SLAVE MARKETS OF TO-DAY

Evening Star, Issue 22106, 13 August 1935, Page 5

SLAVE MARKETS OF TO-DAY

IS THE TRADE INCREASING ? It was not so long ago that this writer stood in the glaring mud-walled market place in Morocco and with his own eyes saw men, women, and children—both black and white (Moors) —auctioned off like cattle (writes Ignatius Phayre, in ‘Current History’). That fateful scene, like a Greek drama, opened with prayer chanted by seven dilals or salesmen. Mounted on a stage above the throng and swaying joined hands, they called down blessings on the day’s deals —“ in the name of God, the Most Merciful and Compassionate!” Inside the wide market stood or squatted hundreds of gaily-dressed men. As a dilal prances by, clutching with one arm a hefty young negro and with the other a graceful Moorish girl—- “ Great is God . . . omy lords, behold the strength and beauty of the desert! ” —one of the watchers beckons. Our salesman' darts over to him. My lord examines the girl gently. Three hundred dollars is the bid, _ Away speeds the auctioneer, dragging his helpless couple and yelling the price. “Any advance on that for my pearl ? ” At rough tables in the centre sit languid scribes to receive the money and write out deeds of life and death and labour. Slaves aro sold to-day in 15 different countries —several of them members of the League of Nations! In the Empire of Abyssinia, a League member, slavery and serfdom aro deeply rooted. Its ruler, Haile Selassie, is a “ modern ”' and enlightened man, yet his domain has at least 2,000,000 slaves taken by merciless raids on the tribes of the interior. Hi fie and spearmen a thousand strong swoop on a village in the dark, blowing shrill horns, yelling and shooting to induce a panic. Then huts are set ablaze, and in the stampede old folks are slain. The sick and exhausted aro left to die where they fall or to bo devoured by wild beasts. Young men, women, and children aro rounded up to be chained and yoked in caravans for the long trail. As many as 8,000 human beings have been taken at one time for the “domestic” markets.

RAIDS IN BRITISH TERRITORY. Much more serious politically are the organised Ethiopian man hunts in British territory. Nearly 200 have occurred in tho last few years. Cattle are driven off; ivory, as well as human beings,’is stolon. Similar raids have been made in Konya and Somaliland. The Emperor’s edicts tend to make these crimes more furtive in the hot, unhealthy lowlands of Abyssinia itself, where slave recruiting among the negro villages is a regular event. The King of Kings does all ho can to block it. He has sot up an anti-slavery department in Addis Ahaba, and a committee has been formed to combat the traditional slave system. Slave labour, nevertheless, is still eagerly sought, whether in the lorm of absolute property, as in Arabia, or in tho guise of serfdom, peonage, and forced labour, as in South America and the Portuguese colonies. In China, where human life is cheap, the buying and selling of slaves have never ceased. To-day there are millions of them even in the more “advanced/’ provinces; one may guess what conditions exist in the lawless regions beyond the control of Nanking, Yet Africa remains the groat emporium of “ The Trade.” The Paris ‘Matin’ has found that among the lowly tribes of Abyssinia, which provide human cattle for Addis Ababa and other local markets, slaves can bo got by “ negotiation ” as well as by violent means. “ When a village is too poor,” one of the Arab dealers told _ the ‘ Matin ’ reporter, “ or if its chief is unwilling to pay his taxes, we settle the taxes and. are then repaid in slave levies. These we deposit for safety in one of the high rock villages, whose warriors will guard onr stock if we pay them.” HUMAN CATTLE. The white men were taken to see a slave haul. Through narrow alleys the investigators passed blind walls, then into mud courts, where armed guards stood watch over_ mysterious cellars. One of them “ raised the planks ami wo peered down. Hero we saw four sleeping women. Three more lay in another dungeon, four men in a third. Not one of them stirred an eyelid; i they must have been half-dead.”

“ We start to-night,” the Arab told his French visitors. “We only travel by night; it is safer that way.” The Frenchman followed l him to an island off Italy’s Somali coast, where his captives were to be sold. For safety the dealer bought Ethiopian passports for the cattle packed in his fast-sail-ing sambouk. They now figure as Moslem pilgrims to the Holy City!

This is the infamous commerce which European warships try to break up. The British Navy’s watch involves endless strain in the hottest waters on earth. Sloops patrol the Persian Gulf to stop slave and gun running. British vessels, aided by Italian gunboats and french sloops, lie in wait in the Red Sea, which is still the main rout tor black ivory cargoes. Yet they are far from effective. “ We do catch the slave dhows now and then,” a naval officer at Aden remarked 1 to me. “But they are very fast. They, have their own spy system, too, and lots of hiding places in shallow reefs where we can’t follow them. Each skipper is a daring seaman. He. sails in the dark without any lights. He scuds close inshore, to thread his his way through rocky shallows whei;e no other craft could live. For one boat we capture, perhaps a dozen make the Arabian shore and deliver their living goods to the two main markets of Mecca and Taif.” SLAVE TRADE INCREASING. Forty nations _ signed the League’s Slavery Convention, but its machinery was feeble and slack. Sir Austen Chamberlain sought to make slave running an act of piracy, in which case its perpetrators could be hanged or drowned, and their property confiscated. But indifference persisted, and as a result the trade is even increasing as economic conditions in Arabia improve. A former officer of the British preventive service estimated that as many as 5,000 men, women, and children were carried across the Red Sea each year, many of them from Britain’s own territories. Slaves who survive to reach the auctions in the realm of the warrior King Abdul Ibn-Saud are treated kindly, often as members of the family. Theological students in the Holy City marry women who are owned by the Arabs. But all offspring of such unions belong by the Sharia, or religious law? to the woman’s owner. Meanwhile, new supplies are being constantly landed in a vast domain nearly one-third the size of Europe. Lbn-Saud, by the Treaty of Jidda (1927), has undertaken to co-operate with Great Britain to suppress the slave trade, but, like Haile Selassie of Abyssinia, ho is not a free agent in the matter. There is Islam’s warrant to 300,000,000 of the faithful that they may own slaves if they so desire. And so to-day, in a narrow street in Mecca, you will find the shops of traders in human beings.' Outside the tall houses are stone benches, the display counters on which sit men and women and children exposed for sale.