So, why don’t our history books teach us much about this aspect of the history of slavery in Africa? Mine certainly didn’t touch on it at all, and in all the years since then, when I’ve about the evils of the institution of slavery I never heard a word about the role of Christian missionaries in ending slavery within Africa itself.

In fact, ending slavery seems to have been one of the main reasons that missionaries were there, and a rather significant force in the European colonization of Africa in general, although of course it was hardly the only factor. And the campaign was relatively effective, although there is still some slavery there:

Patrick Manning explains that “if there is any time when one can speak of African societies being organized around a slave mode production, [1850-1900] was it.” The continuing anti-slavery movement in Europe became an excuse and a casus belli for the European conquest and colonisation of much of the African continent. It was the central theme of the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference 1889-90. In the late 19th century, the Scramble for Africa saw the continent rapidly divided between Imperialistic European powers, and an early but secondary focus of all colonial regimes was the suppression of slavery and the slave trade. In response to this pressure, Ethiopia officially abolished slavery in 1932, Sokoto Caliphate abolished slavery in 1900, and the rest of the Sahel in 1911. By the end of the colonial period they were mostly successful in this aim, though slavery is still very active in Africa even though it has gradually moved to a wage economy. Slavery has never been eradicated in Africa, and it commonly appears in African states, such as Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, and Sudan, in places where law and order have collapsed.

Then today, after I’d already prepared the above draft, I saw this offering in the comments section from “Dennis”:

In the mid 19th century Islamic jihad against black Africans was in full force. The Muslims had invaded central Africa and were killing and enslaving Africans on a massive scale. They would march the newly minted African slaves out to the coast in chain gangs. These poor sick undernourished Africans were forced to march with elephant tusks on their heads. Many of the men were castrated out in the field… The Britisher who was most influential missionary in fighting Muslim depredations in Africa was a Scottish missionary named David Livingstone (19 March 1813 ”“ 1 May 187). The primary mission of the early British missionaries to Africa was to protect the Africans from Islamic jihad. David Livingstone and the other missionaries fought Islamic jihad against Africans primarily through education both in England where the English were alerted to the tragedy which was unfolding in Africa and in Africa where the Africans received the education necessary to enable them to repel the Muslim invaders. It is ironic that leftists accuse missionaries of destroying traditional African society and to some extent they did however since Christian missionaries relied on education and persuasion to win converts rather than by force they ended up saving much of what is uniquely African from the impending destruction by Islamic jihad. The name of the modern day Islamic jihadis in central Africa, Boko Harem (roughly translated ”“ Western education is a fraud which is forbidden in Islam) is not a fluke. The Islamists know exactly what the missionaries hoped to accomplish by establishing schools and hospitals throughout Africa and they hate them because they stand as bulwark against their violent jihad.

It’s a never-ending struggle, isn’t it?

Ultimately, after European influence, some anti-slavery feeling developed within the Muslim world, although it was met with resistance:

Bernard Lewis writes: “In one of the sad paradoxes of human history, it was the humanitarian reforms brought by Islam that resulted in a vast development of the slave trade inside, and still more outside, the Islamic empire.” He notes that the Islamic injunctions against the enslavement of Muslims led to massive importation of slaves from the outside. According to Patrick Manning, Islam by recognizing and codifying the slavery seems to have done more to protect and expand slavery than the reverse… Arab or Islamic slave trade lasted much longer than Atlantic or European slave trade: “It began in the middle of the seventh century and survives today in Mauritania and Sudan. With the Islamic slave trade, we’re talking of 14 centuries rather than four.”… Earlier in the 20th century, prior to the “reopening” of slavery by Salafi scholars like Shaykh al-Fawzan, Islamist authors declared slavery outdated without actually clearly supporting its abolition. This has caused at least one scholar (William Clarence-Smith) to bemoan the “dogged refusal of Mawlana Mawdudi to give up on slavery” and the notable “evasions and silences of Muhammad Qutb”. Muhammad Qutb, brother and promoter, of the famous Sayyid Qutb, vigorously defended Islamic slavery from Western criticism, telling his audience that “Islam gave spiritual enfranchisement to slaves” and “in the early period of Islam the slave was exalted to such a noble state of humanity as was never before witnessed in any other part of the world.” He contrasted the adultery, prostitution, and (what he called) “that most odious form of animalism” casual sex, found in Europe, with (what he called) “that clean and spiritual bond that ties a maid [i.e. slave girl] to her master in Islam.”

ISIS and Boko Harum are firmly in that tradition, although much of the Islamic world now opposes them:

ISIL appealed to apocalyptic beliefs and “claimed justification by a Hadith that they interpret as portraying the revival of slavery as a precursor to the end of the world.” In late September 2014, 126 Islamic scholars from around the Muslim world signed an open letter to the Islamic State’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, rejecting his group’s interpretations of the Qur’an and hadith to justify its actions. The letter accuses the group of instigating fitna””sedition””by instituting slavery under its rule in contravention of the anti-slavery consensus of the Islamic scholarly community.

Who will win that battle?