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| Title: | The Nilotic slave trade: past and present |
| Author: | Collins, Robert O. |
| Book title: | The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade |
| Year: | 1992 |
| Pages: | 140-161 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Northeast Africa |
| Subjects: | slaves slave trade abolition of slavery |
| Abstract: | From the beginning of historic time there has been a trade in slaves throughout the Nile Valley spreading across the Red Sea and into the Middle East. From the 16th century onward the rulers of the Funj kingdom methodically pillaged Nubia and the variety of ethnic groups along what is now the Sudan-Ethiopian borderlands where they supervised their export of slaves north to Egypt and eastward across the Red Sea. But it was not until the conquest of the Sudan by the forces of Mu?ammad 'Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt (1805-1849), that the slave trade became an organized function of an Oriental colonial government. In 1841 Salim Qapudan, a Turkish naval officer, successfully penetrated the hitherto implacable swamps of the upper Nile, the Sudd. The opening of the Nile south of the Sudd extended the policy of recruiting slaves for military service and for the profit of officials and traders. Pressed by the European powers to abolish the slave trade, Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, employed a host of Europeans to stamp it out in the 1870s, but it was the Mahdist revolt of 1885 which finally destroyed the corporate Nilotic slave trade. However, slavery continued in various forms until the 1930s. Since 1985, slave trade and slavery have erupted again in southern Kordofan. Notes, ref. |
