In Cairo, transactions involving eunuchs and concubines happened in private houses. Potential buyers made a careful examination of the 'merchandise': they checked the state of health of a person who was often standing naked with wrists bound together.

Sales were held in public places or in souks. In North Africa, the main slave markets were in Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli and Cairo. In 1416, al-Maqrizi told how pilgrims coming from Takrur (near the Senegal River) had brought 1,700 slaves with them to Mecca. Įnslaved Africans were sold in the towns of the Arab world. Bantu adult and children slaves (referred to collectively as jareer by their Somali masters ) were purchased in the slave market exclusively to do undesirable work on plantation grounds. Collectively, these Bantu groups are known as Mushunguli, which is a term taken from Mzigula, the Zigua tribe's word for 'people' (the word holds multiple implied meanings including 'worker', 'foreigner', and 'slave'). Most of the slaves were from the Majindo, Makua, Nyasa, Yao, Zalama, Zaramo and Zigua ethnic groups of Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi. Zanzibar slave market in 1860, by Edwin Stocquelerįrom 1800 to 1890, between 25,000–50,000 Bantu slaves are thought to have been sold from the slave market of Zanzibar to the Somali coast. In Somalia, the inhabiting Bantus are descended from Bantu groups that had settled in Southeast Africa after the initial expansion from Nigeria/Cameroon, and whose members were later captured and sold into the Arab slave trade. This was a popular subject in 19th-century Orientalist painting, normally with a sexual element. Main article: Indian Ocean slave trade The Slave Market, by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1866.

Slave market girl