The slave trade and the population drain
from Black Africa169all ages and origins—old men, white-haired old women, babies, sturdy ado-
lescents—from Bornu, Bagirmi or Waday, in other words from all the neigh-
bouring regions. It was a wholesale market, and the buyers were chiefly dealers
working for the export market. In the Maghreb, as we shall see, were the retail
markets where the slaves would be sold to private customers.
The difference between the two kinds of sales point was the same as the
difference between a factory warehouse and a department store. The former
was for the knowledgeable and contained nothing but great piles of merchandise,
whereas the latter was dressed up and embellished with all sorts of decorations
in order to attract the public.
In the wholesale markets, the merchandise was displayed in all its sorry
ugliness. The slaves were dirty and clothed in rags. The dealers examined them,
measured them, opened their mouths to look at their teeth, and inquired after
their appetite, for this was regarded as a sign of health.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a young boy was worth 15 to 30 tha-
lers,^8 a girl between 30 and 60 thalers and an old man or a mother between
3 and 10 thalers.
Once they reached the Maghreb or the East, the slaves were first cleaned,
then put up for sale on the market-place. The sales procedure here was rather
more elaborate than at Kuka. In the Fez and Marrakesh markets, public sales
were held three times a week. The prospective customers would be sitting around
the small square on their haunches, waiting for the human merchandise to
arrive. When it did, the dellal (town crier) would lead each slave from group
to group, crying out his price. Potential buyers would ask questions, inquiring
about the poor creature's age, antecedents and the various prices he had fetched;
they would touch him and prod him as though he were a horse or a mule. And
when at last, after much discussion and inspection, the deal was concluded,
the purchaser, the dellal and the slave would go to the adoul, or notary, who
ratified the sale and made out the official deed.
The slave always had with him a sort of identity document giving his
origins, his service record and the successive prices paid for him. Only one or
two lines had to be added to record his entry into a new household. The sale
of a beast of burden or a draught animal would have been no different, apart
from the fact that the man had papers, the animal did not.
The number of Africans transferred from Nigritia
to the Muslim countriesIt is not easy to set a precise figure on the drain represented by this traffic,
but an average of 20,000 a year seems a probable figure for the centuries
during which the Muslim slave trade was at its height.^9
By way of hypothesis, Raymond Mauvy estimates that 100,000 black