Sudan
A country to be discussed is Sudan. It is geographically the largest country in Afrika, nearly, 100,000 square miles, with a sizeable population almost equal to the entire number of Afrikan Americans. The Afrikans such as the Dinka, Nuer, Nuba, and other ethnic groups make up the majority. The country is split in half: the predominantly Arab north, and the free Afrikans in the south. The capital is Khartoum, which is the seat of the Islamic-Arab government, and one of many places of slave trading in the country. The Khartoum government is supported by various Arab governments, among those are Iran, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. In Khartoum, a human being may be sold for a few dollars. The Islamic government has been very direct in its policy of jihad (or holy war) against non-believers. Still today, the religion has been a justification, a means for the purpose of Arab supremacy and control over the lands of the south and into the rest of Afrika. Sheik Hassan El Turabi, once co-dictator of Sudan, was called “the real power and architect of Islamic Fundamentalism or Revivalism in North Sudan.” Journalist Samuel Cotton quotes him as saying:
Black Africa is Virgin land… fertile, ripe for the Islamic seed. In Africa, Islam’s roots will go deep and become sturdy quickly. There is much to tap and little to compete with. What is there in Africa but tribalism? We want to plant civilization in southern Sudan and beyond. They need one (Daily Challenge, “Blood, Shackles and the Koran,” 1995).
With the Arab conquest of Egypt, the campaign spread into Sudan, the country directly below and bordering Egypt. This began the systematic movement of these people from their homeland. Those not exiled were enslaved, the men were castrated or killed. The women were captured and divided among the Arab men. We must understand the role race plays here. Many of these so-called Arabs are a product of this forced mixed breeding, but they are in denial about their Afrikan ancestry and hostile towards the Afrikan people. Islam, like Christianity and Judaism (in Israel and Palestine), is misused as a tool of war, enslavement, and oppression.
Samuel Cotton’s book, Silent Terror, is a must read on the subject of Afrikan enslavement in the Arab world. In 1995, the journalist Samuel Cotton wrote a series of articles that ran in the Daily Challenge entitled “Blood, Shackles and the Koran: Slavery in Sudan Today.” A 1995 February issue of The City Sun in New York featured Cotton’s research on the front page with the title “Arab Masters, Black Slaves.” The City Sun ran several articles by Cotton on Afrikan enslavement in Mauritania. Cotton eyewitnessed this slavery in humans in the Sudan and Mauritania. Young girls were taken as sex slaves for “indolent rulers and rich men in North Africa, the Near East and Sudan.” The young boys were prized as castrated slaves (eunuchs) who would protect the houses where the female sex slaves were kept known as harems. Arabs and Europeans had historically enslaved their women. What would they care about Afrikan women?
Cotton describes the Sahara crossing like the Middle Passage. Millions died crossing the sands on the way to be sold as slaves in the Muslim world. It was a long journey of exhaustion, thirst, hunger, beatings, and torture. Due to high mortality rates, castrations, the large number of women enslaved in harems in North Afrika and the Middle East, there are fewer Afrikan descendants than in the western hemisphere where men were mostly enslaved.
“Thus, despite the fact that even more vast millions of slaves were taken from Africa to the Islamic Countries… over the centuries…” says Cotton, “there is no such Black population surviving in these Islamic nations today,” as in the Americas where slave breeding was a systematic program. A grim testament to the Arab slave trade in Afrikans was noted by a 1950s traveler who said if a stranger did not know his route out of the desert, all he had to do was follow the endless stream of the remains of human skeletons of those who died en route to become slaves.
Commenting on the tradition of draining Afrika of people to enslave, Samuel Cotton mentions:
Large harems were maintained at the court in Persia during the reign of the Safavids in the 17th century and Khadjars in the 19th century. Europeans who traveled to Persia in the 17th century noted there were as many as 3,000 eunuchs in the service of the court, an indication of how great were the harems. The Caliph al-Amin …it is said, collected them in large numbers…
An Arabic description of the court of the caliph in Baghdad at the beginning of the 10th century speaks of 7,000 [Afrikan eunuchs]… This required an unending stream of desexed boys who walked or transported by boat or caravan from Africa.
With the increase in the number of harems the need for eunuchs grew. In Egypt, where eunuchs were kept by the ruling family of Mohammed Ali [of whom it is said he had 500 concubines] and rich Turks, they [the eunuchs] brought a great price in slave markets of Cairo and Alexandria. Eunuchs could be sold anywhere from twice to ten times the price of ordinary Black boys.
Another reason “an unending stream” of kidnapped and castrated boys were required to feed the demand was because the survival rate after castration was about 10%. This rate does not count suicide, murder, and those who went insane, as many did.
A point should be made about slavery today in Sudan. As with slavery anywhere, there is strong resistance to it. In particular, the Sudanese People Liberation Movement Army (SPLM/A), mostly of the Dinka people, but also other Afrikans in Sudan have led the resistance. The SPLM/A have fought Sudan’s National Islamic Front (NIF) who gets support from various Arab-Islamic governments. It is the NIF who wages war and makes raids on the lands of the people. The war in Sudan has cost the lives of several million Afrikans in recent decades, and if the SPLM/A was not in existence many more Afrikans of Southern Sudan would likely have been killed off or enslaved. The war is over resources, power, and religion. The Arab government wants shari’a to be instituted and the thorough Arabization or enslavement of the country, and the exploitation of all valuable resources, primarily oil in Southern Sudan. This is the motive behind the murder of John Garang de Mabior. This is the reason behind the assault on Darfur’s Afrikan population. The Afrikans of Sudan are resilient and steadfast in the fight to protect and preserve what is left of their land and culture. They are among the most courageous people in the world today. Southern Sudan, where they live, is predominately Afrikan Spiritual. There is a small percentage of Christians, but even many of them are dual religious. They are like many Afrikans in Afrika who practice and live Afrikan Spirituality and a blend of another religion. At the core they are Afrikan Spiritual, but such syncretism in Afrika or the Americas threatens the Afrikan worldview. The battle has many fronts.
. Who knows what ethiopian could be today if we still had contact with western civilisation and continued our cultural and technological exchange.
We could have been a black superpower
islam, as usual
at your attempts to defend it