Antiquity Slavery in
the region of the Sudan has a long history, beginning in the ancient Nubian and
ancient Egyptian times and continuing up to the present. Prisoners of war were a regular occurrence in the ancient Nile Valley and other parts of Africa. During times of conquest and after winning battles, Egyptians were taken as slaves by the ancient Nubians. In turn, The ancient Nubians took slaves after winning battles with the Libyans, Canaanites, and Egyptians.
Middle ages Soon after the
Arab conquest of Egypt, the Arabs attempted to conquer the kingdoms of Christian
Nubia on multiple occasions, but utilizing strategic warfare, the significantly smaller Christian Nubia defeated the larger Arab forces. Eventually, given their unsuccessful efforts, the Arabs signed the 600-year
Baqt treaty with the Christian Nubian kingdom of
Makuria. As a part of the treaty, the Nubians, already involved in the burgeoning East African slave trade, agreed to trade 360 slaves annually to their northern neighbors in exchange for spices and grains.
16th- to 19th-centuries village in around 1870 , Sudan, c. 1876 After the Nubian kingdoms' fall in 1504, the Muslims conquered most of Nubia, while the
Funj conquered much of modern-day Sudan from Darfur to Khartoum; the Funj began to use slaves in the army in the reign of
Badi III (). Later, Egyptian slavers began raiding the area of southern Sudan. In particular, the ruler
Muhammad Ali of Egypt attempted to build up an army of southern Sudanese slaves with the aid of the Nubian slavers. Attempts to ban slavery were later attempted by British colonial authorities in 1899, after their victory in the
Mahdi War. According to British explorer and
abolitionist Samuel Baker, who visited Khartoum in 1862, six decades after the British authorities had declared the slave trade illegal, slavery was the industry "that kept Khartoum going as a bustling town". Baker described the practice of slave raiding of villages to the south by Sudanese slavers from Khartoum: An armed group would sail up the Nile, find a convenient African village, surround it during night and attack just before dawn, burning huts and shooting. Women and young adults would be captured and bound with "forked poles on their shoulders", hand tied to the pole in front, children bound to their mothers. To render "the village so poor that surviving inhabitants would be forced to collaborate with slavers on their next excursion against neighboring villages," the village would be looted of cattle, grain, ivory, with everything else destroyed.
20th-century Before the slavery investigation of the League of Nations in 1923, the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1899–1956) had disbanded the Slavery Repression Department with the claim that slavery had become a marginal phenomenon. The report on Sudan to the
Temporary Slavery Commission (1923–1925) described the enslavement of Nilotic Non-Muslims of the South West by the Muslim Arabs in the North, where most agriculture was still managed by slave labor in 1923. The British colonial authorities actively fought the slave trade in Sudan but avoided addressing slavery itself for fear of causing unrest. The British allowed all slavery issued to be handled by the sharia courts which were controlled by the slave owning elite, which used Islamic law to control women, children and slaves. Slave raids were conducted from Ethiopia and Equatorial Africa and kidnapped people were exported to slavery in Arabia. In the 1920s, the British agricultural officer P. W. Diggle conducted a personal campaign freeing slaves in Sudan. He was outraged in seeing slaves beaten, children taken from their parents and slave girls used for prostitution. Diggle was an important informer to the
Temporary Slavery Commission or TSC about slavery in Sudan, which put pressure on the British in relation to the TSC. The British stated to
Frederick Lugard, 1st Baron Lugard of the TSC, that it was not possible to abolish slavery in Sudan because of the massive risk for unrest in "so lightly held and explosive a country as the Sudan" where slavery was allowed per Islamic law. The British also presented a circular issued 6 May 1925 stating that all slaves born after 1898 were free by law and that slaves had the right to leave their owners and would not be returned if they did so, which gave the TSC the impression that action was taken by the British against slavery in Sudan. It was soon found that the 6 May 1925 circular was in fact issued only to British officials and unknown to the Sudanese. When this fact was raised in the House of Lords, however, the colonial administration was ordered to publish and enforce the provisions against slavery in Sudan. Furthermore, action was taken against the
Red Sea slave trade via Sudan by taking better control of the Hajj pilgrimage and establishing a clearinghouse in Port Sudan for slaves repatriated by the British from slavery in the Kingdom of Hejaz, resulting in over 800 slaves resettled between 1925 and 1935. During the Temporary Slavery Commission (TSC), a flourishing slave trade was discovered between Sudan and Ethiopia: slave raids were conducted from Ethiopia to the Funj and White Nile provinces in South Sudan, capturing Berta, Gumuz and Burun non-Muslims, who were bought from Ethiopian slave traders by Arab Sudanese Muslims in Sudan or across the border in the independent Empire of Ethiopia. The most prominent slave trader was
Khojali al-Hassan, "Watawit" shaykh of
Bela Shangul in Wallagi, and his principal wife Sitt Amna, who had been acknowledged by the British as the head of an administrative unit in Sudan in 1905. Khojali al-Hassan collected slaves – normally adolescent girls and boys or children – by kidnapping, debt servitude or as tribute from his feudal subjects, and would send them across the border to his wife, who sold them to buyers in Sudan. British Consul Hodson in Ethiopia reported that the 1925 edict had no practical effect on slavery and slave trade conducted across the Sudanese-Ethiopian border to Tishana: the Ethiopians demanded taxes and took children of people who could not pay and enslaved them; slave raids were still conducted against villages at nighttime by bandits burning huts, killing old and enslaving young. On one occasion in March 1925, when bandits were arrested, the government soldiers confiscated the 300 captured slaves and instead divided them as slaves to their soldiers; women and children were sold for a price of $15MT in Ethiopia, and the formal anti-slavery edict of 1925 was a mere formality. In 1927, the slave trader Khojali al-Hassan, "Watawit" shaykh of Bela Shangul in Wallagi, was reported to have trafficked 13,000 slaves from Ethiopia to the Sudan via his wife Sitt Amna. In 1929, the slave raids were conducted by Ethiopia in to British Kenya as well as the slave trade were ongoing in Sudan, contributed to British support for the foundation of the
Committee of Experts on Slavery of the League of Nations. == Modern-day slavery ==