SLAVE TRADE TO-DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 39, 15 February 1930, Page 8 (Supplement)

SLAVE TRADE TO-DAY.

RED SEA SERFDOM. MARKET IN HUMAN WARES. PIRATICAL RAIDING DHOWS.

(By ROSITA FORBES;)

In the days of Sir Richard Burton, Harrar was the centre of the profitable Abyssinian slave trade, besides which it supplied most of the eunuchs for the harems of Turkey and Western Arabia. Before the war there was a regular traffic j between the half-starved villages of Lasta and Simyen, where the local Copts can hardly wrench a living from the barren rocks on which their huts are plastered like molluscs, and the coasts of Yemen and Hedjaz. Children of anything over three were sold by their parents for an average of 20 Menelik dollars—the price of a mulein order that they might be hustled down to the Red Sea and packed into the dhows, which, when not in ballast, can cross the reef at any point and lie hidden for days in the crecks with which the Eritrean shore abounds. Some of these waifs probably died on their way' to tho markets of Mccca and Sabya, but once bought by the wealthy merchants and sheriffs of Western Arabia their lot was considerably better than it could possibly have been in their own country. 1 The slavery or the East is a beneficent institution, providing there is no traffic which separates children from their parents. By Koranic law a slave must be i treated in exactly the same fashion as the other members of the household. He must eat the same food and wear the same clothes as his master. A woman slave may not legally be married without her own consent, and she can demand the same dowry as a daughter of the house. If she is ill-treated by her her husband she. has the right to claim the protection of her master or of the | local court of justice. A slave who bears her lord a child is automatically freed, and on every festival, or on the receipt of any good news, it is customary for a rich man to free one or more of his slaves, but this makes no difference to their manner of life, for an Arab household is a patriarchal as in the days of Abraham. The only segregation is that of the sexes. Patriarchal Ownership. The men, whether they be free-born, or bought in* the coastal markets, or bred like bloodstock from the family slaves, all eat out of the same dish. Their clothes are exactly the same, except that the Abyssinian black has a greater love of colour and display than the Bedouia lie serves, so the waistcoat under his camel's-hair abbaya is generally more richly embroidered than that of his master. V '■ . Staying in-the harems of Western Arabia, it is almost impossible to distinguish between the wife and the slave. Both wear the same heavy golden jewellery and share equally in the domestic labour; There is-ho feeling of'inferiority among the slaves, for at any moment they may be freed, though such freedom will mean no change of condition, since, men and women alike, they are attached to the household of which they have become a component pajt, and they look, down on the free .Kbuddam class,, the labourers and porters of merchandise, who in Yemen have no right to carry arms. The only occasion on which a slave girl is sent away from her home is when she accompanies a daughter of the house to the harem of her unknown husband, and under these circumstances the lot of one girl is no harder than that of the other. Incited by the European Ministries at Addis Abeba, the Emperor Menelik promulgated an edict freeing all the slaves in his country on the death of their masters. The result has been disastrous, for when a great man dies a horde of pampered personal retainers, who have known no other duties than to walk behind their master in processions gorgeously apparelled, or to follow his standard in war, are thrown on their own devices, penniless, with a rifle as their sole possession. In Abyssinia all land is owned by the village of the family, and it is worked on communal lines. There is no hired labour. Consequently there is nothing for the yearly increasing number of freed slaves to do but to join the bands of brigands which ravage the northern mountains like a cloud of locusts. While he was still Regent, Ras Tafari made determined efforts to exterminate the slavers who still carry on a sporadic and perilous trade out of reach of the ' capital, with the result that where in olden days caravans of 200 or 300 children went more or less openly to the coast, now the dry river beds, winding through almost impenetrable thorn forests are the only roads for the merchant of human wares. Supplying.Afabian Harems. My guide from Lalibela to Gondar was such a' one, and he informed me that, what with the. hostile attitude' of the Government and of the great territorial chiefs who rule the north, and. the' constant vigilance of the British gunboats . which patrol the Red Sea, his trade was diminishing. "By Allah, it is hard to supply even the least number required by my brother, who is a inerchant in Meidi," he remarked woefully—and I remember the harem of that said brother. It was invariably full, but like a kaleidoscope, the crowd of shy, expressionless black faces was always changing, though the generic Moslem names with which the waifs from Christian Ethiopia were endowed .remained the same. Before the war the sheriffs of Yemen added to their considerable wealth) by stealing peasant children, training them within their blind-walled citadels, and Belling them in the same odour of sanctity. But the late Emir Idrisi, an advanced thinker and the only mentality 'Arabia has produced to equal lb 5 n Sa 'ud, put a stop to the traffic. At the present time it is still possible to buy a alive in any of the Western Arabian towns, but it has to be done by more or less private contract. In Jedda there is house where, after the pilgrimage (an excellent and holy excuse for the transport ©f,any number of mute, fuzzy heads, yath rather less than animal intelligence • sun-steeped lands where the only the .Wrongest) male and female Blavet fo n , 35 Egyptian pouhdy • ~ J

In Yemen and Asir there is no difficulty about purchasing human wares, but the price goes up if some gunboat has intercepted a cargo on its way across the Red Sea. The slavers are being harried out of the comfortable existence they used to lead among the almost impenetrable mountains of Northern Abyssinia, but by bribery and by divers odd routes they still contrive to get a certain amount of merchandise to the waiting dliows, and the lot of their captives or their purchases is harder than it used to be when, once aboard the sambukh, the prospectives slaves shared the existence and the labours of their guards. Now, for fear of British interference, the wretched creatures, are herded under the rudder deck and there, half-suffocated by the heat and stench, knee deep in bilge water, they may have to endure several days' tossing while their prisoncraft beats across in the face of a persistent gale. I once watched the arrival at Jeizan of such a dhow, and was told that two women had died on their journey, one of them in childbirth. Hunting and Breeding Human Chattels. Technically, it is legitimate for Moslems to make slaves only of enemies captured in battle, or of those peoples or tribes who have no written religion, but the regular slave-traders abide by no such limitations. When the Abyssinian supply runs short they raid the length of the Western Arabian coast in wellarmed dhows, whose rifles, however, aro only used. as a last resort. . The slaver generally follows the same method. He picks out a light sambukh tacking into the wind, and it) full sail he sweeps down on the luckless boat with the full force of the gale behind his thirty tons. If the manoeuvre is properly, carried out, the smaller craft capsizes, after which the pirates have nothing to do but pick out the Most promising merchandise and rescue it from the deep. Anything old or sick is left to drown, , No ' dhow crossing from . Port Sudan to Jeizatt or Hodeidah will leave the comparative safety of the African coast until, many miles south of its destination, when it can count on a .strong azzieb (the prevailing southerly wind) to take it across the Red Sea, straight into harbour, without any lingering on that dangerous coast where the peculiarly unpleasant Dhuwi Barrakat butchered the survivors of the Emden. In vain King Hussein and the late Emir Idrisi (the former under pressure from the British Government) declared slavery to be illegal. As long as Western Arabia is determined to spend the surplus of her trade in coffee, hides, and spices on new blood for her harems, the traffic is likely to continue, especially as the merchandise in question appears to have very little more feeling than a herd of cattle. The obstinacy of those whom our civilisation would at all costs save from market and harem is one of the worst obstacles in the way of the zealous watchers who ceaselessly patrol the Red Sea," stopping, searching, and interrogating every suspicious dhow. The captives are generally so much more frightened of the white men than they are of their gaolers that whatever they say they appear to be lying, and I remember one particular fuzzy head who was rescued much against his will and triumphantly restored to' Abyssinia, thoiigh he swore (with truth as it was subsequently discovered) that he'd been born and bred in Arabia. So long as the black accepts slavery as a natural and, in some cases, as an enviable condition, it will be impossible to put an end to its existence. In the Sahara,.near Kufra, there are large slave farms where men and Women are bred for the market in a comparatively scientific manner, which takes into account the various strains and relationships, and in Asir I have known a sheriff deliberately cross one human breed with another in order to raise a sturdy progeny. Slave-breeding will last as long as the harem veils the major part of primitive Eastern life, but largely owing to the vigilance of the French and British Government, its foreign trade is undoubtedly on the wane. — (Anglo-American N.S. Copyright.)