Trans Saharan Slave Trade

During the Trans-Saharan slave trade, slaves were transported across the Sahara desert. Most were moved from Sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa to be sold to Mediterranean and Middle eastern civilizations; a small percentage went the other direction. Estimates of the total number of black slaves moved from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Muslim world range from 11-17 million, and the trans-Saharan trade routes conveyed a significant number of this total, with one estimate tallying around 7.2 million slaves crossing the Sahara from the mid-7th century until the 20th century.

Early trans-Saharan slave trade

Records of slave trading and transportation in the Sahara date back as far as the 3rd millennium BC during the reign of the Egyptian king Sneferu who crossed the fourth cataract of the Nile into what is today modern Sudan to capture slaves and send them north. These raids for prisoners of war, who subsequently became slaves, were a regular occurrence in the ancient Nile Valley and Africa. During times of conquest and after winning battles, the ancient Nubians were taken as slaves by the ancient Egyptians .

The Garamantes relied heavily on slave labor from sub-Saharan Africa. They used slaves in their own communities to construct and maintain underground irrigation systems known to Berbers as ''foggara''. Ancient Greek historian Herodotus recorded in the 5th century BC that the Garamantes enslaved cave-dwelling Ethiopians, known as Troglodytae, chasing them with chariots.

In the early Roman Empire, the city of Lepcis established a slave market to buy and sell slaves from the Bantu African interior. In the 5th century AD, Roman Carthage was trading in black slaves brought across the Sahara. The empire imposed customs tax on the trade of slaves. Black slaves seem to have been valued as household slaves for their exotic appearance. Some historians argue that the scale of slave trade in this period may have been higher than medieval times due to the high demand for slaves in the Roman Empire. However the slave trade through the Sahara in antiquity may have been small and rare as Saharan trade didn't reach large dimensions until the Arabs and Berbers introduced large numbers of camels into the desert.

Trans-Saharan slave trade in the Middle Ages

Paul Lovejoy estimates that around 6 million black slaves were transported across the Sahara between the years 650 AD and 1500 AD. The trans-Saharan slave trade, established in Antiquity, continued during the Middle Ages. Following the early 8th-century conquest of North Africa, Arabs, Berbers, and other ethnic groups ventured into Sub-Saharan Africa first along the Nile Valley towards Nubia, and also across the Sahara towards West Africa. They were interested in the trans-Saharan trade, especially in slaves, as there was a constant demand for slaves in the eastern Arab nations and Constantinople. The Muslim slave traders distinguished themselves from the peoples on the other side of the Sahara, referring to these African populations as ''Zanj'' or ''Sudan'' meaning "black". Arabs would routinely acquire slaves through violent raiding, followed by capturing them and sending them on dangerous forced marches across the Sahara to slave markets where they would be treated as chattel i.e. as personal property that can be bought and sold. In North Africa, the main slave markets were in Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli and Cairo. Sales were held in public places such as souks.

Aside from raiding, slaves could also be obtained by purchasing them from local black rulers. The 9th century Arab historian Ya'qubi states:
Indeed it was rare that African rulers would resist the slave trade and usually they would act as middlemen, rounding up members of nearby villages to be sold to visiting merchants. The 12th century Arab geographer al-Idrisi noted that black Africans would also participate in slave raiding stating that:

Al-Idrisi would also describe the different methods Muslim merchants would use to enslave blacks, recording that some would "steal the children of the Zanj using dates...lure them with dates and lead them from place to place, until they seize them, take them out of the country and transport them to their own countries". In 1353 the Berber explorer Ibn Battuta would record accompanying a trade caravan to Morocco which carried 600 black female slaves who were to be used as domestic servants and concubines. When Battuta visited the ancient African kingdom of Mali he recounted that the local inhabitants vied with each other in the number of slaves and servants they had, and was himself given a slave boy as a "hospitality gift."

The routes taken by slave caravans transporting slaves depended on their destination. Slaves headed to Egypt would be carried by boat down the Nile and slaves headed to Arabia would be sent to ports on the Red Sea such as Suakin and Assab. Slaves headed to North Africa would have to take the Saharan trade routes which had been in use since around 1000 BC. These include routes such as the ones from Tripoli-Ghadames-Ghat-Hoggar-Gao connecting modern day Libya to Nigeria, the Tripoli-Fezzan-Bornu route, connecting Libya to areas of what are today Chad, Niger, and the east-west route connecting Egypt to Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. Kanem-Bornu-Zawila was another route to North Africa as the Kanem–Bornu Empire in the eastern part of Niger

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