Africa's bigger slave problem

Last year Joe Biden said African Americans who don’t support him “ain’t black,” but this year the Delaware Democrat is open to reparations for slavery...

In 1856, British Army officer John Hanning Speke set out to find the source of the Nile. Speke’s massive Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile documents the African societies he found, and the widespread practice of slavery.  “To catch slaves is the first thought of every chief in the interior,” Speke wrote, “Hence fights and slavery impoverish the land.”

Many Africans were “caught in wars, as may be seen every day in Africa, made slaves of, and sold to the Arabs for a few yards of common cloth, brass wire, or beads. They would then be taken to Zanzibar, resold like horses to the highest bidder, and then kept in bondage by their new masters.”

As slaves, the Africans were “circumcised to make Mussulmans [Muslims] of them, that their hands might be ‘clean’ to slaughter their master’s cattle and extend his creed. For the Arabs believe the day must come when the tenets of Mohammed will be accepted by all men.”...

Black Africans were not the only target for Arab slave traders. As Roger Crowley notes in Empires of the Sea, Muslims were raiding Europe for slaves well into the 1800s. Mohammed did not condemn slavery, which had been standard practice in Africa centuries before any European set foot there....

Leftist Democrats, so eager to condemn the United States, seem unaware that slavery continues in African nations such as Mauritania, where as much as 20 percent of the population is enslaved....

In Africa, slavery endures 158 years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 188 years after the British abolished slavery, and 165 years since John Speke set out to find the source of the Nile....