There is a long history of enslavement and the trading of enslaved individuals on the African continent prior to the upsurge in European and other external involvement after ca. 1500 CE. In some areas, these traditions of enslavement and human trafficking helped enable subsequent exploitation of Africa as a source of unfree human labour. Consequently, understanding the origins of these practices and their transformations over time is as important for understanding later developments as it is for reconstructing the deeper history of the continent. It is important, though, to recognise that enslavement on the continent took many forms, and that while the treatment of enslaved individuals could be as brutal and devastating as anything documented on slave plantations in the Americas, in certain contexts enslaved individuals were well-treated and at times rose to have considerable social prominence within particular households. At times, they even occupied important positions within society more generally—the slave elites of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt in the thirteenth century, being a case in point. Also, violent capture and translocation to distant lands was not the only route to enslavement, as criminals, victims of famines, and other impoverished individuals were at times also enslaved either as a punishment or as a means to escape poverty and starvation.

The range of written sources for understanding the nature of enslavement and slave trading across Medieval Africa are relatively limited, with various itineraries and related accounts compiled by Arab geographers and other scholars providing the bulk of these. These documentary materials can also be supplemented by archaeological data, including evidence (such as genetic and isotopic signatures) recovered from scientific analysis of human remains recovered from excavations, and occasional iconography, maps, and other visual material. Interpretation of these different kinds of sources requires different approaches, and recognition that each has its own limitations as well as potentials, and all are subject to different kinds of biases.

While the presence of enslaved individuals and their trade at any particular locality or during a specific century are rarely discussed in detail in these texts, in combination they testify to the existence and importance of the use of slaves as agricultural labourers, house servants, entertainers, and concubines, and in artisan industries and mineral extraction across much of North Africa and in the Sudanic belt south of the Sahara during the Medieval era. Military slavery, i.e. the use of slaves as part of a standing army, also seems to have been common, and several early states, especially the Middle Nile kingdoms, relied on slave soldiers obtained from farther south through trade and raiding expeditions. Other documentary sources, including various legal documents and texts on Islamic jurisprudence, such as the Risāla of Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī (922-996) and the Mukhtaṣar of Khalīl ibn Isḥāq al-Jundī (d. c. 1365), help supplement these geographies, providing information on the legal status of enslaved persons, processes of manumission, and the rights of freed slaves.

The identification of enslaved individuals from archaeological evidence alone can be challenging. Most obviously, as individuals and a social class with minimal rights and limits to the exercise of their own agency, enslaved persons commonly lack much in the way of personal possessions and access to other material expressions of their own identity, and what material culture traces they do leave are often insubstantial and highly ephemeral. In other words, the material presence of enslaved persons in the archaeological record is typically slight. Secondly, many of the common artefactual and architectural expressions of slave ownership, control and exchange, such as shackles, slave-pens and slave-markets, are not uniquely associated with the institution of slavery, making their definitive interpretation as material evidence for the existence of the institution of slavery problematic.

Given these challenges, research on the archaeology of Medieval slavery in Africa is increasingly concerned with exploring the wider material expressions of societies with a slave-based economy and a societal desire for slaves, including their impacts on those neighbouring areas where enslaved individuals were extracted. This requires archaeological analyses at a landscape scale, and investigation of the multiple material consequences of such economies. As research has shown, these can include settlement relocation, aggregation and/or fortification alongside evidence for the increased militarisation of societies, the appearance of difficult to access “refuge sites”, widespread evidence of destruction or site abandonment, and evidence for population migration. The textual evidence also indicates that Medieval slavery and slave trading often had a gendered dimension, with adult females and young males commonly being preferentially desired as slaves. These imbalances, conceivably, might even be evident in demographic reconstructions of mortuary assemblages and other bioarchaeological indicators.

Archaeological evidence may also contradict some of the textual sources. The site of Zuwīla (sometimes spelled Zawīla), a former trading hub in the Fazzān, SW Libya, is a case in point. Writing in the twelfth century, the Muslim Arab geographer al-Idrīsī (b. 1099/1100, d. 1165/1166), perhaps best known for his maps of the Medieval world, claimed that the town was founded in 918–19 by ‘Abd Allāh b. al-Khaṭṭāb al-Hawwārī. However, the presence of a town here is also mentioned in older Arabic sources.  The earliest of these is in a ninth-century text by ‘Abd al-Ḥakam who refers to Zuwīla in his account of the raids on fortified settlements in the Fazzān under ‘Uqba b. Nāfi‘ in 666–7, and is again mentioned by the geographer al-Ya‘qūbī at the end of the ninth century, indicating that by then it was already an important trading hub from which enslaved individuals were exported, and with an economy partially based on slavery. We also learn from these sources that trades routes from Zuwīla ran south to Tibesti (Chad) and Kawar (northern Niger), and south-westward to Ghat on what is now the Libya-Algeria border.

In contrast to the written sources, archaeological research at and around Zuwīla indicates that there was a sizeable Garamantian settlement here in the early part of the first millennium CE. The Garamantes flourished between the first and sixth centuries CE, occupying the various oasis bands across the Fazzān, where they established permanent settlements and practiced oasis agriculture. The Garamantes had extensive trade connections with North Africa and, based on recent archaeological discoveries from sites such as Kissi (Burkina Faso), it seems increasingly likely that they also traded with communities south of the Sahara.

Contributed by Paul Lane. This contribution CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Source 1: Zuwīla, Libya

Source 2: Al-Bakrī, The Book of Highways and Kingdoms (Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik)

Source 3: Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Travels (Riḥlāt)

Discussion Questions

  1. Zuwīla is known from textual sources to have been an important trading hub from which enslaved individuals were exported, and with an economy partially based on slavery. Has archaeological research added anything new to our understanding of these, and if so, what has been distinctive about this contribution?
  2. Archaeology should be used to supplement rather than simply verify written sources. In what ways is this possible, and what specific gaps in the accounts by al-Bakrī and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa might it be possible to fill through the incorporation of archaeological evidence?
  3.  In what ways might slaves be implicated in the pisé walls illustrated in Source 1, and how might we write their presence into a new narrative of Zuwīla?

Related Primary Sources

Related Secondary Sources

  • Gilliot, Claude. “al-Bakri (geographer).” In Medieval Islamic Civilization. An Encyclopedia, edited by Joseph W. Meri, 95–96. New York: Routledge, 2006.
  • Mackintosh-Smith, Tim. “Ibn Battūtah.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, edited by John L. Esposito. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Online Resource: https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195305135.001.0001/acref-9780195305135-e-1004.
  • Mattingly, David J., Charles M. Daniels, Martin J. Sterry and David N. Edwards. “The walls of medieval Zuwila.” Libyan Studies 46 (2015): 35–56.
  • Mattingly, David and Martin Sterry. “Zuwila and Fazzan in the seventh to tenth centuries: the emergence of a new trading center.” In The Aghlabids and Their Neighbors, edited by Glaire D. Anderson, Corisande Fenwick and Mariam Rosser-Owen with Sihem Lamine, 551–572. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
  • Prussin, Labelle. “Building technologies in the West African Savannah.” In 2000 ans d’histoire africaine. Le sol, la parole et l’écrit. Mélanges en hommage à Raymond Mauny. Tome I, 227–245. Paris: Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 1981.

Themes

Elite Slaves, Images, Labor, Men, Raiding, Trade, Women