sidenote: sorry about the font discrepancies. I don’t know what the fuck is up, i’ll try and fix it lates.
What brought me to this article was actually my daily research topic that happened to be on Eunuchs
Chinese eunuchs were not only castrated, they were fully emasculated
A eunuch (IPA: /ˈjuː.nək/) is a castrated man, in particular one castrated early enough to have major hormonal consequences; the term usually refers to those castrated in order to perform a specific social function, as was common in many societies of the past. …they have performed a wide variety of functions in many different cultures such as courtiers or equivalent domestics, treble singers, religious specialists, government officials, military commanders, and guardians of women or harem servants.
Eunuch guard during the Ottoman Empire
OK. So now we know what Eunuchs are. In many area of Africa, Asia and Europe eunuchs were quite valued, and because they were quite valued, they had very prominent positions in whatever family they were sold in to, many were even part of the government in the Ottoman Empire.
So as i was reading all this great information about Eunuchs and concubines, i came across this interview held Eve Troutt Powell and her interviewer Banning Eyre.
Eve Troutt Powell, is a professor of History and Middle East and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
This link contains the entire interview (transcribed) on the topic on African Slaves in Islamic Lands during Afropop worldwide’s program.
I found this article extremely interesting from a historical and personal perspective and thought it would pass it on to anyone intrigued. It’s well worth the read during Black History Month, and any month for that matter. Below are some the segments that definitely caught my attention and taught me something new. so enjoi:
B.E: There is this ever growing narrative about the Western, Atlantic slave trade…on top of countless other books, films, television documentaries. This is a huge subject that is being discussed very openly. I don’t think that’s so much the case in Islamic contexts [the telling of the Islamic Slave Trade] today. There is not the same level of reflection and discourse. Why is that?
“E.T.P.: The reason my slavery is not discussed with the same attention, volume, the same passion in the Islamic Middle East as it is in, say, the United States, there are several reasons for this. One, as in the case of Sudan, it is still going on, and this makes it very difficult for the Sudanese government, so it becomes a huge political controversy. It is very dangerous for people to talk about. If they talk about it, they’re often imprisoned. You cannot get into do research about this anymore. That’s one thing. It is politically dangerous in places where it still exists. But there’s another reason to, which is that, especially after September 11, the Western world, if I can bifurcate the globe in the sense, the Western world is really angry with the Islamic world, and very suspicious of it. This has created a great deal of anti-Islamic, I would call it racism. And so, there are many people who fear that if you explore the subject, you are catering to the worst kind of Muslim bashing. This age-old idea that Muslims are all despots, and they can’t really govern, and they don’t know the difference between politics and slavery.
However, I do think it is important to hear the slaves themselves, to see what they say. If we think about slaves as some of the greatest explorers in the world. The fact that they crossed borders no one else crossed, that they crossed borders in ways no one else crossed. They had to learn to translate cultures in ways that say David Livingston would have prayed he had the same kind of skills. If we look at slaves in and of themselves, as some of the most powerful interpreters of culture, I think we can tell a different kind of story, one which really honestly tells the history is slavery, but also empowers slaves themselves, in the simplest humanitarian ways.”
“B.E: Let’s talk about slave religion, and the extent to which slaves really did convert to Islam. There’s a suggestion that the conversion was sometimes the performance, exaggerated by particularly ardent praying and so on, but that this was sometimes a cover for other, older religious practices that slaves practiced in secret. What can we say about that?
E.T.P.: I will have to base my answer on how deeply slaves converted to Islam in two ways. One is who will they be telling their spiritual beliefs to? And that is important, because if they had been freed and redeemed by, say, Italian Catholic missionaries, often their story would be that, no, they didn’t really convert. I think, though, there are many examples, and if you look at communities of former slaves in Khartoum, which Ahmad Alawad Sikainga talks about in his book, Slaves into Workers, you can see that there were actually former slaves who really were Muslims, who really did adopt the faith of their master and become Muslim. But the whole idea of conversion is very interesting, particularly in the 19th century, because of what starts happening in the 1870s and 1880s is that you have missionaries coming into Sudan, for instance, who are hoping to free slaves. These are Christian missionaries, who are hoping to free slaves, and there are many, many examples of them actually buying slaves, retaining them, converting them to Christianity, and sending them to Italy to learn Italian, and also Cairo to learn Arabic, so they would be the best missionaries around. This was very much a part of the philosophy created by Daniele Comboni, who was one of the most famous Catholic missionaries in Sudan, and who died in 1881 in Kordofan. So, having slaves testify to their own religious experience under the rubric of the Camboni brothers meant in many ways that slaves were talking about converting to Christianity as a way out of the confines of Islamic slavery, the confines of Islam as the Camboni brothers saw it. And on their road towards freedom, their adopting of Christ as their Lord is a very big part of their becoming real people, free people who owned themselves. But those slaves who could not speak like that, those slaves who remained in Muslim households really, I think there are many examples of the fact that you could not really join society unless you were Muslim. So you do have many, many, many stories and cases of say Dinka people who convert to Islam and use their sense of Islamic faith to make the case that they should be more of a part of Sudanese society.”
Another great article is on the current slave trade in Mauritania:
As a quick breakdown: Mauritania is broadly decomposed into two core communities: the Moors, who constitute the majority, and the black, ethnic tribes like the Soninke and the Poular. It is within the Moors community that the problem lies. The Moors are made up of two groups: the white Moors — light-skinned, mainly Arab and Berber in origin — and the black Moors or the Haratine — the slave descendants. The white Moors are the politically dominant class whereas the Haratine, who are African in origin, grew side-by-side with them, yet as their slaves. The emergence of a whole class that is born out of slavery (i.e. the Haratine) is what builds the complexity of the phenomenon. It does not only show in the blunt form of slavery, where a slave is the “property” of his or her master, but also in slavery-like practices. Further, the dividing line between the two is blurry, which only adds to the obscurity of the problem.
