Stolen, Sold, Silenced: The Global Trade in Black Suffering

Hear me, children of the scorched earth and the golden sun. I speak from the bones of the forgotten, from the rivers that once ran red with our blood, from the ledgers where our names were recorded as property. The world has been fed lies—sweet, digestible lies—about who suffered, who profited, and who conspired in the great theft of Black life. But the ancestors do not lie. The soil does not forget. And the truth will not stay buried.

I. The Arab Slave Trade: The First Betrayal

Long before Europe turned its greed toward Africa, the Arab world built its wealth on our backs. The trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades stretched over a thousand years—longer than the Atlantic trade—yet few speak its name. Our people were dragged across deserts, castrated, worked to death in the date fields of Oman, the pearl beds of Bahrain, the homes of Cairo and Baghdad. The Swahili coast became a slaughterhouse, where Arab and African middlemen sold us to Persian princes, Indian sultans, and beyond.

Where are the reparations from Dubai’s golden towers, built on the backs of African slaves? Where is the acknowledgment from the scholars of Al-Azhar, who once fatwa’d our enslavement as permissible? The Arab world still denies its role, yet our DNA runs in their veins, our labor built their cities, and our screams echo in their holy places.*

II. India’s Silent Complicity

Oh, India—land of gods and contradictions. Your merchants grew fat off the Portuguese, Dutch, and British slave trades. Your ports—Goa, Calicut, Bombay—were waystations for Black flesh. The Siddis, our stolen kin, were forced into your armies, your harems, your docks. Your princes traded with Europeans, selling our people for muskets and silk, then played victim when the British turned on you.

And now? You chant "Black Lives Matter" while your films bleach skin, your caste system mirrors anti-Blackness, and your scholars erase your own role in the crime. You speak of colonization but never of how your elites sold us out. The wealth of your maharajas was built on two hells: the oppression of your lower castes and the blood money of the African slave trade.*

III. Asia’s Blood Money

From the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea, the trade in Black bodies enriched empires. The Chinese, who once marveled at the dark-skinned Kunlun slaves brought by Arab traders, later sold our people in Macau and Hong Kong. The Dutch filled Batavia (Jakarta) with African bondsmen. The Spanish used us to fortify Manila. Even the Japanese, who postured as anti-colonial, exploited Black POWs and adopted Western racism during their imperial reign.

And today? Asia wears gold bought with our suffering. Your economic miracles were seeded with colonial cash—cash that came from crops our hands planted, mines our bones filled. You dismiss Black struggle as a "Western issue," yet your prosperity is tied to the same system that crushed us.*

IV. The Unbroken Chain

But we—the children of the first sunrise—we remember. We know that every time an Indian mogul denies colorism, every time an Arab scholar claims slavery was "kinder" there, every time an Asian nation pretends anti-Blackness is not their problem, they rewrite history. They hope we forget that their hands, too, are stained.

Yet here we stand—unshaken. The same spirit that raised pyramids now demands reckoning. The same fire that burned in Nat Turner’s heart now lights the way for liberation. We do not seek vengeance—we seek truth. And the truth is this:

The world was built on Black suffering, and every empire, East or West, has a debt to pay.

So rise, family. Speak in the tongues of the stolen. Fight with the fury of the ancestors. And never let them tell you that your pain is a footnote in their story. We are the story. And the last chapter has not been written."*

—The Ancestors

(This is the unwritten truth. Pass it on.)