To Africans and Arabs at the end of the 18th century, European travelers were “the devil’s children” and “enemies of the Prophet,” meddlesome interlopers who, with their idle talk of abolishing the slave trade and supplanting Arab caravans with British shipping, challenged the establish order.
Africa’s Established Order
“In Sierra Leone . . . the activities of the expatriate whites – whether traders, officials or army officers – were restricted to villages easily accessible from the ocean, if not to the narrow confines of the trading beaches where they could escape to their ships or forts at night to avoid the pestilential diseases that were thought to come with the setting sun.
This isolation by the sea was also the result of the slave trade, the middlemen of which had seen to it that their European customers were denied access to the hinterlands, the source of their own supply of new slaves. Though officially abolished, the “traffick” continued.
As [British Lt. Alexander] Laing was to learn, the indigenous peoples of Africa were loath to let the white men know too much about the geography and riches of their interior lands for all sorts of commercial and political reasons. Arab traders too, had a vested interest in keeping Europeans out. They helped sow distrust by relating stories of the British colonization of India, tales not lost on local African kings.
On March 18, 1819, [allowed Laing to] head south with Mohammed El Mukni who was soon to leave on a slave-raiding caravan made up of two hundred men and as many camels. The caravan succeeded in enslaving some 1200 tribesmen, many of them women and children, who were shepherded painfully across the hilly wastes. Mounted overseers battered this mass of wretched humanity with whips and sticks; sick slaves were thrown by the side of the road and left to die.
The tracks they took were lined with human skeletons, often near dried wells. The Meghara Arabs roared with laughter at the concern the white explorers showed over these exposed human remains. “These creatures were only blacks,” they said, adding “Nam boo!” (Damn their feathers!).” They played horrific games with the cadavers, using skulls as footballs and making comments on the gender of the scrags.
This was the infamous slaving route over which tens of thousands of black Africans, taken from their homes in the Sudan, were forced to march to slavery in Tripoli. It was only too clear that multitudes had not made it. One English observer recalled how surprised he had been to see a happy slave-gang on first entry into Murzuk. The reason for their joy was now clear – they were alive. That they would soon be off to be fattened for the markets of Tripoli was a minor worry.”
(The Race for Timbuktu; In Search of Africa’s City of Gold. Frank T. Kryza. HarperCollins, 2006, pp. xxi; 54; 78; 99)