Arabs and Muslims Own Black Slaves in Five African Countries
Today, there could be more people enslaved than at any time in human history.
According to the International Labour Organization, as of 2016, around 40.3 million people around the world perform involuntary servitude of some kind.
Slavery exists on every continent, and there are several forms of slavery, including debt bondage, forced labor, sex slavery, and so on. But the sort of human bondage most familiar to Americans is chattel slavery — where a person is the wholly-owned property of another.
Unlike in debt bondage, the slave cannot pay a debt and be freed; unlike in sex slavery, a chattel slave, even after his or her most “useful” years, is typically not set free. One can be beaten, bought, inherited, sold, raped, even rented. Any children resulting from rape by the master are his also his property. It is the worst type of slavery.
And just like the other forms slavery can take, chattel bondage still happens in the world today — particularly in Africa.
While most slavery in Africa fits into the aforementioned categories, the only black chattel slaves in the world are owned by Arabs and Muslims. The mainstream human rights community has consistently and egregiously ignored these slaves for decades, because of the situation’s politically incorrect implications.
Today, an estimate of between 529,000 and 869,000* black men, women, and children are still bought, owned, sold, and traded by Arab and black Muslim masters in five African countries.
Algeria
In Algeria, Sub-Saharan Africans fleeing violence and poverty for Europe are enslaved by Algerian Arabs as they try to cross the Mediterranean. Today, according to the Global Slavery Index, around 106,000 black Africans are estimated to be enslaved.
Migrant women, but also children (both male and female), risk being forced into sexual slavery, while men perform unskilled labor. Such enslavement of black migrants is generally a surprise condition for being smuggled to Europe — though, unlike typical debt bondage, traffickers are not obliged to release the enslaved once their debt is somehow paid. Those who avoid slavery are also subjected to virulent Arab racism, further marginalizing the already destitute.
Read the full Algeria slavery report.
Libya
As in Algeria, black Africans hoping for a better life in Europe travel to Libya to be trafficked across the Mediterranean, often to Italy. Once there, some are enslaved by local Arabs and traffickers. As of 2016, according to the U.N., there are between 700,000 and 1 million black African migrants currently in Libya; of these, the Global Slavery Index estimates many as 48,000 of them live as slaves of some nature. Survivors report torture and sexual and slavery — some even forced to become prostitutes only after they have reached their destinations.
The slave trade in Libya became international news when CNN obtained video of an actual slave auction in 2017.
Watch CNN’s viral footage of black men being sold in Libya.
Read the full Libya slavery report.
Mauritania
In Mauritania, the very structure of society reinforces slavery. Over the centuries a cruel class system has evolved in which the lighter-skinned Arabs and Arabized Berbers (beydanes) rule over the black former slaves who have been forcibly Arabized over time (haratin), those free blacks in the south who refuse Arabization calling themselves “Negro-Africans,” and the black chattel slave class (abidin) at the bottom. Though the country is entirely Muslim, and Islam theoretically forbids the enslavement of one Muslim by another, the severity of Arab racism even supersedes adherence to the Shari‘ah (Islamic law).
In 1993, a U.S. State Department report estimated that between 30,000 and 90,000 blacks lived as slaves owned by private masters. In 2011, a CNN investigation estimated that the number could be as high as between 340,000 and 680,000.
No slave markets exist in Mauritania. All slaves are born in masters’ households from the master raping black slave women, or ordering necessary episodes of sexual activity (“breeding”) between couples of slaves. In the absence of open markets, slaves — often horrifically tortured when deemed “uppity” — are inherited like furniture, change hands quietly in individual sales, are traded as substitutes for money in the settling of gambling debts, or can even be rented.
Watch footage from a groundbreaking 1996 investigation into Mauritanian slavery.
Watch the accompanying video to CNN’s 2012 investigation.
Read the full Mauritania slavery report.
Nigeria
One of the most disturbing byproducts of the long-running civil wars in Nigeria — a fully black nation — has been jihad slavery. Unlike in Arab North Africa, religious bigotry, in place of racism, is the main factor involved. Nigeria is divided evenly between Christians and Muslims, but the government is controlled by the Islamic half, leaving Christians unrepresented and defenseless.
The rise of jihad organizations like ISIS affiliate Boko Haram has been the main source of contemporary slave raids, in which the taking of Christian slaves has become a source of compensation for Islamic fighters. The most infamous incident of a slave raid was Boko Haram’s abduction of 276 Christian schoolgirls in the town of Chibok on April 14, 2014, which inspired Michelle Obama’s (short-lived) “#BringBackOurGirls” hashtag. Most slaves are young girls, kidnapped and kept as the concubines of the Islamic soldiers.
Since then, it is unclear just how many slaves Boko Haram has captured since its insurgency began in 2009. The U.S. State Department’s 2021 human rights report notes that some NGOs have estimated the number of slaves (or “abductees,” as it calls them) to be “more than 2,000,” but the full number is as of now “unknown.”
The Christian human rights organization Open Doors scored Nigeria seventh on its list of countries most dangerous for Christians as of 2022. And, in 2020, Christian Solidarity International issued a formal “Genocide Warning” for Nigeria.
Watch Rebecca Sharibu and her translator, Dr. Gloria Samdi-Puldu, beg the Trump administration to help free Rebecca’s daughter Leah, who has been held as a slave ever since Boko Haram kidnapped her from her school in 2018, because she has refused to renounce her Christian faith.
Read the full Nigeria slavery report.
Sudan
In Sudan, slavery remains as a painful vestige of the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983 – 2005), during which the Arab Muslim government in the north of the country declared a genocidal jihad upon the black, largely Christian south, killing perhaps 2.5 million people and enslaving as many as 200,000.
Though the war ended in 2005 and black South Sudan became the world’s newest nation on July 9, 2011, many black slaves remain as the property of Arab masters across the new border in the north. The exact number is not known, but as of 2006, James Aguer Alic, a former Sudanese government minister and anti-slavery activist, estimated that it could be as high as 35,000.
The slaves lucky enough to be liberated in mass buy-backs — mostly women — tell hideous stories of abduction, beatings, forced conversion to Islam, grueling labor, Islamic vaginal mutilation, malnutrition, racial abuse, and rape.
Witness the freeing of 175 black slaves in Sudan, which took place on Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom.
Listen to a black Sudanese former slave tell the story of how he was kidnapped during a brutal slave raid, enslaved for 10 years, and then escaped from his Arab master.
More recently, however, even with an independent South Sudan, South Sudanese Christians are still not safe. The civil war and political turmoil which have tormented the new country since independence in 2011 have made it almost impossible for the people to defend their porous northern frontier, fueling deadly cross-border violence. Even worse, new slave raids are now occurring, with one in early 2022 costing the lives of 19, destroying two villages, and taking an undetermined number of children as slaves.
Read the full Sudan slavery report.
* This figure consists of the estimates of those enslaved in Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, and Sudan — excluding Nigeria, for which there are no reliable estimates.