Another Slavery Thread: Below are two women from the Sara tribe in Chad. The adornment on their lips and noses were not initially devised for beautification but as a deterrent to slave raiders. The Sara people were raided from the mid-1700's to the 1890's. The 1890's!

The Sara people's government system can be described as anarchic. The basic social units were made up of villages of extended families under a chief called mbang and even his powers were checked by a council.

The mbang had the power to punish criminals, using fines, exile and slavery. This is itself might have indeed looked like the "slavery was just servants" we often hear about. Older enslaved people were treated as wise elders. That model was corrupted by the Saharan slave trade.

On the narratives on the trading of Africans is the gun-slave cycle theory, which posits that everyone was doing it to get the guns. This is not true. It is a racist generalizations that characterizes Africans as indistinguishably wild. A lot of people were just being hunted.

One of the benefits of living in anarchic villages is that you really do live in the land of the free. You live in a close community were you are guided by ethical ties instead of tyrants. The drawback is you are often unable to withstand organized, exploitative empires.

To protect themselves against constant raid, the Sara people had guards whom the French named goumiers. They were tasked with protecting their communities but were often unable to faced trained armies from neighboring caliphates bearing guns.

The kingdoms that raided them were Kanem-Bornu, Baguirmi, Wadai, Dar Fur.

The Kanem–Bornu Empire existed in areas which are now part of Cameroon, Chad and Nigeria. The Kanem Empire (700–1380) later became the The Bornu Empire (1380s–1893). What was Bornu is now part of Northeast Nigeria.

If imperialism was their real motive, the state motivated used to compel their foot soldiers to carry out slave raiding expeditions for centuries was jihad against the infidels (kirdi) since prior to colonization, the Sara people practiced traditional African spirituality.

Unfortunately for the Sara people, in addition to their political structure, which made them easier to prey on, they seem to have characteristics that made them appealing for enslavers. A French colonizer described tall, strong, useful workers and docile.

The kingdom of Baguirmi was southeast of Lake Chad. It was founded in the late 15th century and lasted until 1897, when it became a French protectorate. They began raiding the Sara people in the mid-18th century under Sultan Hadji who wanted eunuchs for the Ottoman Empire

Of the impacts of this pillage of Sara men was that there was great imbalance of gender ratios leading to widespread polygamy. The average polygamist was found to have 4.7 wives per man and this was a direct result of the removal of men from the community.

The Fulani also raided the Sara people but mostly in search of women as concubines. It did not offset the raids of eunuchs to go across the Sahara.

Rabih Fadlallah was a Sudanese warload and slave trader who in the late 19th century had led successful conquests in the region. He raided the Sara people for the Khartoum market, which had become a very important in Arab slave trade, allegedly great numbers.

Not all the enslaved Sara people came through raids. The mbangs, having accepted their fate, sometimes made agreements (amana) with the sultans for a certain number of captives per year in exchange for peace. Keep that in mind, next time you hear, chiefs "sold their own people."

Very few enslaved Africans from Chad went across the Atlantic. Between 1400 and 1900, an estimated 500,000 were sold across the Sahara or Red Sea from Chad. A people like the Sara, who for reasons unclear, did not convert to Islam were targeted by neighboring sultanates.

Centuries of this kind of pillaging makes any "development" impossible. It was a challenge just to get through a planting season. And of course, the loss of men is harmful to such endeavors. In this case however, the underdevelopment was mostly not from Europe.