Mauritania was the last country in the world to legally abolish slavery, having made the measure official in 1981 and criminalizing the practice only in 2007. The global abolition process occurred gradually. Below are the milestones of the last countries and regions to end slavery:
Mauritania: Official abolition occurred in 1981 by presidential decree, but the law that made slavery a punishable crime was only passed in 2007.
Oman: Abolished slavery in 1970.
Saudi Arabia and Yemen: Abolished slavery in 1962.
Ethiopia: Formally prohibited the practice in 1942
The Arab-Muslim slave trade spanned 13 centuries, capturing and transporting an estimated 6 to 10 million black Africans across the Sahara, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. Unlike the plantation-based Atlantic trade, the Muslim trade primarily used enslaved Africans as domestic servants, concubines, guards, and soldiers.
Enslaved men were heavily used as laborers and military conscripts, while women were predominantly sought after as domestic workers and sex slaves. Castration was a distinct and brutal feature of this trade. The routine castration of enslaved African men was for them to serve as harem guards, resulting in exceptionally high mortality rates.
The survival rate of Black slaves subjected to castration in the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades was catastrophically low, with historians estimating that only 10% to 33% survived. The current Black or Afro-Arab population across Arab countries is not tracked via strict racial censuses, but regional estimates place the overall percentage of darker-skinned or Afro-descendant people at roughly 5% to 10% of the Middle Eastern Arab population, though this varies drastically by country.
Castration and Survival Rates: Islamic law technically prohibited the mutilation of humans, so Arab slave traders frequently bypassed this by outsourcing the procedures. Young boys aged 8 to 12 were routinely sent to specialized centers—such as specific Coptic Christian monasteries in Upper Egypt or operations in the Sudan borderlands—before being imported into major cities of the Ottoman, Abbasid, or Umayyad empires as eunuchs.
The Lethality: The complete removal of both the penis and testicles was performed in an era without anesthesia or antibiotics. Bleeding was often stopped using boiling oil or hot sand.
Survival Data: Historical consensus (including data from Ottoman records and African histories) notes a mortality rate of 70% to 90%. This means that for every 10 boys subjected to the procedure, only 1 to 3 survived. This extreme mortality rate artificially inflated the market price of surviving eunuchs tenfold.
Current Black Population in Arab Countries: Unlike the transatlantic slave trade which generated large, visible, and structurally segregated African-American diasporas in the West, the Arab slave trade left a different demographic imprint. This was due to the widespread castration of males, high mortality rates, and a high rate of assimilation, as children born to Arab masters and enslaved women were born free and integrated into the father's lineage. Because modern Arab nations generally record census data based on nationality or religion rather than race, exact figures are hard to compile.
With "Gemini"
