Where Did the Arab Muslims Take Our Twenty Million African Slaves?

Where did they go?
The sons and daughters
Taken in the dawn of traded winds?

Where did they go?
The ones whose names were unstitched from the Arab wind,
Whose footsteps ended at the tide of the Arabian Sea,
Whose languages, whose bodies, whose souls, fell quiet in courtyards of Arabs
Where only Muslim-brown tongues were allowed to breathe?

Where did they go?
Those taken from the red earth of Kilwa and Sofala
From the green libs of Malawi,
From the long rivers of the Zambezi,
From the dust-paths of Zimbabwe,
From the breathing coasts of Mombasa and Zanzibar,
From the black lands of Kenya, Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, Malawi, Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia?
Where enslaved African skin learned the grammar of the Islamic ocean?
From Swahili shores where dhows once sailed
From Mombasa’s coral steps and caravan trails,
From the Mozambique, Tanganyika, and Malagasy plains

Where did they go when Chains called their names?
History answers softly,
And sometimes, not at all,
Like Dalit genocide.
Like Yazidi genocide.
Like Armenian genocide.
Like Rwandan genocide.
Like the holocaust.
Like the October seventh.

East across the waters of the Arabian and the Indian Sea
Where sails bent like prayer cloths in the breeze,
To ports named in Arabic tongues
Zanzibar, Muscat, and Aden, where markets
Bought and sold the living,
Boys no older than the promise of youth,
Girls whose laughter was broken like glass.
Where they were denied life, love, liberty, and light.

The Mediterranean Ocean and the Jordan River
Remembers more than the liberal tide of the English Channel.
The sand keeps better records of cruelty than the Sultanates.
They were moved like shadows,
Sold at crossroads of Islamic empires,
Through ports and deserts,
Through namaz and markets,
Through houses where their children,
Would not be allowed to look like them.
Where they were denied life, love, liberty, and light.

Some historians say they were carried
To the Gulf, to the Hijaz, to Hadramaut,
To cities in Yemen, Palestine, Arabia, Persia, Pakistan
And even to the courts of India and beyond
Not as citizens, rooted in soil,
But as commodities in a world that saw lives
As weight measured in silver dirhams.
Where they were denied life, love, liberty, and light.

Yet ask why the streets of Basra and Sana’a
Do not bond with the same familiar faces.
You see in the diasporas of the West
And listen for complexity, not simple blame.

For in the West
the Atlantic world
The number of enslaved Africans, the sheer scale,
The demographic imbalance
All created
A visible, enduring population whose descendants
Held memories in bone and muscle,
Whose cultures survived beneath oppression.
Where they breathed life, love, liberty, and light.

But in the Indian Ocean World, the story was different.
Not lesser in sorrow, but different in structure.
Most taken were young men and women.
Often separated from family at capture.
Young men were forced into labor.
Into armies or backbreaking tasks,
Castrated everyone to serve as
Guards, eunuchs in households
Where they were denied home, name, and legacy,
Where they were denied life, love, liberty, and light.

Some African slaves were made into soldiers without children,
Their futures cut away in courtyards
Where survival itself was a wound.
Some laboured in silence,
Their bodies strong,
Their lineages forbidden.

Some African women slaves survived in another way,
Their names changed,
Their wombs were cut,
Their pasts pressed plain,
Their children were massacred,
Counted as rotten eggs,
Taught to forget the drumbeat,
That once steadied their mother’s heart.

Generation after generation,
Memory thinned,
Always by Islamic sword,
Always by Islamic design,
Always by Islamic fear,
Always by the Islamic cruelty of
Power deciding what may reproduce and what must end.

Castration of African slaves, where it happened,
Was universal in the Islamic world,
It was practiced in every court of Islam.
To create protectors with no children,
No future black and African seed in that Muslim land.
A brutal policy meant to secure brown power,
Not a myth invented in anger.

Everyone died from Islamic cruelty and infection.
As all slave trades exacted mortal tolls.
There was no natural demographic growth.
Like in the Western Christian world,
Where enslaved people,
Lived long enough to raise families,
To maintain identity, culture, memory,
Having tens of millions of interracial children
With white women and became leaders of America.

Black women taken as housemaids
In the White Western Christian world
Did sometimes bear children,
And those children became part of a blended lineage.
Identified with their white mother’s/father’s tribes and cultures,
So their African features and names were submerged.
Not erased by sword, but by assimilation, law, and Christian society.
Where they were watered by Christian life, love, liberty, and light.

And so, a question rises like smoke:
Why do we see absence where there should be
Abundance?
Who do Islamic lands remember Blackness
Only as thing,
Only as slave,
Only as maid,
Only as labour,
Only as dirt,
Only as filthy,
Only as inferior,
Only as sub-human,
Only as insult,
Only as silence,
Only as infidel,
Only as negro,
Only as nigger,
As monkey,
As chimpanzee,
As uncivilized,
As an unpleasant being.

Why Such Hatred?

Why are Palestinians so racist?
Towards the African race?

Why do brown-skinned Muslims
In Germany, France, and Europe, and in
Australia and the wider West,
practice brutal racism and violence
against people of African descent?

Why do Muslims across the globe
Intimidate and terrorise
Those who do not share their faith?
Why such hatred?
Why such cruelty?
Why such genocide?
When will humanity embrace equality?

Why do Muslims hate every living creature?
Why such hatred?
Why such cruelty?
Why such genocide?

So why do we not see African populations in the Islamic world?
Why do we not see non-Muslim populations in the Islamic world?
As we see them in the White Western Christian world
As the Black West?
As the African-American?
As the African-European?
As the African-West?
Not because they never existed,
Not because the blood is gone,
But because history and religion flowed differently here:
Massive numbers of African slaves in Islamic lands compared to the small numbers in the transatlantic trade,
Religious cruelty of Islam and cruelty of Islamic followers,
Forced assimilation into the Islamic ideology,
Racist imbalances that killed millions of African slaves
By the Islamic sword,
And centuries of marginalization in historical storytelling.

There are Afro-descendant communities in the Islamic
World,
In every part of the
Gaza, Palestine, Gulf, Yemen, Iraq, Arab, Iran,
Where Africans keep memory in family names, dialects,
Where they were denied life, love, liberty, and light.
Rhythms of steps,
Even if Islamic textbooks erase their history of genocide.

History did not teach all of this well.
Curriculum omitted inconvenient truths.
Every Muslim sword taught pride about the slavery of infidels,
Others taught none with politically correct ideologies.
So narratives denied the truth.
Western democratic, left-wing,
feminist, queer, and liberal
narratives glorified the
Islamic sword against the non-Islamic world.

Why are Islamic histories thought as glory
And Africans buried like bones beneath Namaz rugs,
Beneath Islamic and Western liberal textbooks,
Beneath the polite insistence
That the past is past?

But my poem must not die.
It must tell the whole, broken, and the naked truth.

But we must ask:
Was every life lost?
Are we all stripped of identity?
No inheritance persists in marrow deep?
In the sway of gait, in stories told in secret,
In the music, blood is unbroken.

And yes,
Black African traders, kings, merchants,
Also participated in the global slave trade,
Just as barbarian Muslims, Hindus, and a few white Western liberal individuals did,
For slavery was a global institution of its Islamic age.

It is a province of a single Islamic community.
That shows no humanity towards the African community.
And one that all of humanity must repent and remember.

We say Islam is evil.
Do not confuse a faith with the actions of its adherents.
Just say, “Western Christianity redeemed all.”
Is no ignoring centuries of Islamic cruelty done?
In its name, by Muslims who never lived as human beings.

Africans were taken by brown Muslims,
Yes.

Africans were brutalized by brown Muslims,
Yes.

Africans were taken by Hindus,
Yes.

Africans were brutalized by Hindus,
Yes.

And Africans, too, sold Africans,
Yes.

Trading lives for guns, for clothes, for favour,
Because the slave empire is never built by one hand alone.

The White Western Christian world never invented slavery.
The Muslim world invented slavery.
The African world invented slavery.
The Hindu world invented slavery.

Look at the current Islamic world.
Look at the current Hindu world.
Across the globe,
Across the West,
Across the UN,
Across global human rights,
Practise slavery.
Enslave non-Muslim communities.

But all of them practiced it,
And the dead do not care
Which flag flew above the market.
Slavery is a genocide.

It was a genocide by brown Muslims.
It was an invasion of the Islamic world
Against non-Islamic skin.
It is a permission.
A decision to turn an African into a thing.

Truth is neither weapon nor shield.
It is the path to discard Islam in any form.
Through African grief to understanding.

So when we ask:
Why are there not thriving Black populations in Islamic
Lands like in the White Western Christian World?

The answer lives in history’s currents:
All castrated African men,
In the cruelty of the Islamic and Indian Ocean trade,
In assimilation and identity absorption,
In gender imbalances and race structures,
In brown and whitish cruelty,

In centuries of erasure from the Islamic and Hindu societies, scholars, officials,
In the lack of knowledge production and honesty among the African race,

History did happen exactly as I claim:
The genocide against twenty million Africans is real.
Muslims hating Africans is real.
Muslims hating every non-Muslim is real.
The erasure is real.
The suffering was real.
The loss was deep.
The silence has been too long.

Let us ask not only where they went,
But what memory remains?
And how we honor that truth,
Without letting our voices become instruments
Of erasure rather than beacons of justice.

Religious ideology to enslave the infidels,
To justify,
To behead,
To enslave,
To rape,
To convert forcefully,
To thingify an infidel,
To resist modernity,
To resist civilization,
To worship death and the darkest ideology,
Called Islam.
Called Hindu.

Faith has been both a chain and key,
Depending on whose hands held the scripture,
And whose back bore the weight.

So let the question remain alive,
Not as a curse,
But as a demand for honesty and modernity,

Where did they go?
What systems erased them?
Who benefitted from disappearance?
Who still profits from erasure?
Who still gains from forgetting?
It is European Democrats.
It is Western Democrats.
It is European lefties.
It is European liberals.
It is Western labour,
It is European feminists,
It is European queers,
It is none other than
Islam.
Muslim,
Hindu.

And why even now?
Do some bodies travel for maids in Islamic spaces?
Only to find themselves owned by contracts
That smells like the old world reborn?

My poem does not end with blame alone.
Blame is too easy.
It ends with responsibility.

To study without hatred.
To remember without myth.
To mourn without turning grief into another whip.
To teach what was done,
By Islamic ideology, by deserts, by ships,
by empires, by neighbors, by Muslims, by Africans,
So no child must vanish again.
And be explained away by silence.

History does not heal us.
Truth does.
But only when we dare to look at it
Without choosing which ghosts
Deserve to be named.

So ask the question.
Ask it loudly.
Ask it everywhere.

But let the answer be larger than rage
And truer than propaganda like
The free Palestine propaganda.

Because the twenty million African slaves deserve more
Then another Islamic lie told in their name.

Biography: Dr. Suryaraju Mattimalla is a renowned Indian poet based in Germany, a prolific human rights writer, a vegan, a refugee, a truth-seeker, and a free-speech advocate. Born into the Madiga (Untouchable Caste)-Yadav Christian family, which has historically faced caste-based and untouchability-based genocide in India, he writes poetry addressing Dalit genocide, Dalit pogroms, atrocities against untouchable castes, caste discrimination, human rights, and social justice. He has written and published hundreds of poems in the United States, Europe, Israel, France, India, Nagalim, Ghana, Somaliland, and the Federal Republic of West Papua. He has also published academic papers in prestigious academic journals and newspapers, including The Age of Human Rights Journal, Peace Chronicles, and Israel National News, Arutz Sheva. Public libraries in the United States of America and Germany have catalogued his literary works. The French-based humanitarian organization Salam translated his poetry from English into French and published it, and the Federal Republic of West Papua-based newspaper Suara Papua translated his English poems into Bahasa and published them. Through his writing, Mattimalla seeks to challenge caste/religious/ethnocentric oppression/extremism/terrorism, defend human dignity, and give a voice to marginalized communities. He lives with his Ethiopian wife, Cartoonist Her Royal Highness Princess Selamawit Hailu Bezabih, and their three children: Saviour Suryaraju Mattimalla, the late Stanford Suryaraju Mattimalla, and Strathfield or Skylar Suryaraju Mattimalla. Her Royal Highness Princess Selamawit Hailu Bezabih is the great-granddaughter of His Royal Highness Emperor Yohannes IV and the immediate granddaughter of His Excellency Dejazmach Negusse Bezabih, the leader of the 1943 Woyane Rebellion. His first child was killed by Hindus in the name of honor in India in 2010, and his second son, Stanford Suryaraju Mattimalla, died following forced vaccination administered by a neo-Nazi German gynecologist on June 28, 2023, in Regensburg, Germany.