The African Slave Traders Who Exported to the Middle East and Asia

 The Age of European Exploration is not the first era of long-distance trade-oriented intercontinental networking. Nor is it the first to use and trade in slaves.

In Africa, the Swahili Coast (Somalia, Mozambique, Zanzibar, Tanzania) was the region of world renowned city-states trading with Arabia, India and China beginning over 2000 years ago. As an early year marker, Emperor Wen of the Han Dynasty was buried in 157 BC, four African elelphant tusks occupied the Emporer to his grave. 

The trade was enabled by the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean, and their seasonal flipping of directions. December to March the "trade winds" blew northeasterly, providing a push on sails to go from Africa to Arabia and India. April to November the winds blew southwest providing power for boats to move from Asia to East Africa. This provided the seafaring traders the ability to make a round trip within one year's time.

Archeological evidence has established that the main Swahili city-states had built themselves up with wealth, substantial infrastructure, building sophistication, and appreciation for foreign fine goods...long before Arabic Islamic influence existed. Popular imports into Africa from the Indian Ocean included glassware and pottery, jewelry, paper, paints, books, gunpowder, pointy weapons, silk, and other precious fabrics.

While the trading abilities and urban sophistication can be directly credited to African indigenous origin, it was the linkage with Arabic Islamic culture and the Muslim far-stretching empire that provided the Swahili port cities an uptick in trade. It is early on in Islam that trade in slaves became a major part of the cultural exchanges, and the Swahili coast began to be the primary source for African slaves exported to the Middle East, India and China.

From "Forgotten History of African Slavery in China" (areomagazine.com )[link]:

The first Africans arrived in China as gifts from the King of Kalinga in Java to the Tang emperor in 813 A.D. These young boys and girls were treated as exotic ornaments, no different from the rhinoceros and other animals they were presented alongside. The Chinese called them Zangzi, a reference to Zanzibar, which at that time described the whole length of the Eastern African coastal region, including Madagascar.

In later accounts, African slaves turn up as the personal property of Arab merchants residing in Chinese port cities such as Guangzhou (map), which housed a significant Arab community. The average Guangzhou resident is likely to have encountered Africans as she went about her daily tasks. Eventually, wealthy Chinese also started demanding such slaves in large numbers. This required a supply line beginning from East Africa, traversing the Indian Ocean, stopping in India and finally crossing the Malaccan Straits to reach the port cities of China.

Before closing with a strong invite to read or view the references below, here are some thoughts and thought experiments.

Picture the highest classes of society in the Swahili port cities, keeping the rare and precious imports within their cities, mostly in their homes, unapologetically engaged in exporting Africans to the Middle East and Asia. This breaks the false narrative of African solidarity opposed to an unfair, cruel, merchantilist world. They are the merchants. There is no such African solidarity.

It is a false equivalence to point to these merchants of slavery as the same as US southern plantation owners. It is easy to break that equivalence by this simple thought experiment: proponents within US southern plantation culture stated many times over that blacks are suited only for slavery. Can we imagine the elite wealthy slave trading blacks of the African coast saying the same thing? Of course not. The US plantation south taught some things about human subgroups (black) that was untrue propaganda aimed at their own selves to feel better about the whole slave owning arrangement. The elite blacks of the Swahili port cities practiced no such indoctrination.

Advocates for "indigenous ways" who take that stance without nuance or knowledge are missing out on a horror they invite back into our world. Where did all these slaves come from through those many centuries of the African port cities? They came from the interior and a product of raids and contentious battles. Indigenous cultures didn't have prisons like their contemporaries in the Roman and Persian sphere. At the end of a battle the losing side faced two primary outcomes: total annihilation or bondage. As hostiles against the victorious group, they can't be let lose to win on another day. They have to be deleted from the region that day, either through death or exported in bondage as forced wives or forced workers.

Finally, the idea of "Kunlun", dark people, in pre-modern China is fascinating. The Chinese gave the kunlun title to any from deep southeast Asia or Africa. The Chinese took many female slaves from Korea, but didn't refer to them as kunlun, rather they remarked how Korean women where so white (white is a beauty standard first mentioned in writings as far back as 1100 BC, 3000 years old). The native peoples from the Philippines to Indonesia, much less Australia, are very dark. Here is my suggestion for the seismic rift between these people -thousands of years living on the edge of glaciers of the last glacial maximum (link). What we call Asians of the Far East were hunter-gatherers on glacial ice, and that environment molded them to be better suited for the environs with wider heads, slanted eyes for snow glare, and other physical traits. Africa and areas south of Asia didn't get that ice, and thus didn't get shapped by it over thousands of years. Therein is the difference that isn't cultural or made up in our minds.

REFERENCES

1. The Swahili Culture 0 to 1500 AD (Youtube)
2. Forgotten History of African Slavery in China (areomagazine.com )
3. Kunlun Nu ( Wikipedia ) A Tang Dynasty era novel about a black man in China.
4. Slavery in China ( Wikipedia )
5. Kunlun People China <-Google Search
6. The Blacks of Premodern China ( University of Pennsylvania Press ) Read the excerpt, it has the a free reprint of the entire introduction within the book.
8. Chinese-style ceramics in East Africa from the 9th to 16th century (journals.openedition.org)