Slavery in Libya

Slavery in Libya has a long history and a lasting impact on the Libyan culture. It is closely connected with the wider context of slavery in North Africa and trans-Saharan slave trade.

Since ancient history, the territory of modern Libya was a transit area for the slave trade from Sub-Saharan Africa across the Sahara desert to the Mediterranean Sea. The Trans-Saharan slave trade was known from antiquity and continued until the 20th-century. Slavery in Ottoman Libya was nominally prohibited in the 19th-century, but the abolition laws were not enforced.

During the Italian colonial period (1912–1951) the slavery and slave trade was finally suppressed in practice. Abolition was, however, a gradual and slow process, and the institution of slavery continued long into the colonial period, particularly in the interior desert areas, where the Italian control was weak. The Trans-Saharan slave trade in the interior of Libya was still in operation as late as the 1930s.

In the 21st-century, the Libyan slave trade of Africans across the Sahara continues, with open-air slave markets reported in a number of cities in Libya, including the capital city, Tripoli.

History

Roman Libya

As a Roman province, Tripolitania was a major exporter of agricultural products, as well as a centre for the gold and slaves conveyed to the coast by the Garamentes, while Cyrenaica remained an important source of wines, drugs, and horses.Mommsen, Theodore. ''The Provinces of the Roman Empire'' Chapter: Africa

Enslavement of the Berbers and of the Jewish people

When Amr ibn al-As conquered Tripoli in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their ''jizya''. Uqba ibn Nafi would often enslave for himself (and to sell to others) countless Berber girls, "the likes of which no one in the world had ever seen."

Ibn Abd al-Hakam recounts that the Arab General Hassan ibn al-Nu'man would often abduct "young, female Berber slaves of unparalleled beauty, some of which were worth a thousand dinars." Al-Hakam confirms that up to one hundred thousand slaves were captured by Musa and his son and nephew during the conquest of North Africa. In Tangier, Musa enslaved all the Berber inhabitants. Musa sacked a fortress near Kairouan and took with him all the children as slaves. The number of Berbers enslaved "amounted to a number never before heard of in any of the countries subject to the rule of Islam" up to that time. As a result, "most of the African cities were depopulated, ndthe fields remained without cultivation." Even so, Musa "never ceased pushing his conquests until he arrived before Tangiers, the citadel of their erbers’country and the mother of their cities, which he also besieged and took, obliging its inhabitants to embrace Islam."

The historian Pascual de Gayangos observed: “Owing to the system of warfare adopted by the Arabs, it is not improbable that the number of captives here specified fell into Musa’s hands. It appears both from Christian and Arabian authorities that populous towns were not infrequently razed to the ground and their inhabitants, amounting to several thousands, led into captivity.”

Successive Muslim rulers of North Africa continued to enslave the Berbers en masse. The historian Hugh N. Kennedy observed that
"the Islamic jihad looks uncomfortably like a giant slave trade." Arab chronicles record vast numbers of Berber slaves taken, especially in the accounts of Musa ibn Nusayr, who became the governor of Africa in 698, and who "was cruel and ruthless against any tribe that opposed the tenets of the Muslim faith, but generous and lenient to those who converted." Muslim historian Ibn Qutaybah recounts Musa ibn Nusayr waging "battles of extermination" against the Berbers and how he "killed myriads of them, and made a surprising number of prisoners."

According to the historian As-sadfi, the number of slaves taken by Musa ibn Nusayr was greater than in any of the previous Islamic conquests.

Enslavement of Europeans

There is historical evidence of North African Muslim slave raids all along the Mediterranean coasts across Christian Europe. The majority of slaves traded across the Mediterranean region were predominantly of European origin from the 7th to 15th centuries. In the 15th century, Ethiopians sold slaves from western borderland areas (usually just outside the realm of the Emperor of Ethiopia) or Ennarea.
European slaves where also traded South: in the 17th-century, European slaves are noted to have been imported to the Sub-Saharan African Bornu Empire