The Ocean That Devoured Names: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade And The West African Muslims Who Disappeared Into It

Between 1501 and 1867, twelve and a half million Africans were embarked on the coasts of West and Central Africa. Two million of them did not reach the other side. Of the ten million who did arrive, one in five carried an Islamic memory that no one in the New World could read any longer. This scene opens that chapter. Not to weep. To count, and then to name.

Fort Zeelandia, Paramaribo, On An Afternoon In 1720

You must imagine how the light falls. The Suriname River lies brown-green, thick, slow. On the western bank stands Fort Zeelandia, raised in 1667 by the Zeelanders on the ruins of an English fort, now the nerve center of the West India Company in this colony. Brick from Dutch ship ballast. Palm trees that have seen the stones come in, beam by beam. The heat is not the heat of the Senegambia coast; it is more humid, heavier, with a smell of mud and mildew that the Fulani captives — embarked nine weeks earlier at Albreda in the mouth of the Gambia — have never inhaled before.

A ship has arrived. Its name is De Vigilantie or something similar. It counts one hundred and eighty-five survivors out of a loading of two hundred and forty. Fifty-five bodies have been thrown overboard along the way. Of one of them we do not know the name, for he was never entered into a register. Of another we know that he could recite Surah al-Mulk down to the last ayah, because his son later, on a plantation along the Commewijne, would whisper it to his grandchildren before they slept.

That is the scene. One ship, one quay, one afternoon. Multiply it by sixty-three hundred. That is the estimated number of Atlantic slave voyages that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Eltis & Richardson, 2010) has reconstructed. Three centuries. Four continents. Twelve and a half million people.

This is where we begin.

The Scale

Let us not paper over the numbers. They are not abstract. Each figure here is a human being, and each human being a chain of names that broke somewhere in the world.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database — the largest historical dataset project on the slave trade, compiled by David Eltis and David Richardson on the basis of ship-loading registers from Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, Spanish, Danish, and American archives — counts 12.5 million Africans who were embarked between 1501 and 1867. Of these, 10.7 million reached the Americas alive. 1.8 to 2 million died along the way, during what in English-language historiography is called the Middle Passage. That mortality struck children and women disproportionately; the average voyage lasted six to twelve weeks; the causes of death were dysentery, smallpox, scurvy, suicide (often by refusing to eat or by jumping overboard), murder by the crew during revolts, and drowning when ships sank.

Paul Lovejoy, in his standard work Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (3rd edition, 2011), places these figures in a wider African context. He shows that the Atlantic trade was not the first slavery in the region — trans-Saharan and East African trades had existed for centuries — but that it was, in scale, intensity, and economic logic, something entirely new. Between 1650 and 1850 West African demography was demonstrably affected: whole regions depopulated, sex ratios skewed (many more men than women carried off), and the gender structure of the villages left behind effectively reorganized around absent men.

Four centuries. Twelve and a half million embarked. Ten million arrived. Two million overboard. And with each figure goes the fact that the majority left no written trace.

The Double Complicity

Here we stand before an honesty that no one in this hall deserves to be spared. The Atlantic slave trade was no European crime alone, and it was no African crime alone either. It was the cooperation of European capital structures with African political structures, in a system that both sides maintained, refined, and brought to scale.

On the European side: Portugal opened the field with the feitorias on the Guinea coast from 1441 onward. The Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, would carry roughly 550,000 to 600,000 Africans across the Atlantic between 1630 and 1803 — to Dutch Brazil, to Suriname, to Curaçao as a transshipment harbor, to Sint Eustatius as a smuggling point. Great Britain became after 1713 the largest slave trader in the world, with the Asiento contract that gave the British the monopoly on Spanish-American deliveries. France traded from Nantes, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux. Denmark held forts on the Gold Coast. Portugal remained dominant in the South Atlantic corridor to Brazil.

On the African side: the image of an unwitting continent that was raided does not hold. There were specialized political structures that organized the supply. The kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin) under kings such as Agaja (r. 1718-1740) and Tegbesu (r. 1740-1774) waged annual campaigns against its neighbors to produce captives for the European factories; Ouidah thus became one of the busiest export harbors of the Bight of Benin. The Oyo Empire (Yorubaland) supplied large numbers of captives to the south, especially Hausa and Nupe Muslims from failed cavalry raids. The kingdom of Kongo — which itself had become Christian in 1491 — was systematically emptied by its northern neighbors (Jaga, Imbangala) and later by Portuguese pombeiros via Luanda. The Ashanti Empire in the Gold Coast hinterland consolidated itself in the eighteenth century partly on the proceeds of slave wars to the north.

And then there is the Aro trading network in the Biafra hinterland (present-day southeast Nigeria): a system of rivers and march routes, under the religious-political direction of the Arochukwu oracle, that during the second half of the eighteenth century exported hundreds of thousands of Igbo captives via Bonny and Calabar. This was infrastructure. This was not ad hoc.

There is no innocent Africa in this story, and there is no innocent Europe. There is also no neat moral-arithmetical division of guilt — one of the fruitless debates this subject often absorbs. What there is: a trade that in its mature form linked European ships, European capital, European insurers, and European end-demand to African war, African statelike raiding constructions, and African inland caravans. Both sides — not one. And in the middle, voiceless: the captives themselves.

The Dutch Suction Line

For the audience tonight this is not an abstract chapter in a world history. It is specific. Your ancestors — or the ancestors of your partners, parents, grandparents — crossed the Atlantic in great likelihood through the Dutch colonial infrastructure. Let us make that line concrete.

The WIC (West India Company) operated in two charter phases: the First WIC (1621-1674) and the Second WIC (1674-1791). The trading posts lay mainly on the Slave Coast: Elmina (taken from the Portuguese in 1637), Fort Crevecœur near Accra, Fort Goede Hoop near Ouidah. From the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, Africans were shipped via the Middle Passage of roughly eight to ten weeks to Willemstad on Curaçao, which became the central transshipment harbor of the Dutch Atlantic world. From Curaçao ships continued to the plantation islands — Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, Saba — and to the Spanish-American coast (Venezuela, Colombia) via smuggling. A second direct route brought captives directly to Paramaribo for the Surinamese plantations.

The Surinamese figures: between 1651 (English foundation) and 1826 (end of the official Dutch slave trade), roughly 295,000 to 325,000 Africans were brought to Suriname (figures from Alex van Stipriaan, Surinaams contrast, 1993, and the Trans-Atlantic database). The plantation mortality was so high — 4 to 6% per year, driven by malaria, dysentery, food scarcity, abuse — that the population could only be maintained through constant supply. An enslaved person on a Surinamese sugar plantation had an average life expectancy of seven to ten years after arrival.

The Curaçao figures: roughly 100,000 to 150,000 captives were landed there between 1650 and 1800, of whom only a small portion remained on the island (Curaçao had limited plantation capacity). The majority was resold, often to Spanish buyers. That made Willemstad the “Amsterdam of the Caribbean” — a city built on intermediary trade, with a synagogue, a Catholic cathedral, and a slave market within ten minutes of each other. The Mikvé Israel-Emanuel synagogue, founded in 1651, still stands today. The former Kura Hulanda museum in the old town center documents this trade explicitly.

Trinidad falls outside the WIC line but belongs in Dutch-language Caribbean awareness through later migrations. Under Spanish, French, and British rule (from 1797) another roughly 23,000 Africans were landed there, with a significant share from Senegambia and the Bight of Benin. After 1834, British emancipation, Trinidad would become the landing point for Indian indentured laborers, but that is another story.

Why this matters for tonight: when we speak of the Muslims among the enslaved in the next scene, we are not speaking of generic African Muslims in a generic Caribbean context. We are speaking of the specific cargo of the WIC out of the Bight of Benin, of the Senegambia freight that went via Elmina to Willemstad, of the Hausa captives who flowed as the spoils of war from Oyo raids onto the Paramaribo plantations. This hall stands in a line that runs through Willemstad and Paramaribo. That line is not a metaphor.

The Muslims Among Them

Now the point that carries the rest of this sub-chapter.

A majority of the West Africans who were carried off between 1650 and 1850 came from regions where Islam had been present for centuries or was establishing itself. Sylviane Diouf, in Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (1998, rev. 2013) — the standard work on this subject — estimates that fifteen to twenty percent of all Africans who crossed the Atlantic were Muslim. Other estimates (Michael Gomez, Black Crescent, 2005; Paul Lovejoy) lie between ten and twenty-five percent, with regional peaks much higher.

Regionally:

• Senegambia shipments (via Gorée, Saint-Louis, Albreda, Bance Island) in the second half of the eighteenth century: thirty to forty percent Muslim, particularly Fulbe, Mandinka, and Wolof — often literate, often from reform states such as Futa Toro and Futa Jallon.
• Bight of Benin shipments: lower percentage but significant. Hausa Muslims from the northern interior of Hausaland, captured in Oyo raids and exported via Lagos, formed a specific sub-stream, especially to Brazil (where they would become the Malês in Bahia) and to the Dutch Caribbean.
• Bight of Biafra: small percentage Muslim, mainly de-Islamicized or half-Islamicized Nupe and northern Igbo.
• Angola/Congo shipments: virtually no Muslims; these regions were predominantly Christian (Kongo) or traditional-religious.

What these figures concretely mean: of the two million Africans shipped between 1750 and 1850 to the British, French, and Dutch Caribbean, an estimated two hundred to four hundred thousand were Muslim. Tens of thousands of Muslims thus walked in a single generation on Jamaican, Barbadian, Surinamese, and Curaçaoan plantations. Among them were hafidh, imams, malams, talibs. People who knew the Qur’an by heart and who, on plantations where no Arabic text existed, transmitted it orally.

This is one of the best-kept secrets of Atlantic history: that the first generation of West African Muslims in the Americas was a substantial group, not a curiosity. That they — for short generations, under brute pressure — tried to maintain deen. And that part of that memory, in deformed but recognizable form, would survive into the twentieth century within Afro-Caribbean, Brazilian, and South American communities.

Scene 29 goes into this further. Here is only the figure: one in five, sometimes more. Not an exception, but a minority large enough to leave traces.

The Arab Slave Trade — Honestly Nuanced

We must now discuss something that is often deployed as a rhetorical weapon in discussions of Atlantic slavery: “but the Arabs did it too”. This is a sentence that can be misused in two ways — as an apologia for the Atlantic trade (it was not unique, so not so bad), or as an accusation against Islam as a religion (it sanctioned slavery and therefore bears moral guilt). Both versions are untenable. We must formulate it more sharply.

First: the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades truly existed, over a much longer period, on a different scale. Paul Lovejoy and Ralph Austen have estimated that between roughly 700 and roughly 1900, in total roughly seventeen million Africans were carried off via these routes: to Morocco, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the Hijaz, Persia, India, the Swahili coast, and beyond. Spread over thirteen centuries. This is a substantial figure, and each individual captive in this stream of figures was a human tragedy that weighs as heavily as each individual captive in the Atlantic stream.

Second, and here lies the nuance that matters: these trades were not the same. The Atlantic trade had specific characteristics that the Oriental trades did not share. The Atlantic trade was:

• Fully plantation-capitalist at the receiving end: African labor became a raw material for a sugar/tobacco/cotton/coffee industry that was an integral part of European capital accumulation.
• State-financed and -protected by national companies: Royal African Company, WIC, Compagnie des Indes. This created a permanent, predictable, mass-industrial trade.
• Racially closed: the status of slavery was made hereditary (“partus sequitur ventrem”) and bound to black skin color. An enslaved child remained enslaved. This is not so in Islamic fiqh, where children of slave women by their free father (in the same household) were born as free children and the mother would be freed at the death of her master (umm walad).
• Run on mass mortality as an economically acceptable cost: the British planters in Barbados already by 1750 had such a high mortality rate that only constant supply kept the population at level; this model was considered rational.

The Oriental trades, by contrast, were:

• Predominantly domestic in destination: military (Mamluks, Ottoman Janissaries), household personnel, eunuchs, concubines. Not plantation labor on industrial scale.
• Not nationalized in the same way: there was no Royal Arab Company, no Ottoman Slave Trade Company with shares and centralized insurance. The trade ran via caravan entrepreneurs, individual merchants, and local networks.
• Not racially closed: Slavic captives from Eastern Europe, Turkish captives, Circassian slaves were no less common than African ones. Africa was one of several sources, not the exclusive source. Status was not by definition hereditary.
• Subject to legal frameworks that — in theory and often in practice — kept the trade within bounds: a Muslim was not allowed to enslave a Muslim; manumission was religiously recommended; mothers of children were freed at the death of their master.

These are structural differences in scale, form, and state integration. They do not make the Oriental trades good. They do not make them pleasant for the people trapped in them. The woman from Bornu who in 1780 ended up as a concubine in Istanbul led a diminished, stolen life, regardless of which jurisdiction her master ruled. Her tragedy is real. But the categorical equation of Atlantic industrial slavery with Oriental patrimonial slavery is historically untenable.

And — this is the critical point that often falls away — within the Islamic tradition there was an indigenous anti-slavery discourse that did not arise from European Enlightenment sources but from the fiqh itself. Let us name the figures.

Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀ (1556-1627) wrote in Moroccan exile around 1614-1615 his Mi’rāj al-Ṣu’ūd ilā Nayl Ḥukm Mujallab al-Sūd — “The Ladder of Ascent toward the Verdict on the Importation of Blacks”. At the request of jurists from Touat he answered with a systematic Maliki fatwa: skin color is not legal grounds for slavery; the peoples of Bornu, Kano, Katsina, Gao, Djenné, Timbuktu, and the Fulbe regions are Muslims; to enslave them is haram. He named names. He denounced those who did so. His text circulated through the Sahel, through Hausaland, later via Mauritanian and Sudanese copies even into Bahia, Brazil. This is a century before the European abolitionist movement. The legal grounds were already there within Islam itself, by a scholar who was sitting under Moroccan occupation by a state that had plundered his own people.

Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I issued in 1847 a firman that restricted the African slave trade in major Ottoman ports, including a ban on the market of Istanbul. His successor Abdülaziz extended this in 1858 with a more formal ban on the trade in Hijaz ports (with hesitant exceptions). This came about partly under British pressure — we should not delude ourselves that it was purely endogenous — but at the same time there was Ottoman ulama support for these steps, based on classical arguments against unlawful captivity.

Tunisian Bey Ahmed Bey abolished slavery in 1846, a full eight years before British crown colonies in the Caribbean (1834-1838 with apprenticeship transition) had fully completed their process and nineteen years before the United States (1865). This was no marginal gesture; it was a legal and administrative reform that made Tunisia the first Arab state to be abolitionist. The mujaddid framing (“renewer of the deen”) was explicitly applied to Ahmed Bey by some Tunisian ulama.

Moroccan Sultan Mawlay Hassan I (r. 1873-1894) tried in the 1880s to restrict the slave trade to and from Morocco, with mixed success; internal opposition from local notables and tribes frustrated his attempts but the state direction was abolitionist.

These names are no apologia. Slavery was tragedy, in Agadir as much as in Charleston. But we may not erase the intra-Islamic legal and political tradition that argued against it in order to push forward a Western-secular abolitionism as the only moral inheritance. The Mi’rāj al-Ṣu’ūd existed. The firmans existed. They did not make everything right. They showed that within the Islamic tradition the argument against slavery was available, in legal language, in 1615 and in 1847, and that we today — as descendants and as Muslims — may recognize the continuity of that argument.

The Question About The Qibla

There is one scene from which we must not look away tonight, if only because it sets up the rest of this sub-chapter emotionally.

In the Surinamese plantation archives — preserved largely in the National Archives in The Hague, with portions in the Surinamese National Archive in Paramaribo — there are various nineteenth-century mentions of enslaved people who asked for “the direction of the East”, who in certain months refrained from food between sunrise and sunset, who refused to eat pork, who bowed their head in a particular manner five times a day.

Gert Oostindie documented in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800 (2012, co-edited with Jessica Roitman) and in earlier publications various such incidents. One mention, from a plantation in the Commewijne district around 1770, describes how a group of recently arrived Fulbe men asked the bomba (black overseer) where Mecca lay. The bomba did not know. The master laughed at it and had them flogged for “Mohammedan practices”. One of them — according to the report an old man who by his own account had been imam in Futa Toro — died within the year. His name is not recorded.

Multiply this across three centuries. With the Dutch Caribbean archives that we have not yet all read. With the French, British, Portuguese, and Spanish that yet remain to be added. Somewhere between those archives runs an invisible prayer-trail through the Atlantic world. Most of the voices are lost. Some are preserved. A handful have left names.

Scene 29 is about three of those names.

What The Ocean Could Not Do

We have touched four centuries. Twelve and a half million figures. Two million dead. The WIC and its ships. Curaçao and Paramaribo. Fulani, Mandinka, Hausa, Wolof. The intra-Islamic anti-slavery tradition from Ahmad Baba ﵀ to Ahmed Bey.

What we do not do tonight is close this scene with a “despite everything” sentence that reconciles the pain. The pain is not reconciled. Generations have been broken. Names are lost. Languages — Fulfulde, Hausa, Mandinka, Wolof, Kanuri — died on Caribbean plantations within one or two generations. The majority of the Muslims in the Middle Passage left no written trace. They continued to perform their prayer in silence, to whisper their basmala over their newborns, to keep their memory of Mecca as an orientation in the mind — and then to fall silent, unknown, in plantation graves without qibla.

But of some, yes. Omar ibn Said ﵀ wrote in Arabic on a field in North Carolina. Bilali Muhammad ﵀ dictated his Risala fragments from memory on Sapelo Island. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ wrote a letter in a Maryland prison, and that letter bought him free. Salih Bilali signed his name in Arabic script on plantation documents. Yarrow Mamout kept halal in Georgetown, Washington DC. The Malê captives of Bahia rose up in 1835 with Arabic amulets sewn into their clothes. The Jamaican Obeah leaders of 1760, on some readings, carried a Muslim secret.

So we do not know everything. But we know more than only the emptiness.

Let us begin with those who still knew Al-Fatiha when the ship left harbor. But we know their names. Let us name them.

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