New Book: Unbroken Chains
Posted: 12 Sep 2025, 15:43
(Thank you Martin, This has been the issue and the subject I had been posting on the Social media and here on the Ethiopian Review for years to educate my fellow Horn Africans. The Arab Muslim slavery on the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean is still very rampant from the slavery of young Eritreans, Ethiopians and Somalis across the Arab Passage in the wide Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula.
Sadly, this historical subject is ignored in the social studies curriculum of schools and universities of Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Eritrea and Tanzania but not anymore. Worse, the Muslim Arabs and their current slaves in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia ... would not open and make the historical documents and books available to researchers.
Historically, the Red Sea coast and the Indian Ocean side of Africa in Massawa, Suwakin Sudan, Zula, Tio, Zeila Djibouti, Berbera, Mogadishu, Zanzibar ... had been the largest of the Arab Muslim slave markets.
I look forward to the translation of this very important and historical book into local languages by Ethiopians, Somalis, Sudan, Eritrea and Tanzania or the Arab Abeed slaves will try to hide the book in their closets.)
Unbroken Chains: , by Martin Plaut, is a groundbreaking new history that illuminates the full story of slavery in Africa, from Ancient Egypt to the present.
Slavery has torn apart African societies since at least 2,500 BCE, from Egypt to the Cape; from Mauritania to Somalia. Yet most writing covers just one fraction of this history: the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Historians and commentators long neglected the equally sizeable, far more protracted phenomenon of Indian Ocean slavery, and all but passed over Africa’s internal practices—from Ethiopian kingdoms enslaving conquered peoples, to the Sokoto Caliphate capturing non-Muslims on a scale matching that of the US plantations.
Over the last five thousands years some 50 million Africans have been enslaved: some taken as far as India and China, others held in captivity in Africa itself.
https://africanslavery.org/#:~:text=Unb ... %20Somalia.
---------------------------
Sadly, this historical subject is ignored in the social studies curriculum of schools and universities of Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Eritrea and Tanzania but not anymore. Worse, the Muslim Arabs and their current slaves in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia ... would not open and make the historical documents and books available to researchers.
Historically, the Red Sea coast and the Indian Ocean side of Africa in Massawa, Suwakin Sudan, Zula, Tio, Zeila Djibouti, Berbera, Mogadishu, Zanzibar ... had been the largest of the Arab Muslim slave markets.
I look forward to the translation of this very important and historical book into local languages by Ethiopians, Somalis, Sudan, Eritrea and Tanzania or the Arab Abeed slaves will try to hide the book in their closets.)
Unbroken Chains: , by Martin Plaut, is a groundbreaking new history that illuminates the full story of slavery in Africa, from Ancient Egypt to the present.
Slavery has torn apart African societies since at least 2,500 BCE, from Egypt to the Cape; from Mauritania to Somalia. Yet most writing covers just one fraction of this history: the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Historians and commentators long neglected the equally sizeable, far more protracted phenomenon of Indian Ocean slavery, and all but passed over Africa’s internal practices—from Ethiopian kingdoms enslaving conquered peoples, to the Sokoto Caliphate capturing non-Muslims on a scale matching that of the US plantations.
Over the last five thousands years some 50 million Africans have been enslaved: some taken as far as India and China, others held in captivity in Africa itself.
https://africanslavery.org/#:~:text=Unb ... %20Somalia.
---------------------------