On the occasion of the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition on August 23: In Africa, also Africans and Arabs traded in people.
The boxer Cassius Clay (1942-2016) converted to Islam in 1964, at the time of “segregation” in the United States, and from then on called himself Muhammad Ali. “Clay” was a “white” name and that of a slave, the then 22-year-old said in explanation. Whether Muhammad Ali ever knew that there had been a Muslim slave trade in Africa? By which also his own ancestors had come to America. Would Cassius Clay have wanted to be a Muslim with this knowledge?
My radio features from earlier this year illuminate the political, social, and theological aspects of that chapter of history. In addition, I found a touching testimony in literature:
The pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (“The Little Prince”) describes in his 1939 book “Wind, Sand and Stars” how he encountered slaves of Moors during stopovers in the Libyan desert. “Moors” are all those Berber tribes living in North Africa – partly as nomads – who were Islamized by Arabs from the 7th to the 10th century. When Saint-Exupéry made his observations, the slave trade had already been outlawed under international law for half a century, but were still alive in the desert in the Sahel.
All slaves are called Bark; so he was also called Bark. Despite four years of captivity, he had not yet resigned himself to his fate. (…) In Marrakech, where his wife and three children were probably still living, he had practiced a wonderful profession: “I was a drover, and my name was Mohammed!” (…)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Wind, Sand and Stars, translated excerpts from the German edition, Karl-Rauch Verlag, new translation 2019, p. 110-120
One day Arabs had approached him, “Come with us to the south to drive cattle.” They had marched with him for a long time, and after three days they led him into a hollow way in the mountains not far from the rebellious areas, simply put their hands on his shoulder, named him Bark, and sold him.
I knew other slaves. I went to the tents for tea every day. (…) Sometimes the black slave squats in front of the door and enjoys the evening breeze. Memories no longer rise in the heavy prisoner’s body. He hardly remembers the hour of his abduction, those beatings, those screams, those men’s arms that pushed him into his present derangement. (…)
One day, however, he will be released. When he is old and no longer worthy food and clothing, they will grant him an immoderate freedom. For three days he will offer himself in vain from tent to tent, daily growing weaker, towards the end of the third day, still devoted, he will lie down in the sand. This is how I saw them in Juby, dying naked. The Moors watched their long death throes, indifferent but without cruelty, and the Moors’ children played beside the gloomy wreck, coming running every morning to check in play if he was still moving, but without laughing at the old servant. That was the natural order of things. (…)
Bark, the black prisoner, was the first one I met who resisted. Bark did not settle down in servitude as some, tired of waiting, settle down in a mediocre happiness. (…) He kept for the absent Mohammed the house that the latter had inhabited in his breast. (…)
I had tried to buy him out, supported by the mechanics of the flight station, but it was not common that the Moors met Europeans who wanted a slave. They took advantage of that.
“Costs 20,000 francs.”
“Are you kidding us?”
“Look at the strong arms he has…”
And so months passed.
At last the Moors’ demands diminished, and with the help of friends in France to whom I had written, I found myself in a position to ransom old Bark.
And we waved goodbye to our fifty-year-old newborn, a little worried about letting him take this step into the world.
“Goodbye, Bark!”
“No.”
“Why no?”
“No. I am Mohammed ben Lhaoussin.”