ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Slavery Sufferings of Slaves We have already seen what Islam did achieve in alleviating the plight of the slaves and how, for the first and last time in the history, slaves were regarded as human beings having rights upon their masters. Now let us see how the Christians treated their slaves. Before giving the description, I must make one point clear.

These accounts are of the plight of the slaves during the last five centuries when, as mentioned earlier, the Christians started slave-trade on a previously unimaginable scale. As I have shown in the last chapter, the Arabs also gave them a willing helping hand in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. As most of the European accounts of the slave-trade in Africa date from this period, so there are many vivid descriptions of what men saw there.

Thus, the Christians must bear the responsibility of these horrors in a far greater degree. They were inflicting these injuries for four centuries compared with one century in which the Arabs joined hands with them on their instigation though quite willingly. The victims were the poor and defenceless Africans, the Negroes of the west and east coast of Africa and also of the interior of that continent. They were treated as mere chattels and tools or even worse.

They had to work or rather they were forced to work in inhuman conditions on the newly acquired plantations of their masters, the Christian Western powers, who had taken possessions of the islands across the Atlantic and in the New World and also at home in Portugal and Spain and the countries of central Europe of the Holy Roman Empire under the spiritual domain of the Roman Catholic Popes. The horrors of the slave trade were most pronounced during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Wherever a raid on a village took place, death and destruction followed. Many more people died defending their homes and families, or as a result of the starvation and disease which usually followed such violence, than were ever actually enslaved, let alone sold at the coast. One shudders to think of the most diabolical ways in which the poor natives of Africa were captured, separated from their kith and kin, carried away and treated as worse than animals.

We shall now give a short account from the books of Western authors themselves on how the slaves were treated and what cruel methods were employed by the slave hunters.