TRUE THROUGHOUT THE AGES...nothing new!

The Arab slave trade was the practice of slavery in the Arab world, mainly in Western Asia, North Africa,Southeast Africa, the Horn of Africa and certain parts of Europe (such as Iberia and Sicily) during the era of the Arab conquests. The trade was focused on the slave markets of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Slaves were of varied race, ethnicity, and religion.  Toward the 18th and 19th centuries, the flow of Zanj (Bantu) slaves from Southeast Africa increased with the rise of the Oman sultanate, which was based in Zanzibar in Tanzania. They came into direct trade conflict and competition with Portuguese and other Europeans along the Swahili coast.^[4]The North African Barbary states carried on piracy against European shipping and enslaved thousands of European Christians. They earned revenues from the ransoms charged; in many cases in Britain, village churches and communities would raise money for such ransoms. The British government did not ransom its citizens.

The Arab slave trade originated before Islam and lasted more than a millennium. Arab traders brought Africans across the Indian Ocean from the Swahili Coast of present-day Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania, and elsewhere in Southeast Africa and from Eritrea and Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa to present day Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Somalia, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East and South Asia (mainly Pakistan and India). Arabs supplied African slaves to the Arab world, which at its peak stretched over three continents from the Atlantic to the Far East.

The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade took place across the Atlantic Ocean from the 16th through to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those enslaved that were transported to the New World, many on the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, were West Africans from the central and western parts of the continent sold by West Africans to Western European slave traders, or by direct European capture to the Americas. The numbers were so great that Africans who came by way of the slave trade became the most numerous Old-World immigrants in both North and South America before the late 18th century.^[1]Far more slaves were taken to South America than to the north. The South Atlantic economic system centered on producing commodity crops, and making goods and clothing to sell in Europe, and increasing the numbers of African slaves brought to the New World. This was crucial to those Western European countries which, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were vying with each other to create overseas empires.

The Atlantic slave traders, ordered by trade volume, were: the Portuguese, the British, the French

, the Spanish, the Dutch Empire, and the United States. They had established outposts on the African coast where they purchased slaves from local African leaders. Current estimates are that about 12 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic,^[4] although the number purchased by the traders is considerably higher.  The slave trade is sometimes called the Maafa by African and African-American scholars, meaning "great disaster" in Swahili. Some scholars, such as Marimba Ani and Maulana Karenga, use the terms "African Holocaust" or "Holocaust of Enslavement".

There were eight principal areas used by Europeans to buy and ship slaves to the Western Hemisphere. The number of enslaved people sold to the New World varied throughout the slave trade. As for the distribution of slaves from regions of activity, certain areas produced far more enslaved people than others. Between 1650 and 1900, 10.24 million enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas from the following regions in the following proportions:

• Senegambia (Senegal and the Gambia): 4.8%
• Upper Guinea (Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone): 4.1%
• Windward Coast (Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire): 1.8%
• Gold Coast (Ghana and east of Côte d'Ivoire): 10.4%
• Bight of Benin (Togo, Benin and Nigeria west of the Niger Delta): 20.2%
• Bight of Biafra (Nigeria east of the Niger Delta, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon): 14.6%
• West Central Africa (Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola): 39.4%
• Southeastern Africa (Mozambique and Madagascar): 4.7%

The different ethnic groups brought to the Americas closely corresponds to the regions of heaviest activity in the slave trade. Over 45 distinct ethnic groups were taken to the Americas during the trade. Of the 45, the ten most prominent, according to slave documentation of the era are listed below.

1. The BaKongo of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola
2. The Mandé of Upper Guinea
3. The Gbe speakers of Togo, Ghana and Benin (Adja, Mina, Ewe, Fon)
4. The Akan of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire
5. The Wolof of Senegal and the Gambia
6. The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria
7. The Mbundu of Angola (includes both Ambundu and Ovimbundu)
8. The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria
9. The Chamba of Cameroon
10. The Makua of Mozambique

The transatlantic slave trade resulted in a vast and as yet still unknown loss of life for African captives both in and outside America. Approximately 1.2 – 2.4 million Africans died during their transport to the New World. More died soon upon their arrival. The number of lives lost in the procurement of slaves remains a mystery but may equal or exceed the number who survived to be enslaved.

The savage nature of the trade led to the destruction of individuals and cultures. The following figures do not include deaths of enslaved Africans as a result of their labour, slave revolts, or diseases suffered while living among New World populations.

A database compiled in the late 1990s put the figure for the transatlantic slave trade at more than 11 million people. For a long time, an accepted figure was 15 million, although this has in recent years been revised down. Estimates by Patrick Manning are that about 12 million slaves entered the Atlantic trade between the 16th and 19th century, but about 1.5 million died on board ship. About 10.5 million slaves arrived in the Americas. Besides the slaves who died on the Middle Passage, more Africans likely died during the slave raids in Africa and forced marches to ports. Manning estimates that 4 million died inside Africa after capture, and many more died young. Manning's estimate covers the 12 million who were originally destined for the Atlantic, as well as the 6 million destined for Asian slave markets and the 8 million destined for African markets.

(WIKIPEDIA USED AS SOURCE FOR THIS ARTICLE)

THANK G-D THAT THIS ISSUE IS ALMOST SOLVED IN THE WORLD.  A HUMAN LIFE IS

PRECIOUS, NO MATTER COLOR OR CREED OR COUNTRY OF ORIGIN.