Though Europeans and their descendants in America are most identified with the slave trade, in fact slavery existed in Africa for centuries before the first Europeans arrived in the 1400s. Not only did Africans buy and sell members of other tribes, but Arab and Persian merchants were enthusiastic slave-traders.
The first Mideastern reference to sub-Saharan Africans, whom the Muslims called Zanj (ZAHNJ), occurred in about 680. These writings prove that racism is nothing new: frequently Islamic writers described the Zanj as their social inferiors, a lazy and dishonest people, and they often commented negatively on the black skin of the Zanj. Yet the Muslims also believed that the Zanj possessed magical powers.
Because the Africans on the continent's east coast admired the Arabs, this made them easy targets for capture. Many of the Zanj were brought to serve as slaves in the Abbasid caliphate, and in 868 a revolt broke out among them. For nearly fifteen years, the rebels controlled much of southern Iraq, but by 883 the Muslim government had suppressed the revolt.
An extension of an even older realm controlled from Zimbabwe (zim-BAHB-way).
The latter reached its peak between 1250 and 1450, when it thrived on a flourishing gold trade. Its ruins
Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, became a battleground in the late twentieth century as civil war gripped the nation. Reproduced by permission of AP/Wide World Photos.
Lie in the southeastern corner of the modern nation called Zimbabwe, though in fact there are two sets of
Ruins: Great Zimbabwe, older and larger, and Little Zimbabwe some eight miles distant. The most impressive set of stone buildings in premodern southern Africa, Great Zimbabwe extended over more than sixty acres, and included a palace capable of housing a thousand servants. Its circular temple complex, modeled on a tribal chief's enclosure, had walls ten feet thick and twenty feet high, comprising some 15,000 tons of cut stone—all laid without use of mortar.
Though the people of Zimbabwe left behind no written records and the city had long been abandoned when the Portuguese arrived, the royal court of Mutapa in the east provided visitors with an idea of Zimbabwe's glory. The king was attended by a royal pharmacist, a head musician, young pages who had been sent as hostages from subject peoples, and many other aides—including a council of ministers composed primarily of women. Apparently at some earlier stage in Mutapa, women had been in control. There was even a female military contingent, which played a decisive role in the choosing of kings.
World History
