The Silent Millennium
The Silent Millennium
(Where Are the Children of the Desert?
A millennium of shadows stretched across the shifting sand,
From the seventh to the twentieth, a heavy, trading hand.
Arab, Berber, sub-Saharan, charting routes of pain,
Binding ten to eighteen million in a long, enduring chain.
Across the harsh trans-Saharan waste, the Nile’s ancient flow,
To North Africa and Asian shores, the stolen lives would go.
Eastward through the Indian Ocean, where the dhows would ride,
To the Sultanate of Zanzibar, upon a tragic tide.
They laboured in the clove fields, where the sweet spices grew,
Acquired by raid and tribute, and a local bargain too.
Unlike the western ocean trade that sought the strongest man,
A different, cruel dynamic shaped this eastern, binding plan.
Three women for each lonely man were taken from their home,
To serve within the domestic walls, in harems made of stone.
And for the men, a sharper grief, the blade of the knife,
To guard the palaces as eunuchs, through a short and muted life.
Today the echoes linger on in memory and race,
A sensitive and layered past that time cannot erase
They call them; Afro-Americans!
Where are then; Afro-Arabians?
Africa, wants to know.
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