CHAPTER XLIV SLAVE-RAIDING From time immemorial the slave trade of the ancient world had its markets of supply in the Soudan. The earliest Greek historians speak of slaves captured by the native tribes of North Africa, and the monuments of Persia and Ethiopia show that the enslavement of the negro was a custom more ancient than any written record. In modern times the horrors of the African slave trade have been fully exposed by the great army of explorers who have penetrated into the interior of the continent. Livingstone, Baker, Stanley, Cameron, and many others, have given the testimony of eye-witnesses to the sufferings of the natives, whom the demand for slaves caused to be hunted like wild beasts in their homes. My husband, when he fought against the slaveraiders of Nyassaland, was himself a witness of the brutalities of the Mohammedan slave-hunters in East Africa. The curse of the slave-hunt in the equatorial regions of the continent has known no limit of time or place. It has spread broadly from sea to sea. To abolish it has been one of the aims which has most strongly enlisted the sympathy of the public in the modern movement of carrying civilisation into Africa.

During the whole period of which the principal historic movements of the Western Soudan have been so scantily outlined in this book, the trade in slaves was one of the most important elements of local industry and of foreign commerce. Spain and Portugal, North Africa and Egypt, drew their supply of slaves through the Middle Ages from the Soudan. We have seen at a later period 408