A caravan of Moorish merchants arrives and offers goods for slaves. If there are no slaves on hand, they must be procured. The Sultan immediately collects his forces, marches into the country of some harmless tribe, burns their villages, destroys their fields and flocks, massacres the infirm and old, and returns with as many able-bodied prisoners as he can seize. Sometimes 3,000 have been obtained in a single ‘ghrazie,' as these expeditions are called."[1] What a picture of savagery and cruelty is this! And. the slave-trade across the Great Desert, sustained by these enormities, has been going on to Bancroft) since A.D. 990, — nearly nine hundred years.
Here may be introduced another extract from Mungo Park, which presents a view at once of the internal slave-trade of Africa, and of the sufferings which the slaves sometimes endure in their long journeys from the interior to the western coast. The person, Karfa, mentioned in the extract, was a slatee or African slave-dealer, by no means cruel, but on the whole a kind-hearted man, who showed great kindness to Park, and was the means, indeed, of his being enabled to reach the coast on his return, and thus take ship for home. The narrative simply exhibits the wretched customs of a country where a "prime slave" is the ordinary standard of value.
"On the 24th of January, Karfa returned to Kamalia with a number of people, and. thirteen prime slaves whom he had purchased — The slaves which Karfa had brought with him were all of
- ↑ Freeman's Plea for Africa, Conversation VI.
