Slavery is the ownership of one person by another. It is not a matter of race. Since well before 1500 BC, slavery has infected every society, nationality, race and religion. It has impacted white and black people and people of all colors in between. Most of it has been interracial – a society enslaving its own.  

  Slavery is a business, still is most prevalent in Africa. Middle East Muslims invaded Africa for slaves and according to Muslim records, millions of Africans were enslaved in the name of jihad (fighting in the cause of Allah). 

    Victorious tribes captured Africans from competing tribes and used them to increase the size of their tribes, generating more wealth. Winning tribes exported captured slaves for a handsome profit overseas. As the trade grew, tribes focused more on capturing slaves. 

    Then there were the pirates along the Barbary Coast in north Africa. They raided ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and invaded towns on the shores kidnapping white men, women and children. Consequently, countries like France, England, and Spain lost thousands of ships while long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were left empty of people. Across the Mediterranean, thousands of white Christian slaves were taken and sold as slaves.

    From 1530 until the Revolutionary War Muslim pirates of the Barbary Coast sold over one million white European Christians to toil in quarries and construction. About 8,500 new slaves were needed annually to replenish numbers. In fact, from 1500 to 1650, when trans-Atlantic slaving was still young, more white Christian slaves were taken to Barbary than black African slaves to the Americas. No one who sailed the Mediterranean Sea or lived along its coastline was safe from enslavement.

It took the United States 80 years to officially abolish black slavery and another 100 years to enact civil rights legislation. In the Civil War, over 500,000 white soldiers lost their lives in the cause to free slaves. But the transformation was made.

Today blacks comprise 13 percent of the American population and 13 percent of them graduate from college. Over 20 government programs help black entrepreneurs. Many, though, still don’t succeed because ironically, they live in cities ironically controlled by other blacks.

  It is quite different in Africa. The number of slaves today ranges from around 21 million to 46 million, most of which are harbored in Africa. The International Labor Organization estimates 25 million people are in forced labor; 5 million in forced sexual exploitation; 4 million in forced labor imposed by state governments; and over 15 million in forced marriages.

    Muslim groups are still profiting from the slave trade all throughout Africa. Further, modern slavery is often a by-product of class division. The wealthy elite practice slavery. Further in Africa, race is obviously not the cause of slavery. Rather it is a matter of kinship and traces back generations to families that could never escape poverty.

So should wealthy African elites pay reparations to the ancestors of African-held slaves, both black and white?