Status Updates From Islam's Black Slaves: The O...

Slavery still persists in Mauritania and the Sudan; against a background of fourteen centuries of Islamic colonization and slave-owning, the practice becomes more comprehensible, if no less painful. An imam in Mauritania explains, "This 'abolition'...amounts to the expropriation from Muslims of their goods, goods that were acquired legally." Racial and religious dimensions are clearer with the historical context.

Detailed and thoughtful examinations of policies in Nigeria (Britain), Somalia (Italy), Mauritania (France) and Zanzibar/Kenya Coast (Britain) illustrate how uneven, careless policy-making created populations of squatters, impoverished day-laborers and vagrants who were often conscripted for government projects or even as labor gangs or fighting units in Europe's world wars.