in chapter 1, we examined specific agricultural techniques used in tradi-tional Arabian Peninsula agriculture, including terracing, sayl agriculture, ghayl agriculture, the qanat, and the jalib. The degree to which African slave or servile labor was employed in these techniques varied widely. i have, for instance, found no explicit references to the employment of Afri-can servile labor in terracing, which in the Arabian Peninsula is mainly practiced in Yemen. indeed, in his survey of islamic abolitionist thought, William Gervase clarence-smith reports that slavery among the Zaydi highlanders of Yemen was quite rare, and concentrated in urban sana’a rather than the surrounding agricultural countryside.13 The relative lack of agricultural slaves in the terraced Yemeni highlands could be explained by Yemen’s somewhat unique social structure. in the rest of Arabia, farmers tended to be an exploited underclass, subject to the demands of Bedouin tribes, emirs of the towns, or sometimes both. Not so in the highlands of Yemen, where tribal groups of farmers living in easily defensible mountain villages constituted the militarily dominant group, and where agriculture was a respectable profession for a free man.14 These military and cultural factors, combined with Yemen’s high population (by Arabian standards), probably would have made African servile labor unnecessary.
African agricultural slavery might also have been rendered unneces-sary by the relative lack of malaria of the Yemeni highlands, since as we will see repeatedly throughout this chapter and in chapter 4, malaria is strongly correlated with African agricultural labor in the Arabian Peninsula. insofar as agricultural slavery existed, it would have probably been concentrated, not in the mountain terraces, but in mid-altitude agricultural wadis where malaria was a chronic problem. case in point is the Madinat al ‘Abid, a town on a tributary of Yemen’s Wadi al-Rimah. The name of the town means “city of the slaves,” and although British traveler Hugh scott notes neither slaves nor Africans when driving through there in 1937, he does note that the place had an “evil reputation for malaria,” to the point that his guides timed the day’s travels to avoid camping overnight in the vicinity.15 Nonetheless, while the place name seems to suggest the large-scale use of slaves in the area at some time in Yemeni history, overall there is no hard evidence suggesting agricultural slavery was anything more than periph-eral to highland Yemen’s terrace agriculture.
Much the same could be said concerning the contribution of slaves to Arabia’s sayl agriculture. sayl farming was not particularly time intensive.
The fields and embankments did have to be prepared on a seasonal basis,
which required some short-term effort, but the fields themselves were watered by gravity flow with little human assistance. That is, of course, if the fields were watered at all; if the rains failed, the plot of land would have remained fallow. Thus, given the low and unpredictable labor demands of sayl cultivation, it is unlikely that African servile labor would have been employed, except perhaps on a seasonal basis and in conjunction with other slave employments.
in contrast, African servile labor probably played a significantly greater role in another traditional Arabian agricultural sector, the construction and maintenance of Arabia’s qanats and other man-made springs. While the construction of qanats was supervised by well-paid experts, the dan-gerous grunt work of construction and maintenance was often performed by African slaves or African servile labor. Our best source on slave involve-ment in qanat construction and maintenance is a remarkable docuinvolve-ment concerning agricultural slavery, L’esclave de Timimoun by F. J. G. Mercadier, which details the life of the African slave Griga in the palm plantations of nineteenth-century French North Africa. Griga recalled to Mercadier the horrors of qanat repairs, a task which to which he was once assigned as part of a general levy of slaves from the village. His party of ten was assigned to clean out ten maintenance shafts, each approximately 36 meters deep, on the plateau overlooking the town. He was sent down one of the shafts with-out a rope, lowering himself by clinging by hands and feet to the sides of the well: “After a long and painful descent, in which i took stones to the head, i arrived at the water, and crouched in a narrow tunnel which connected two wells.” Another slave then joined him, precipitating as he did another
“rain of stones” upon Griga, after which they got to work filling baskets with rock and soil by lamplight. speaking long after the event, Griga was still haunted by this “lonely, superhuman task in a narrow gallery, humid and dim, to open a passage in a cork of sticky clay before which the water mounted inexorably.” Griga was terrified all the while, as “it is frequent in the course of such work for supports to collapse, obstructing the channel and burying or crushing the workers.”16 Thankfully, after a period of time, Griga was helped to the surface with the aid of a rope and his place in the qanat channel was taken by another.
As Griga was soon to learn, tunnel collapses were not the only danger that threatened qanat workers. No sooner had he returned to the surface when “suddenly, downstream, we heard cries. We all stopped short, assem-bled, and discussed. it appeared that someone was calling for aid. We ran to the spot. The slaves [there] explained that when descending into the
56 | Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula
well, Moumen, a slave of Abdelali had slipped and fallen down a chute 18 meters deep!”17 Two men descended to retrieve the fallen worker, who was alive but breathing with difficulty, and eventually lifted him to the surface with the help of ropes passed under his armpits. in the end it was to no avail; the injured Moumen later died, leaving his fellow slaves to mourn the loss of life and his Arab owner Abdelali to bemoan the loss of the two hundred francs he had spent on Moumen just a year before.
Although this example hails from North Africa, many such scenes undoubtedly played out, mostly unrecorded, in the Arabian Peninsula. The only explicit account i have come across of African workers laboring in Arabian qanat shafts is given by Harry st. John Bridger Philby, who made note of a team of “a few negroes” working on a qanat shaft near Banna during his travels in Najd in 1918. According to Philby,
at the time of my visit a few negroes were at work in the last shaft, about three fathoms [5.5 meters] deep, trying to improve the water-supply, which was extremely feeble, by clearing out the channel, but they seemed to be digging in the dark for they confessed they did not know from what direction the water was coming; it looked very much as if the spring, on which the stream depended, was steadily losing its vitality.18
African laborers were employed in the construction or maintenance of other large-scale irrigation works as well. For example, in 1907, French archeologists Jaussen and savignac make note of a team of “five or six negroes” that had been sent out to repair an old reservoir and irrigation channel 6 kilometers south of Taima.19 Not all such labor was performed by African slaves in Arabia. According to interviews performed by soriya Altorki and donald cole in the 1980s, both free tribesmen and servile Africans were traditionally employed as well-diggers due to the high wages it offered. Nonetheless, the risks that this occupation entailed probably ensured that most well-diggers were servile, as “the men who did it died young,” both because of injury and “the smoke [dust] of the clay in the wells.”20
African servile labor was also frequently used to operate and maintain the jalibs of Arabian farming towns. Altorki and cole found that these wells were still remembered with nostalgia by the inhabitants of ‘unayzah in the 1980s: “They particularly remember the women singing and speak of the wonderful sound of ‘wishshsh’ the water made as it emptied into the
basin.”21 i doubt that this nostalgia was shared by the workers tasked with the monotonous, mind-numbing task leading the animals up and down the well ramps “throughout the night and into the morning of the next day.”22 This of course assumes animals were available—if not, there was no other alternative than to draw the water by hand. Not surprisingly, workers on the jalib tended to be drawn from the lowest and most impoverished ranks of society, including (where available) African slaves and mawlas.23
it is likely that African servile agricultural labor was employed to some degree in Arab agricultural villages through the length and breadth of the Arabian Peninsula. But to what degree? Given the limitations of the sources, this is an impossible question to answer. individual African slaves and freedmen living in predominantly Arab villages are almost invisible to the historian, and families of Africans scarcely less so. in general, African agricultural slaves only become visible to posterity when concentrated into a large community. Luckily for the present-day historian, such communi-ties were not infrequent in the traditional Arabian Peninsula. it is to the phenomenon of African farming colonies that we now turn.