SLAVERY: TRADE AND PREJUDICE

Slavery: a kneeling figure of a young black Roman slave cleaning a boot. This bronze statuette was made between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD.

A seventeenth-century Barbary war gallery with slaves manning the oars.

Round the circle of buyers the auctioneer led the slaves.

A prospective buyer on the Barbary Coast of North Africa carefully examining a female slave before bidding.

Slaves in North America.

Slave trading is (in)human trafficking. Africa was the source of slaves and the scourge of slavery were the Arab traders. They were near to Africa. There was market for slaves within and outside their domains and hence the trading. 

The Barbary Coast in North Africa and Zanzibar in the central east coast of Africa were noted as entrepôt for slave trading. One of the sultans of Zanzibar became so rich that he could afford to have 90 wives!

The thousands of years in the past that Africa had been associated with slavery remains a stigma and prejudice against coloured people.