Saladin) the Kurd who captured 20,000 Christian men, women and children pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land and sold them into slavery. Salau-ud-Din also invaded Nubia and forced Christian monks to convert to Islam or die. While most converted, one named Maurice would not, and he was skinned alive on orders of Salau-ud-Din that is the Black Saint Maurice whose statue graces the Cologne Cathedral, Germany. Is this not the great Salau-ud-Din who Muslims think of as an Islamic warrior?
Remember along the coasts of the Maghreb (North Africa) the Corsairs did a thriving slave trade by attacking European and American shipping, capturing the crews, which they then sold as slaves. But it was Stephen Decatur of the U.S. Navy that foiled the Corsair raiders and soundly defeated them. Then there is the Othman Turks whose fleets attacking the Mediterranean coast of Europe captured and sold thousands of Europeans into slavery. There were big slave markets in Tripoli, Libya, in Meknes, Morocco, in Tunis, Tunisia (Carthage), Algiers, Algeria, all countries conquered and colonized by Arabs from the Islamic invasion of the 7th and 8th centuries. Also the capture by Muslim pirates of the niece of the Empress Josephine (Beauharnois) of France who was returning from a convent in Martinique, and who later sold her to the Sultan of Othman Turkey. Slavery was part and parcel of Islamic society then, and we cannot get away from it. A perfect example of this, is the Holy City of Meknes in Morocco, within whose walls were buried alive some 20,000 white Christian slaves.
Neither Islamic society nor those who support them want these truths to be known. There are still slave markets in Arab countries, where one can bid and buy a slave of any nationality. The present forced conversion of Christians to Islam in the Sudan by the Arab regime in Khartoum is an on-going affair. In Marseilles, France alone every year almost 4,000 girls disappear. This is where there are gangs operating the slave markets from Arab and African countries. To talk of European colonialism of the past and forget the slavery of the present is to be duplicitous. We can only deal with the present, because there is not much of the past that we can really remember.
We see no cry for justice and reparations being asked of Muslim countries for their enslavement of Europeans and others, from those that now expect the former European colonial powers to pay for their past sins. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and other Islamic states are just as guilty of the enslavement of millions of people, more so than all the European colonial powers put together. Are we to overlook Arab slavery, while we only make it a point to remember the sins of Europe? No country ever conquered by an Islamic invading force can remember its history beyond the Islamic period. This is the religious brainwashing that has gone on for centuries in the Middle East, Maghreb (North Africa), darkest Africa and the Balkans.
Perhaps it is worth remembering that even the Othman Turks were past masters at religious brainwashing, more so than all the communists in Europe. It is time to take serious overview of past history to get an honest judgment of its reality vis-à-vis the Moors in Spain, the Arabs in all of the present day Middle East and Africa, the Othman Turks in the Balkans after the conquest of the Byzantine Empire in May 1453. In Byzantium they took the Christian women as concubines, and killed, converted or castrated the Christian men in that great kingdom. After that the Turks were in occupation of Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary for centuries and forced people to convert to Islam or die. Why do you think there is a Muslim Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina today, but not for the Othman Turkish Islamic conquest centuries ago?
Do not forget the Turks still occupy Constantinople, which is part of the Greek Nation. Let's not forget the Armenian genocide of 1915-21 by Othman Turkey in which 1,500,000 people died. Turkey is still in denial of her crime of the Armenian genocide. There is also the Abyssinian genocide carried out by Il Duce Benito Mussolini's Italian Legions in 1935-36, both of which have been conveniently forgotten by some historians. We cannot therefore judge the European colonial powers, if we do not include the Islamic invasions and the slavery it brought with it. And if we do not, then we cannot arrive at an honest judgment of all the issues involved. We can deliberately pretend forgetfulness or omit the facts that expose the reality of our time by selective amnesia, but sooner or later it will catch up with us. History, cannot be fooled around with, because it might come back to haunt us.
Finally, it should be remembered that it was the Rev. William Wilberforce, MP for Kingston-upon-Hull, Yorkshire that began his campaign to outlaw slavery in 1807. He made it his life's work, and died a scarce three months after it passed by an act of the Parliament at Westminster in 1833. It took a caring Christian man like the Rev. William Wilberforce to make good on a promise he had made to himself. If today we celebrate 200 years after the fact that slavery was outlawed, it is indeed a great achievement by a kindly old man who made it his life's career.
Kenneth T. Tellis
