Toni Fontich ||*||

The Arab-Islamic slave trade began in the 7th century and didn't fully end until the early 20th century. Over those 1,300 years, an estimated 10 to 18 million Africans were taken from the continent, marched across the Sahara or shipped across the Indian Ocean. It outlasted the transatlantic slave trade by more than three centuries, and by some estimates moved more people overall. THE PROCEDURE A large share of the men taken were castrated, mainly to serve as eunuchs guarding harems, households, and royal courts. The operation was performed with primitive tools and little to no medical care. Mortality estimates vary, but most historians describe it as extremely high, with many accounts putting the death rate at over half. THE RESULT Enslaved women, unlike the men, frequently had children, often with the men who enslaved them. Surviving castrated men could not. Historians point to this as a central reason the African diaspora across the Middle East and North Africa is so much smaller today than in the Americas, despite a trade that ran for over a millennium. It wasn't only the men who died in the procedure or on the journey. It was every child who was never born after them. WHAT'S LEFT Small Afro-Arab communities still exist today in places like Iraq, Yemen, and the Gulf states, descended from those who survived. Compared to the millions taken over thirteen centuries, what remains is a fraction of what those numbers would suggest.