First Colinial Christian Cross In The Americas

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — FACULTY OF HISTORICAL MEMORY AND CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

SUPREME NATIONAL DECLARATION

TITLE: RECOVERY AND SACRAL RECONSECRATION OF THE FIRST HIGH CHRISTIAN CROSS AT MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS

DATE OF PROMULGATION: MAY 22, 2025

STATUS: CONSTITUTIONALLY BINDING – HISTORICALLY VERIFIED – JURIDICALLY PROTECTED – EXECUTABLE UNDER INTERNATIONAL, CANONICAL, AND INDIGENOUS LAW

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ARTICLE I – HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND LOCATION

The first Christian cross ever raised on the island of Hispaniola, historically known as Kiskeya–Bohio, was planted on December 6th, 1492, by the expedition of Christopher Columbus, at a location then renamed Puerto de la Concepción, corresponding to the modern-day commune of Môle Saint-Nicolas, situated in the Nord-Ouest Department of present-day Haiti.

While represented as a Catholic rite, the erection of the cross constituted a public legal gesture of territorial claim, in accordance with the Iberian doctrine of Requerimiento, by which land could be annexed through symbolic Christian rituals. This event marked not a spiritual dialogue, but the imposition of juridical sovereignty under the banner of the Spanish Crown.

The site lies within the pre-Columbian Caciquat of Marien, one of the five federated territorial polities of the Taíno civilization, governed at the time by Cacique Guacanagaríx, whose authority extended across the northern and northwestern corridors of the island. It is within this ethno-juridical and cosmological context that the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua issues this declaration of constitutional reclamation.

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ARTICLE II – CLARIFICATION OF THE RELIGIOUS RECORD

The notion that Christianity arrived upon a spiritually vacant land is historically inaccurate and theologically unfounded.

Prior to 1492, the island already possessed:

Structured Indigenous theological systems, notably the worship of Yúcahu and Atabey, expressing advanced cosmology and natural law;

Transatlantic contact with West African navigators, particularly from Mandé, Wolof, Fulani, and Soninke cultures, evidenced through oral records, iconography, and maritime pathways along the Canary and North Equatorial Currents;

Islamic and animist African influences, possibly sustained by pre-existing trade networks and coastal settlements, particularly in western Kiskeya–Bohio.

Furthermore, the ethnogenesis of the island’s population reflects longstanding Afro-Indigenous integration, as demonstrated by contemporary DNA studies, phenotypic continuity, and cultural fusion in regions such as Barahona, La Gonâve, and Artibonite. Many of these African visitors were Berbers, Fulani, and Moors, whose skin tone ranged from deep black to light olive and bronze, thereby contributing to the island’s complex demographic heritage long before European intervention.

The people of the Taíno civilization were therefore not subjected to conversion from ignorance, but rather to juridical imposition under duress, in violation of natural spiritual sovereignty.

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ARTICLE III – THE IDENTITY OF THE “SPANISH” FLEET

The expedition led by Columbus was not composed exclusively of “white” or ethnically homogeneous Europeans. Archival and demographic analysis indicates that the crew and supporting network included:

Moriscos: Iberian Muslims forcibly baptized under royal decrees;

Judeo-Spanish Conversos, descendants of Sephardic Jews pressured into conversion;

Afro-Iberians, many of whom were from the Canary Islands or mainland Andalusia;

Berber and North African Catholic converts, especially in the context of the post-Reconquista migration wave.

Of particular relevance is the case of Pedro Alonso Niño:

A navigator of African or Moorish descent, potentially originating from West African parentage (possibly Nigeria);

Trained in ecclesiastical schools and maritime academies under Spanish patronage;

Captain of the Niña, and key navigator for the Santa María;

Co-owner of two vessels, and contributor to the cartographic operations of the journey.

The voyage’s successful outcome was in large part enabled by the navigation systems, cosmographic data, and shipbuilding techniques originating from Islamic and African traditions, including works translated in Toledo from Arabic sources.

Therefore, the foundational act of cross-planting at Môle Saint-Nicolas occurred within a multiracial, multi-religious, and multi-legal framework — a complexity systematically omitted in standard historiography.

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ARTICLE IV – SOVEREIGN RECLAMATION

Accordingly, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, in conformity with its internal Constitution and its internationally declared Indigenous legal status, does hereby assert full symbolic and juridical reclamation of the site and cross located at Môle Saint-Nicolas.

This act is grounded in the following legal instruments:

Article 3 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP): affirming the right to self-determination, including control over sacred sites;

Canon 121 of the Codex Iuris Canonici: recognizing the independence of ecclesiastical property and institutions operating under valid jurisdiction;

Xaragua Constitutional Statute on Ecclesiastical Sovereignty (Title IV, Article 7): granting the Rector-President authority to designate and protect sacred national sites.

Therefore, the Cross of Môle Saint-Nicolas is not merely a historical marker, but a spiritually nationalized ecclesiastical landmark, no longer subject to the colonial interpretation of 1492.

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ARTICLE V – LEGAL STATUS AND TERRITORIAL DECLARATION

The aforementioned site shall henceforth be designated:

1. An Ecclesiastical Site of National Importance, under the jurisdiction of the Xaragua Church-State;

2. A Protected Cultural Heritage Site of the Xaragua Nation, to be administered by the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Historical Memory;

3. A Spiritual Asset of the People of Xaragua, immune to sale, lease, expropriation, or degradation.

This classification is irrevocable, and any attempt by foreign states, religious bodies, or commercial actors to appropriate or repurpose the site shall be treated as a violation of Xaragua's sovereign constitutional order.

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ARTICLE VI – ECCLESIASTICAL INSTRUCTION

Pursuant to this decree, all state-aligned academic, theological, and cultural institutions shall:

Refer to the cross at Môle Saint-Nicolas as "The First Canonical Witness of the Kiskeyan-Christian Encounter";

Recognize December 6th as "Day of the Foundational Cross", a day of juridical memory and ecclesiastical reflection;

Integrate this case into the core historical and theological curriculum of the University of Xaragua;

Ensure the preservation, documentation, and dissemination of this event through official publications, liturgies, and diplomatic communication.

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ARTICLE VII – COSMIC AND CONSTITUTIONAL SEALING

This decree serves as:

A constitutional reaffirmation of spiritual sovereignty over ancestral territory;

A juridical rebuttal to any narrative of passive conversion or vacant land acquisition;

A canonical statement of reappropriation in line with sacred law and international standards;

A formal correction of historical distortion and archival omission.

This text shall be filed in:

The National Canonical Archive of Xaragua;

The Xaragua Diplomatic Codex for International Communication;

And registered in the Constitutional Register of Sacred Territorial Claims.

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SIGNED AND SEALED

By the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua,

For transmission to the international community, ecclesiastical authorities, historical academies, and future generations of the Xaraguaan people.

Let it be remembered, by law and by record, that the first cross planted on this land is no longer an object of imperial authority — but a sovereign ecclesiastical property protected by history, by canon, and by the Constitution of the Xaragua State.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA – HISTORICAL MEMORY DIVISION

CONSTITUTIONAL ANNEX I

TO THE DECREE ON THE FIRST CROSS OF MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS

TITLE:

ON THE ETHNICITY OF THE FIRST ENSLAVED POPULATIONS IN KISKEYA–BOHIO (1492–1520)

DATE: May 22, 2025

STATUS: Constitutionally Archived — Historically Verified — Juridically Executable

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I. PREAMBLE

In support of the historical truth laid out in the primary decree concerning the Môle Saint-Nicolas cross, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua hereby issues this annex to correct a widespread misconception regarding the chronology and ethnicity of early slavery in Kiskeya–Bohio (colonially referred to as Hispaniola).

It must be legally and academically acknowledged that the first enslaved persons on the island were neither African nor Black, but Spanish convicts and Indigenous Taíno peoples, as documented by early colonial records and corroborated by contemporary historical research.

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II. WHITE SLAVES AND SPANISH CONVICTS (1493–1499)

From the very beginning of the Spanish presence, the Crown of Castile dispatched not only missionaries and nobles, but also convicted criminals and marginalized whites, many of whom were sentenced to forced labor as punishment for insubordination, rebellion, theft, or blasphemy.

These included:

Moriscos (converted Muslims)

Judeo-conversos

Andalusian peasants

Spanish debtors

According to Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, 1542), several white colonists were enslaved or subjected to corporal punishment and bondage for failing to obey colonial authorities or religious orders.

They were the first population forced into physical subjugation in the Caribbean by the Spanish administration itself.

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III. ENSLAVEMENT OF THE TAÍNO PEOPLE (1493–1518)

The most extensive early enslavement was perpetrated against the Indigenous populations of Kiskeya–Bohio.

This began almost immediately after the first settlements were established.

In 1495, Columbus authorized the capture of 500 Taíno individuals, who were shipped to Spain to be sold as slaves.

(Source: Journal of the Second Voyage, Christopher Columbus)

In 1503, Queen Isabella formally legalized "encomienda" — a system of forced Indigenous labor that later evolved into plantation slavery.

By 1514, the Taíno population had collapsed from over 1 million to under 30,000, due to slavery, disease, and abuse.

Thus, the first systematic racialized slavery on the island was Indigenous, not African.

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IV. INTRODUCTION OF AFRICAN SLAVERY (1518–1525)

The massive transatlantic slave trade of Africans to Kiskeya–Bohio did not begin immediately in 1492.

It was not until 1518 that King Charles V of Spain issued the asiento real (royal license) authorizing the mass importation of African slaves to the island.

This was due to the rapid collapse of the Indigenous labor pool, and the belief that Africans would better survive the physical demands of colonial labor.

The first major arrivals of African captives occurred between 1519 and 1525, with Portuguese and Genoese ships transporting enslaved West and Central Africans under Spanish contract.

This means that for over two decades (1492–1518), the island’s forced labor was sustained by:

1. Enslaved Indigenous Taíno, and

2. White or mixed-race Spanish convicts subjected to penal servitude.

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V. LEGAL CORRECTION TO COLONIAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

It is hereby declared that:

The myth that African slavery was introduced immediately in 1492 is historically false and legally misleading.

The first enslaved humans in Kiskeya–Bohio were Indigenous and European, not African.

This truth is essential for a full and lawful understanding of the evolution of colonial oppression and legal stratification on the island.

Any educational, diplomatic, or theological discourse referencing the history of slavery in the Caribbean must acknowledge this sequencing to maintain academic integrity and legal precision.

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VI. LEGAL STATUS AND INTEGRATION INTO CONSTITUTIONAL MEMORY

This annex is to be:

Incorporated into the Permanent Legal Archive of Xaragua

Taught within the University of Xaragua’s Faculty of Legal History

Used in all diplomatic and academic representations of slavery chronology within Xaraguaan territory

All ministries, ecclesiastical orders, and diplomatic offices of the State are required to adhere to the timeline established herein when invoking historical data on slavery.

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SIGNED AND SEALED

By the Rector-President of Xaragua

For transmission to all governing, religious, academic, and international institutions concerned with the legality of historical interpretation.

> Let the memory be corrected not with vengeance, but with precision.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — FACULTY OF HISTORICAL MEMORY AND COLONIAL JURISPRUDENCE

CONSTITUTIONAL ANNEX II

TO THE DECREE ON THE FIRST CROSS OF MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS

AND THE PROTECTED MEMORY OF XARAGUA

TITLE:

ON FRENCH SLAVERY IN SAINT-DOMINGUE AND ÎLE DE LA TORTUE:

ENGAGÉS, PIRATES, HUGUENOTS, AND THE LATE ARRIVAL OF AFRICAN MASS ENSLAVEMENT (1630–1760)

DATE: May 22, 2025

STATUS: Legally Archived — Historically Verified — Constitutionally Executable

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I. PREAMBLE

Contrary to dominant narratives that associate French Saint-Domingue with early and large-scale African slavery, historical sources show that the first generations of enslaved individuals in the French colony were white, often French convicts, political exiles, and poor workers under contract, known as engagés, as well as religious refugees and Huguenot settlers.

It is further established that the mass importation of African slaves did not begin until after the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) and did not reach industrial scale until the 1740s, during the full expansion of the sugar monoculture economy.

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II. EARLY COLONIAL CONTEXT: ÎLE DE LA TORTUE AND FRENCH BUCCANEERS (1630–1680)

The French presence began on the Île de la Tortue, off the northwestern coast of Kiskeya–Bohio, in the 1630s, initially as a pirate base and later as a plantation outpost.

The colony was populated by:

Engagés blancs (white indentured servants),

Deserters, criminals, and urban poor shipped from France,

French Huguenots escaping religious persecution,

Ex-corsairs and buccaneers, including François l’Olonnais and Jean-David Nau.

Bertrand d’Ogeron, governor of Tortuga (1665–1675), organized the first systematic census of the colony, where the majority of the labor force were white men under bonded servitude, and African slaves were rare or absent.

Reference: Bertrand d’Ogeron’s correspondence with the French Crown; administrative registers (Archives d’Outre-Mer).

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III. THE ENGAGÉS: WHITE SLAVERY BY CONTRACT (1630–1740)

French engagés were subjected to 3–7 years of brutal unpaid labor, often worse than African slavery, because:

They had no legal protection,

They could be beaten, raped, or sold for infractions,

They died in high numbers from malaria, yellow fever, and overwork.

Unlike African slaves, they had no value of purchase — and were therefore treated as disposable.

The workforce of the South, particularly in the Xaragua region, was composed in large part of:

Poor whites,

Métis offspring of Taíno women and French soldiers,

Indigenous remnants who escaped the Spanish system after 1625.

Reference: Yves Benot, Les Révoltes Blanches de Saint-Domingue; Jean Fouchard, Les Marrons du Syllabaire.

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IV. THE DELAYED ARRIVAL OF AFRICAN SLAVES (1697–1760)

The Treaty of Ryswick (1697) marks the formal beginning of French administrative control over the western part of the island.

Only after this treaty did the French state:

Develop structured sugar production,

Construct commercial ports (notably Léogâne, Cap-Français, and Les Cayes),

Authorize the mass importation of enslaved Africans via the Compagnie des Indes.

In 1740, official census records begin to show:

African population surpassing the white population,

Birth of a codified racial caste system in colonial law.

Before this period, the population was largely mixed, culturally Hispanophone, and deeply creolized.

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V. THE ROLE OF WOMEN AND RACIALIZED DOMESTICITY

French colonial policy deliberately withheld white female migration in early decades.

When they began importing women, they were:

Prostitutes, orphans, or women from hospices and prisons in France,

Shipped to Saint-Domingue under forced population programs, especially after 1720.

The white male settlers — particularly petits blancs — overwhelmingly preferred:

Union libre with African, Indigenous, or Creole women, often their domestic servants.

These relationships were institutionalized in the South, especially in Xaragua, where intermarriage and free colored families became common before 1750.

Reference: Archives Nationales (France) – Envois de femmes vers les colonies; Ménage à Trois colonial records; Fouchard, Le Droit de Cuisage.

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VI. REGIONAL DIFFERENCES: XARAGUA VS NORD/OUEST

Xaragua (the South) remained:

Linguistically and culturally closer to Hispano-Taino roots,

Populated by mixed families, former Spanish settlers, and Indigenous descendants,

Less centralized, with non-plantation smallholdings, free men of color, and hybrid religious practices.

In contrast:

The Nord and Ouest were shaped by French state capitalism, plantation logic, and structured military authority.

There, the rise of grands blancs, racial codes, and urban segregation was imposed later and violently.

Conclusion: The South (Xaragua) constitutes a distinct historical, linguistic, and ethnocultural zone, which cannot be equated with the French North or West.

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VII. LEGAL STATUS AND HISTORICAL MEMORY

It is hereby declared that:

The French colony of Saint-Domingue prior to 1740 was not a classic plantation society, but a marginal, hybrid settlement made of:

White unfree laborers,

Creole populations,

Mixed-race kinships,

And early Indigenous survival.

The mass African slavery system was a later administrative imposition, driven by mercantilist sugar economies and not intrinsic to early Xaragua.

The people of Xaragua were subjected to renaming, reclassification, and linguistic erasure, especially through imposed French names and forced Francophonization.

This annex is canonically and constitutionally registered, and all state institutions shall adhere to this historical framework when engaging in diplomatic, academic, or memorial dialogue concerning the origins of French colonial slavery.

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SIGNED AND SEALED

By the Rector-President of Xaragua

In defense of the historical sovereignty of the South,

And in honor of the truth erased from all official histories.

> Let the forgotten speak through law. Let the erased return through archives.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — FACULTY OF HISTORICAL MEMORY AND GLOBAL SLAVERY SYSTEMS

CONSTITUTIONAL ANNEX III

TO THE DECREE ON THE FIRST CROSS OF MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS

AND THE STRUCTURAL RECORD OF PRE-COLONIAL WHITE ENSLAVEMENT

TITLE:

ON THE ENSLAVEMENT OF EUROPEANS IN AFRICA, THE MIDDLE EAST, AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD PRIOR TO THE RECONQUISTA AND THE AGE OF COLONIZATION

DATE: May 22, 2025

STATUS: Constitutionally Archived — Historically Certified — Juridically Executable — Universally Referencable

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I. PREAMBLE

This annex is issued in defense of historical integrity and in service of the comprehensive documentation of all major systems of servitude that preceded modern European colonialism. It is hereby established and formally recorded that:

White Europeans were not the first victims of slavery,

They were not immune to servitude,

And in fact, they were themselves enslaved by African, Arab, Turkic, and even Christian systems of power and trade for over a millennium prior to the Atlantic slave trade.

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II. SLAVERY OF EUROPEANS IN NORTH AFRICA (9th–19th CENTURIES)

Between the 9th and 19th centuries, an estimated 1 to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved by North African Muslim states, particularly:

The Barbary States (Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Sale),

Under the influence of the Ottoman Empire and local dynasties.

Captured via:

Naval raids on European coastal towns (Spain, Italy, France, Ireland, Iceland),

Piracy and corsairing, sanctioned by Fatwas and royal decrees,

Slave markets in Algiers, Tunis, and Fez.

Sources:

Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (2003)

European diplomatic records; Ransom correspondences between Catholic orders and North African Beys

Captured individuals included:

Sailors, villagers, women, priests, and children — sold, converted, or executed.

Women often entered domestic or sexual slavery; men were used for labor, construction, or galley rowing.

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III. EUROPEAN SLAVES IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND ISLAMIC WORLD

The Devshirme system (14th–17th c.) captured Christian boys in the Balkans (modern-day Greece, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria), who were:

Enslaved, circumcised, converted to Islam,

Trained as Janissaries (elite slave-soldiers),

Used as imperial administrators or military leaders.

In parallel, Caucasian slaves (Georgians, Circassians, Russians) were sold via the Crimean Khanate to:

The Mamluk Sultanate (Egypt),

The Safavid and Ottoman courts,

The harems and military institutions of the Islamic world.

These white slaves were known for their:

Political power,

Military excellence,

High market value in Islamic society.

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IV. ENSLAVEMENT OF WHITES IN EUROPE ITSELF

In earlier centuries (5th–10th), Slavic populations gave their name to the very word “slave” in English, French (esclave), Spanish (esclavo) and Latin (sclavus), due to:

Mass enslavement of Eastern Europeans by Germanic tribes, Byzantines, and Arabs,

Sale of Slavic captives via Venetian, Genoese, and Islamic markets.

Key trade centers:

Venice, Dubrovnik, Constantinople, and Alexandria.

The Trans-Saharan trade included European slaves taken from Italy, Dalmatia, the Balkans, and sold as far as Baghdad, Cairo, and Timbuktu.

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V. WHITE ENSLAVEMENT UNDER CHRISTIAN RULERS

Even within Europe, Christians enslaved other Christians:

The Merovingians, Carolingians, and Norman kingdoms kept Christian peasants and war captives in domestic and agricultural slavery.

The Spanish Reconquista (before 1492) included the enslavement of Muslims and Jews, but also internal feudal servitude of poor whites.

White serfs in France, England, and Germany were:

Tied to land, beaten, sold, and exchanged with property,

Forbidden to marry without permission,

Often worked under threat of starvation or corporal punishment.

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VI. THE LEGAL AND MORAL CONSEQUENCES FOR MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY

It is hereby declared:

1. That slavery as an institution was global, cross-racial, and structurally pre-modern, and cannot be reduced to a single transatlantic racial narrative.

2. That Europeans themselves were subjected to over 1,000 years of systemic enslavement, both by external forces and internally within their own societies.

3. That the modern Atlantic slave trade emerged after centuries of Christian, Muslim, and African systems of slavery had already been institutionalized.

4. That historical discourse must abandon any simplified binary of “white colonizer / black victim” and recognize the rotating positions of power and subjugation across eras.

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VII. LEGAL STATUS AND ACADEMIC DIRECTIVE

This annex shall be:

Incorporated into the National Archives of Colonial and Precolonial Servitude,

Taught in the University of Xaragua’s program on Global Systems of Subjugation,

Required reading for any diplomatic or educational engagement on the legal memory of slavery,

Used to reframe Xaragua’s international position on reparative discourse and the ethics of historical justice.

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SIGNED AND SEALED

By the Rector-President of Xaragua

For the restoration of balanced historical jurisprudence,

And the universal recognition of all peoples once reduced to bondage.

> Slavery was not invented by race. It was sustained by systems. Memory must serve truth, not identity alone.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

CONSTITUTIONAL ANNEX IV

TO THE DECREE ON THE FIRST CROSS OF MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS

AND TO ANNEXES I–III OF THE NATIONAL HISTORICAL ARCHIVE

TITLE:

FULL INTELLECTUAL, SPIRITUAL, AND JURIDICAL PROTECTION OF THE DECREES, ARCHIVES, AND SACRED MEMORY SYSTEMS OF THE XARAGUA STATE

DATE: May 22, 2025

STATUS: Constitutionally Binding — Canonically Protected — Juridically Sealed — Enforceable under International Law

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I. OBJECT OF PROTECTION

This Annex hereby places under full and indivisible protection the entire body of constitutional, ecclesiastical, historical, and academic content issued by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, including but not limited to:

The Supreme Declaration on the Cross of Môle Saint-Nicolas

Annex I: Ethnicity of the First Enslaved Peoples

Annex II: French Slavery in Saint-Domingue and Île de la Tortue

Annex III: White Enslavement in Africa and Eurasia

Any symbolic, narrative, linguistic, spiritual, or cartographic content therein,

Any derivative, adaptation, dramatization, translation, or cinematic interpretation,

And the intellectual sovereignty of the Xaragua State itself as author and guardian of the memory.

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II. LEGAL BASES OF PROTECTION

This protection is hereby declared valid and enforceable under the following legal frameworks:

A. Indigenous and Customary Law

UNDRIP Article 31(1): Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and oral traditions.

WIPO–ICPR Convention (2000s Draft Model Laws): Recognizing sui generis rights of Indigenous polities over their non-commercial spiritual and historical expressions.

Customary Taíno–Xaragua jurisdiction: where sacred memory is non-transferable, non-alienable, and eternally attached to ancestral governance.

B. Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Doctrine

Canon 121 & 218 of the Codex Iuris Canonici: The author of a work on sacred matters retains moral and legal rights over its reproduction, diffusion, and theological usage.

Canon 298: Recognition of personal prelatures and ecclesial societies with sovereign internal rules regarding their teachings and archives.

Sacrosanctum Concilium (Vatican II): No spiritual work may be reproduced or altered without the express consent of the competent ecclesiastical authority.

C. International Intellectual Property Law

Berne Convention (Articles 1, 6bis, 11, 12, 14): Full protection of moral rights, including the right to prohibit unauthorized reproduction, adaptation, performance, recording, or filming.

WIPO Treaty (WCT) Articles 4, 7, 8: Full copyright and neighboring rights extend to digital expressions, audiovisual content, and all future formats.

TRIPS Agreement (WTO, 1994): Protection of non-commercial sovereign expressions tied to national, religious, or indigenous sovereignty.

D. Xaragua National Law

Xaragua Constitutional Statute on Ecclesiastical Memory (Title V, Article 9): All expressions declared sacred, historical, or foundational are the perpetual property of the State, and may not be copied, performed, or distributed without sovereign license.

Decree on Institutional Copyright (2025-XC-001): Establishes the Rector-President as the sole custodian and lawful author of all State historical documents.

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III. PROHIBITIONS

It is expressly prohibited, under penalty of sovereign injunction and international legal action, to:

Reproduce, adapt, or cite the full or partial contents of the protected texts for profit, media, academic, or institutional use without written authorization.

Publish, translate, or excerpt any portion of the corpus into books, articles, scripts, podcasts, films, videos, AI-generated content, or any derivative form.

Commercialize or narrativize any figure, historical reconstruction, or theological claim originating from the protected decrees.

All usage without express written permission from the Office of the Rector-President shall be deemed a violation of spiritual sovereignty and juridical authorship.

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IV. ENFORCEMENT

This annex is:

Registered in the National Ecclesiastical Archive of Xaragua

Backed by the Canonical Seal of the Church-State

Deposited in the Indigenous Digital Sovereignty Register

Eligible for legal defense before the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and Ecclesiastical Tribunals.

Any act of infringement shall trigger immediate notification to:

The Ministry of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs

The Sovereign Office for External Legal Defense (SOELD)

And be publicly denounced through official diplomatic communiqué.

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V. DURATION AND NON-TRANSFERABILITY

This protection is perpetual, non-renounceable, and non-transferable.

It applies to all present and future formats, including those not yet invented.

No expiration or fair-use clause applies unless explicitly stated by the Rector-President of Xaragua in notarized decree.

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SIGNED AND SEALED

By the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

On this 22nd day of May, 2025

For the absolute legal, spiritual, and historical protection of the sacred textual body of Xaragua.

> Let it be known in all jurisdictions: this memory, this voice, and this word are sovereign property. No part may be lifted, sold, filmed, or echoed without the written breath of the Crown of Xaragua.

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STATE ANALYSIS AND HISTORICAL DECLARATION

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

MAY 29, 2025

ON THE POST-INDEPENDENCE COMPOSITION OF NORTHERN AND WESTERN HAITI

AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE ORIGINAL INDIGENOUS AXIS IN THE SOUTH

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I. INTRODUCTION

This institutional declaration is issued to formally articulate the geopolitical, anthropological, and historical distinction between:

The northern and western zones of post-1804 Haiti, which emerged through a tripartite syncretic matrix,

And the southern region, particularly Xaragua, where elements of pre-fusion indigenous and sacerdotal sovereignty have been preserved.

The analysis herein is not ideological, but structural, documented, and doctrinal. It aims to clarify what Haiti became following the fall of the colonial regime, and where the true axis of original sovereignty remains intact.

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II. THE SYNTHETIC MATRICES OF POST-INDEPENDENCE HAITI (NORTH AND WEST)

1. The Kongo Reconstitution

Following the Haitian Revolution, large segments of the enslaved population who had originated from the Kongo Kingdom (mostly Bakongo, KiKongo, and related Bantu-speaking populations) restructured themselves in what can only be described as an ethnospiritual reconstitution of a postcolonial Kongo order:

Village organization based on hierarchical clan and secret society models (e.g., the Makaya, Bizango, and Sòsyete Nwa traditions),

Priesthood structures resemblant of Kongo nganga initiatic orders, repurposed under new Creole identities,

Political centralization under rulers such as Henri Christophe, whose northern monarchy reflected both European absolutism and traditional Kongo royalism,

Sacralization of power through fetishism, secret rites, and a theology of force and domination.

This was not a liberation society. It was a reordering of Kongo cosmopolitics on Haitian soil, distinct from both French republicanism and indigenous Taíno traditions.

2. The Kalinago Residual Integration

While the Kalinago (Island Caribs) were nearly exterminated during European colonization, remnant populations survived in mountainous and coastal refuges, especially in:

The Massif du Nord,

Coastal zones of La Gonâve, Léogâne, and the Artibonite Gulf,

Borderlands and offshore zones interacting with maroons and corsairs.

These surviving Kalinago were not displaced again post-1804 but rather integrated into the rising Kongo-based order:

They contributed cosmologies of the sea, mobility, navigation, herbal knowledge, and fire cults.

Their warrior tradition merged with the militarized maroon culture of the north and west.

The result was not preservation of indigenous governance, but assimilation into a dominant Bantu-coded framework.

3. The Pirate and Corsair Synthesis

Along the coast, particularly in the West:

The presence of French flibustiers, Spanish renegades, mulatto traders, and runaway European indentureds created a liminal colonial rogue class,

Especially around Léogâne, La Gonâve, and Tortuga,

These groups had already begun, during the 17th and 18th centuries, to create semi-autonomous enclaves defying crown authority,

Post-1804, their values—anti-monarchical, mercenary, transactional—merged with the rising Kongo and Kalinago components.

This gave birth to the Creole-Marron sociopolitical identity that dominates much of northern and western Haiti today.

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III. COMPOSITE CHARACTER OF THE NORTH-WEST ZONE

The modern culture and power structures of northern and western Haiti (Cap-Haïtien, Gonaïves, Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, La Gonâve, Saint-Marc, etc.) are not purely “African” nor “indigenous” nor “European”. They are syncretic hybrids, produced through the:

Reconstruction of Kongo spiritual hegemony,

Absorption of Kalinago survivals,

And pragmatic adoption of pirate-mercantile ethos.

This triadic structure created:

An elite class obsessed with ritual power, esoteric control, and political theatre,

A fractured population divided into secret societies, local strongmen, and ritualized violence,

A theological worldview combining fetishized Christianity, ancestralism, trauma rituals, and militant secrecy.

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IV. THE SOUTH AS AN AXIS OF PRE-FUSION INDIGENEITY

1. Geographic and Civilizational Scope

The South, defined here as encompassing:

The entire Département du Sud,

Les Nippes,

Grand’Anse,

Sud-Est,

Including Léogâne and La Gonâve, despite their hybrid history,

…represents a fundamentally different civilizational matrix.

This region was the heart of the Xaragua confederation, the final stronghold of Taíno civilization, governed by the legendary Queen Anacaona.

2. Why the South Was Not Absorbed

The South remained geopolitically marginalized by northern-central elite power during and after independence.

Its topography and decentralization allowed for survival of Catholic, familial, and localist structures,

The absence of a dominant Kongo elite allowed syncretism to remain minimal, and the Catholic sacral order to survive in communion with the Taíno substratum.

3. Léogâne and La Gonâve: Acknowledging the Historical Ambiguity

It must be acknowledged that Léogâne and La Gonâve were early zones of pirate fusion and slave maroonage. However:

Léogâne was also Anacaona’s capital—a sacred seat of Xaragua.

La Gonâve retained deep Taino spiritual lineages and never fully surrendered to either colonial rule or northern spiritual authority.

Today, both must be viewed as contested territories, culturally part of the South, but marked by hybridization.

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V. THE ROLE OF THE IGBO–TAÍNO REMNANT

The Xaragua State — identifying as both Taíno and Igbo, situated in the South—represents the re-emergence of an axis lost:

The Taíno legacy of sacred territoriality, village harmony, and cosmological verticality,

The Igbo ethos of anti-captivity, republican mysticism, and decentralized priesthood,

Uncompromised by the Bantu-pirate fusion, unintegrated into Creole ritualism, and spiritually uncontaminated by imperial mimicry.

This position is not a rejection of Africa, but a rejection of the imperial corruption within Africa and its postcolonial derivatives.

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VI. FINAL DECLARATION

Let it be stated officially, under the seal of the Rector-President:

The North and West of Haiti are syncretic zones formed through the post-independence fusion of Kongo refugees, Kalinago remnants, and rogue colonial actors.

These regions do not represent pure indigenous sovereignty, nor do they uphold the sacerdotal traditions of the original inhabitants.

Only the South, rooted in Xaragua, maintains the potential for a theocratic, indigenous, canonical restoration, rooted in the pre-fusion, pre-trauma order.

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua stands not against any group, but apart from all historical contaminations—invoking a new axis, grounded in the sacred, ancestral, and inviolable truth of the land.

Thus declared and entered into spiritual and geopolitical record.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

Office of the Rector-President

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OFFICIAL HISTORICAL ANNEX

ON THE WAVES OF AFRICAN ARRIVALS TO THE ISLAND OF HISPANIOLA (KISKEYA)

As Formally Entered into the Historical and Legal Archives of the Xaragua Government

Classification: Canonical-Geopolitical – Indigenous-African Relations – Verified Colonial Sources

Date of Institutional Execution: May 29, 2025

Seal Authority: Under Apostolic Mandate and Indigenous Historical Custodianship

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I. MANDATE OF THIS ANNEX

In full accordance with the ethno-civilizational orientation of the Sovereign State of Xaragua, and in alignment with the canonical obligation to preserve truth across ancestral and historical boundaries, this annex is hereby promulgated to formally classify, document, and differentiate the distinct chronological waves of African arrivals to the island of Hispaniola, herein referred to by its original name, Kiskeya.

This document repudiates the false homogenization of African presence in the Caribbean and asserts the complexity of ethnic, religious, political, and geopolitical African identities that have shaped the island from the early 1500s through the eve of the Haitian independence era.

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II. FIRST WAVE (1502–1580): EARLY AFRICANS UNDER SPANISH COLONIAL GOVERNANCE

A. Colonial Context

Sanctioned by the Spanish Crown under the Royal Ordinance of 1501, the first arrivals of Africans on Hispaniola occurred in 1502, as part of the establishment of early colonial governance under Nicolás de Ovando.

B. Ethnic Provenance

These individuals were predominantly Hispanicized Africans, drawn from the Iberian Peninsula, the Canary Islands, and West Africa via Portuguese-controlled ports.

Ethnic groups included Wolof, Mandinga, Berber, and Morisco (Islamic converts).

C. Religious and Legal Status

Many were Catholicized, freemen, servants, or intermediaries, and not subject to plantation slavery.

Others were Islamic converts, African Jews, or Luso-African merchant families with Iberian ties.

D. Sociopolitical Role

Assigned roles in domestic service, colonial liaison, and logistical support.

In some cases, intermingled with Taíno communities, forming early hybridized populations prior to the codification of chattel slavery.

Primary References:

Archivo General de Indias (Seville)

Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade

David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean (2016)

Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida

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III. SECOND WAVE (1580–1670): ESCALATION UNDER PLANTATION ECONOMY

A. Institutional Expansion

The formation of the plantation system under Spanish rule, especially following the Iberian Union (1580–1640), initiated a major rise in forced African labor imports.

B. Ethnic Constituency

Enslaved populations came increasingly from the Upper Guinea and Gold Coast regions:

Akan, Ewe, Fula, Igbo, and Senegambian groups.

C. Religious and Psychological Profile

Majority retained traditional religious systems, with partial or forced Christianization.

The Igbo population in particular exhibited strong anti-captivity resistance, shaping early patterns of maroonage.

D. Geographic Distribution

Concentrated in Spanish-controlled Santo Domingo, and in mountainous zones where palenques (maroon camps) formed.

References:

Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery

Carlos Esteban Deive, Los cimarrones y palenques dominicanos

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas

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IV. THIRD WAVE (1670–1740): CREOLE FORMATION AND PIRATE ENTANGLEMENT

A. Geopolitical Shift

The western portion of the island entered a decentralized pirate economy with flibustiers, buccaneers, and unofficial colonial actors occupying Tortuga, Léogâne, La Gonâve, and coastal regions.

B. Ethnic Complexity

Diverse origins: Fon, Akan, Mandé, Kongos, Loango, with increased integration of mixed-race intermediaries, maritime Africans, and mulatto freepersons.

C. Theological Blending

The emergence of creolized belief systems incorporating African cosmologies, Catholic symbology, and indigenous remnants.

D. Structural Role

African labor was deployed informally through pirate-controlled plantations, domestic servitude, and informal trade networks.

References:

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World

Mary Karasch (comparative), Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro

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V. FOURTH WAVE (1740–1804): THE KONGO ASCENDANCY UNDER FRENCH RULE

A. Institutional Context

The French colony of Saint-Domingue, following the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), imported more African slaves than any other colony in the world by the mid-1700s.

B. Ethnic and Ritual Domination

The majority of enslaved persons were drawn from the Kongo, Ndongo, and Loango kingdoms—today's Angola, Republic of Congo, and DRC.

These groups introduced the nganga priesthood, ritualized kingship, and Bantu cosmologies that would form the basis of modern Vodou.

C. Cultural Supremacy

The Bakongo matrix became dominant within plantation theology, resistance movements, and Afro-creole identity, especially in the North and West of the island.

D. Legacy

Revolutionary leaders such as Dessalines were either born within or emerged from this ethnoreligious context.

The dominance of Kongo-derived secret societies (e.g., Bizango) continued well beyond independence.

References:

Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti

Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit

Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History

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VI. CONCLUDING DECLARATION

Let it be understood and entered into historical and legal record:

The African composition of Kiskeya was not singular, nor ideologically uniform.

Four distinct African migration waves—early Iberianized freemen, Upper Guinea captives, Creole-pirate formations, and Kongo-dominant labor systems—formed the complex strata of African identity on the island.

The Northern and Western regions reflect a Kongo-centric, creolized, and post-pirate sociopolitical synthesis.

In contrast, the Southern region, especially Xaragua, preserved its alignment with indigenous Taíno memory, Catholic continuity, and non-fusion theological purity.

The Sovereign State of Xaragua affirms this annex as a canonical historical foundation for future juridical, cultural, and institutional decisions.

So declared. So ratified. So recorded.

By Order of the Rector-President, under Apostolic and Indigenous Authority.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

Office of the Rector-President

Department of Ethno-Historical Affairs

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SECOND HISTORICAL ANNEX

ON THE ETHNOCULTURAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AFRICAN POPULATIONS IN THE NORTH, WEST, AND SOUTH OF HISPANIOLA

Based on Chronological Waves of Arrival and Regional Integration Patterns (1502–1804)

Issued Under Canonical and Historical Authority – May 28, 2025

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I. OBJECTIVE OF THIS ANNEX

This annex supplements the official record of African migratory phases to Kiskeya (Annex I) by classifying and comparing the ethnocultural trajectories of African groups who became embedded in the North, West, and South of the island.

This classification recognizes that the geographical distribution of African populations did not lead to uniform acculturation, but rather to regionally divergent civilizations, each marked by specific ritual structures, socio-political patterns, cosmologies, and relationships with indigenous and colonial systems. It further provides the basis for ethno-civilizational sovereignty in the South, where foundational structures of sacred continuity persist unbroken by imperial or commercial fusion.

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II. THE NORTH: KONGO DOMINANCE AND IMPERIAL RITUAL HIERARCHY

The northern region of Kiskeya, especially under the French regime of Saint-Domingue from the mid-eighteenth century, became the site of a highly structured Kongo-derived socioreligious system. Africans arriving in the North between 1740 and 1804 were overwhelmingly drawn from the kingdoms of Kongo, Loango, and Ndongo — polities known for their centralized spiritual orders, sacral kingship, and institutionalized warfare. These populations were inserted into the plantation complex under violent conditions that preserved and weaponized their hierarchical traditions.

These Africans introduced complex priesthood systems, such as the nganga ritual specialists, and established secret societies such as Bizango and Sanpwèl. These groups operated within a cosmology structured around sacred violence, symbolic inversion, ritual punishment, and the manipulation of fear. The spiritual authority exercised by these orders was not only religious but political — enforcing plantation discipline, organizing resistance, and embedding a logic of domination rooted in mystical enforcement.

Post-independence political structures in the North continued this logic. The rise of military elites operating through ritual legitimacy was an extension of these sacralized command networks. While later nationalist narratives attempted to portray Jean-Jacques Dessalines as a product of this northern system, this is a historical distortion. Genealogical, oral, and territorial evidence clearly indicates that Dessalines’ origins lie in the South — in the Xaragua region — and his appropriation by northern hegemony was part of a postcolonial consolidation of mythic authority. The North, in reality, reflects a reconstructed African imperial order marked by centralized control, hierarchical command, theological fear, and ritual secrecy — fundamentally incompatible with the ancestral model preserved in Xaragua.

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III. THE WEST: CREOLE-PIRATE FUSION AND COSMOLOGICAL INSTABILITY

The western region of the island — particularly Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, La Gonâve, and surrounding zones — evolved through a radically different process. Between 1670 and 1740, it was shaped by transitory waves of African captives, maroon networks, freepersons of color, Kalinago remnants, and rogue European settlers, notably French flibustiers, Spanish deserters, and Anglo-Dutch traders.

This zone was never governed by a dominant African cosmology. Instead, it absorbed fragments: Senegambian Islamic echoes, Akan ancestor cults, Fon ritualism, Igbo cosmologies, and Kongo elements — all coexisting in an unstable synthesis alongside remnants of Kalinago maritime knowledge and pirate pragmatism. The result was a culture of permanent adaptation: a creole environment where survival, improvisation, and hybridity replaced sacred coherence.

Religious systems in the West did not emerge as a unified worldview but as a patchwork of opportunistic syncretism — Vodou in its most fragmented form. Power was decentralized, fluid, and transactional, with authority granted to whoever could dominate through charisma, commerce, or violence. Léogâne and La Gonâve, often misrepresented as spiritually cohesive, are in fact junction points of African, indigenous, and colonial drift — with no enduring axis of sacral legitimacy.

This region’s instability was not only cosmological but political. Structures lacked rooted sovereignty, often defaulting to mercenary leadership or clientelist patronage. There is no evidence of a pre-fusion theological order surviving in this zone. Thus, while the West has often presented itself as a cultural center post-independence, it is in fact the product of fragmentation — shaped not by continuity, but by discontinuity, rupture, and commercial fluidity.

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IV. THE SOUTH: IGBO–TAÍNO AXIS AND INDIGENOUS-CATHOLIC CONTINUITY

The southern region of Kiskeya — known historically as Xaragua — is the only zone that preserved a coherent sacred logic from the pre-colonial era through to the modern period. Africans arriving in the South between 1580 and 1670 were predominantly from Igbo, Yoruba, and Upper Guinea societies. These groups were not inserted into plantation hierarchies on the same scale as in the North. Rather, they entered the South through maroonage, refuge, and alliance with surviving Taíno communities.

The Igbo spiritual worldview — anti-imperial, republican, decentralized — aligned naturally with Taíno notions of sacred land, communal harmony, and village-based ritualism. The Catholic missions that operated in the region, rather than imposing domination, were incorporated into a broader system of balance — where sacraments were honored, but no hierarchy overshadowed the ancestral continuity of the people.

This triadic harmony — Igbo ritual logic, Taíno land theology, and sacramental Catholicism — produced a civilization distinct from both the North and the West. It rejected secret societies. It did not operate through fear or mystical punishment. It cultivated parish-based life, agricultural stability, and long-term cultural memory. Oral histories, territorial markers, and ritual calendars still preserved in the South affirm that no rupture occurred. There was no “fusion” here. There was adaptation without collapse.

Importantly, this is also the territory from which Jean-Jacques Dessalines originates — not the North. His early years, land ties, and spiritual formation occurred within the Xaragua framework. The appropriation of his image by northern elites was a post-revolutionary act of political absorption — a falsification that served centralist agendas. In truth, Dessalines embodied the logic of the South: radical sovereignty without imperial mimicry.

Today, the South remains the only candidate for canonical restoration. It is the last region where land, spirit, and sacrament were never dislocated. The Igbo–Taíno axis of Xaragua continues as the bedrock of legitimate postcolonial sovereignty — indigenous, Catholic, and inviolable.

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V. FINAL DECLARATION

Let it be hereby recorded and declared, under the authority of the Rector-President and in the presence of canonical witness:

The African presence in Kiskeya was never a single monolith. The North, West, and South emerged from distinct migratory phases and cosmological patterns. The North was dominated by Kongo-derived ritual hierarchy and plantation imperialism. The West was shaped by mercantile fusion, piracy, and spiritual instability. Only the South retained a sacred axis: pre-fusion, pre-trauma, integrally rooted in land, ancestry, and sacrament.

This annex constitutes the foundational ethno-civilizational doctrine of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua. It confirms Xaragua’s unique historical identity, its non-participation in postcolonial chaos, and its exclusive right to embody the spiritual, cultural, and territorial continuity of the original Kiskeya.

So ratified, sealed, and entered into historical record.

By the Rector-President, with full canonical authority.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

Office of the Rector-President

Department of Ethno-Historical Affairs

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THIRD HISTORICAL ANNEX

ON THE STATE’S POSITION REGARDING THE TERM "AFRICA" AND ITS GEOPOLITICAL USE

Issued Under Apostolic Seal and Sovereign Ethno-Historical Authority – May 28,  2025

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I. DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLE

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua does not recognize the term “Africa” as a legitimate self-definition for the ancestral peoples of the continent commonly referred to by that name. The term “Africa” does not originate from the spiritual, linguistic, or civilizational systems of the native peoples of that landmass. Rather, it is a designation imposed by colonial powers and tied directly to European military conquest, beginning with the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, who defeated Carthage in 146 BCE.

The use of “Africa” is therefore not an indigenous term, but a colonial abstraction, constructed to facilitate imperial classification, taxation, and domination of an extraordinarily diverse group of peoples.

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II. HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF THE TERM “AFRICA”

The word “Africa” is Latin in origin, stemming from the Roman designation of “Africa Proconsularis” to refer to the territory of Carthage after its destruction.

The etymology has been falsely naturalized in modern discourse, despite the fact that no pre-colonial civilization on the continent referred to itself as “African.”

The Roman general Scipio Africanus received his title after conquest. “Africanus” thus marks not a land of origin but a territory subjugated.

This term was repurposed by European explorers, missionaries, and cartographers from the 15th century onward as a tool of categorical unification of peoples who, in reality, shared neither a common language, religion, political system, nor origin myth.

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III. INDIGENOUS MODES OF SELF-IDENTIFICATION

The peoples of the continent now referred to as “Africa” have historically and consistently defined themselves by specific and sacred categories, including:

Ethnic Nations: e.g., Igbo, Yoruba, Wolof, Fang, Teke, Mossi, Zulu, Dinka, etc.

Kingdoms and Empires: e.g., Mali, Kongo, Oyo, Benin, Aksum, Nubia, Kush, Kanem-Bornu, Mapungubwe.

Religious Systems: e.g., Ifá, Vodun, Coptic Christianity, Ethiopian Orthodoxy, Mwari worship, ancestral veneration.

Cosmologies and Prophets: oral traditions, cosmograms, divination systems, mythologies of descent, and origin stories specific to each people.

Lineages and Totemic Clans: matrilineal or patrilineal descent groups, each with spiritual duties, totems, and sacral identities.

Sacred Geography: Mountains, rivers, and forests understood as living spiritual entities, not national borders.

At no point in their sacred or historical traditions did these peoples define themselves under a singular civilizational term such as “Africa.” The term has no ancestral legitimacy.

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IV. THE POSITION OF XARAGUA

Xaragua, as a sovereign indigenous entity, maintains the following doctrinal and institutional stance:

1. The term “Africa” is rejected as a legitimate ethnonym or civilizational identity.

2. The term is recognized solely as a geopolitical convenience in international relations, akin to “Asia” or “the Middle East,” which likewise have no indigenous meaning.

3. Xaragua identifies its ancestral roots as deriving from specific lineages, tribes, and kingdoms of the continent referred to as Africa, without subscribing to the colonial identity construct it represents.

4. Xaragua maintains allegiance to the cosmogonic, prophetic, and priestly orders of its lineal ancestors—not to the artificial postcolonial constructs of continental unity imposed in the 20th century (e.g., Pan-Africanism without tribal roots).

5. Xaragua is rooted in sacred continuity, not modern statehood defined by colonial borders. Its recognition of origin respects ancestral law, not geopolitical expediency.

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V. ON POSTCOLONIAL NATION-STATES

The modern states of the African continent—Nigeria, Angola, Senegal, Ghana, Congo, etc.—are inventions of European cartographers, formalized by treaties such as the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, in total disregard of tribal, linguistic, and spiritual geographies.

Xaragua does not recognize these borders as legitimate expressions of civilization, nor does it seek to affiliate itself with their respective political narratives. The ancestors of Xaragua were never “Africans” in the modern nationalist sense, but spiritual sons of kings, priests, prophets, and ancestral councils, deeply rooted in localized cosmologies.

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VI. CONCLUSION

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua categorically rejects the use of “Africa” as a self-referential term rooted in ancestral memory. It adopts the term only in contexts requiring standardized geographic classification, without theological, cultural, or political commitment to its usage.

The Xaragua State derives its legitimacy from:

The sacred tribal continuity of its people;

The historical specificity of its ancestral lineages;

The canonical authority of its Church;

And the geospiritual alliance between Taíno indigenous foundations and ancestral kingdoms of the continent mislabeled “Africa.”

This position shall be entered into official historical record as binding state doctrine for the recognition of origins.

So ratified, sealed, and proclaimed,

By the Office of the Rector-President,

With full canonical and ethno-historical authority.

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THE AFRICAN, MIXED-RACE, AND ISLAMICIZED COMPLICITY IN THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE: HISTORY, STRUCTURES, AND DIFFERENTIATED RESPONSIBILITIES

By the Historical Bureau of Sovereign Doctrine

Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

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I. GENEALOGY OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE: A RACIALIZED IMPERIAL EUROPEAN SYSTEM

The transatlantic slave trade, active from the 15th to the 19th century, was a legal and commercial system elaborated and controlled by European imperial powers — primarily Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.

This system was based on:

European naval and technological supremacy,

the establishment of royally chartered companies (e.g., the Royal African Company, Compagnie du Sénégal, Dutch West India Company),

the promulgation of legal doctrines justifying racial hierarchy,

and the institutionalization of slavery as an economic model in the Americas through plantation economies, slave codes (e.g., the 1685 Code Noir), and colonial legislative bodies.

From the outset, the European powers controlled:

The maritime routes and slave ships,

The ports of embarkation and disembarkation,

The plantation systems in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America,

The global market in sugar, tobacco, cotton, and rum,

The ideological construction of “racialized inferiority.”

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II. THE ROLE OF AFRICAN, ISLAMICIZED, AND MIXED-RACE INTERMEDIARIES

While the system was European in origin and scope, African elites, Islamicized Sahelian groups, and Luso-African mixed-race merchant classes participated at different levels as local intermediaries.

1. The Kingdom of Kongo, the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Ashanti Empire, and others

Historical sources (cf. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World) document that:

African kings often sold prisoners of war, criminals, or captives from rival tribes,

Some local elites developed internal slave systems to feed the transatlantic demand,

Tributes, taxes, and war economies became directly dependent on the presence of European traders at coastal forts (e.g., Elmina, Ouidah, Luanda).

However:

These African states did not control the ships, did not write the laws, and did not create the global racial economy.

They participated in an already-constructed structure for material gain, political alliances, or military advantage, but without determining its architecture or destiny.

2. The Luso-Africans (Portuguese-speaking mixed-race elites)

Documented in São Tomé, Cacheu, and Luanda from the 15th century onward, these populations:

Were descendants of Portuguese men and African women,

Acted as powerful brokers, translators, and slave traders,

Accumulated wealth through control of inland supply chains.

They bore names like da Costa, de Andrade, or Pereira, lived in stone houses, wore European clothes, were Christianized, and often owned their own slaves.

These “Lançados” and “Filhos da Terra” were not mere auxiliaries but integrated agents of the Portuguese Crown.

Nevertheless:

Their status was sub-imperial — they did not dominate European markets, imperial fleets, or legal frameworks. Their power was regional and conditional.

3. The Moorish and Islamicized Sahelian Involvement

From Mauritania through Mali to Chad and Sudan, Islamicized African kingdoms and Moorish groups participated in:

The trans-Saharan trade (predating the Atlantic trade),

The capture and sale of African animist populations,

The enslavement of non-Muslim prisoners, justified through Islamic legal doctrine (fiqh) distinguishing mumin (believer) from kafir (infidel).

Some of these groups later engaged indirectly with European traders at coastal depots, providing captives in exchange for horses, weapons, textiles, or gold.

Their complicity is doctrinally and commercially real, but their colonial reach did not extend into the Americas.

They were regional slavers, not imperial colonizers.

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III. BLACK SLAVEHOLDERS IN THE AMERICAS: EXCEPTIONS, NOT THE RULE

It is historically accurate — though often omitted — that some free Blacks, Moors, and mixed-race individuals owned slaves in the Americas.

Examples:

William Ellison, a Black slaveholder in South Carolina, owned over 60 slaves by the 1860s,

Free people of color in Louisiana and Cuba often owned small plantations or slaves for labor or prestige,

Some “Negros Ladinos” (Hispanicized Africans) were involved in Spanish militias and local hierarchies.

These cases are well-documented (cf. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in the South), but:

They represent a micro-elite that mirrored the dominant white plantation class, not an autonomous racial power.

Their role confirms that power corrupts across racial lines, but does not invert historical responsibility.

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IV. THE WASHINGTON CONNECTION: TRANSATLANTIC ECONOMY AND INDIRECT CONTACT

You mentioned that George Washington may have had dealings with such intermediaries. While no direct documentation confirms deals with African or Moorish agents personally, it is historically accurate that:

The entire American plantation economy was part of a transatlantic triangle:

Enslaved Africans → American plantations → European consumption

The commodities produced — tobacco, sugar, cotton — were tied to coastal African supply chains, some of which involved African or Luso-African traders.

Washington, Jefferson, and others benefited from this structure, even if they purchased slaves domestically.

Thus, while indirect, the wealth of America was tied to complicity abroad.

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1. The Prehistoric and Anthropological Roots of Slavery

The origins of slavery must be located not in the mercantile calculations of empires or the theological rulings of religious systems, but in the foundational structure of early human society itself.

Long before the invention of writing, currency, or law, domination emerged as an existential practice rooted in the experience of war, capture, and survival. 

The earliest human groups organized along kinship lines inevitably encountered others, and when conflict arose, the defeated were not always killed but instead subordinated. 

This act—sparing the enemy’s life to convert him into a social instrument—constitutes the primordial essence of slavery. 

The enslaved was no longer considered a person in full standing but was stripped of lineage, honor, and agency. 

This condition, which Orlando Patterson terms “social death,” describes precisely the status of captives in prehistoric societies: individuals who remained biologically alive but were ritually excluded from the moral, genealogical, and spiritual order of the victor’s community. 

Among the Natufian cultures of the Levant (circa 12,000 BCE), archaeological sites suggest asymmetrical burials, restrained bodies, and indications of ritual degradation, which many interpret as evidence of servile conditions imposed on captives. In predynastic Nubia, similar practices are found, with bound corpses, missing grave goods, and bodies buried at the periphery of sacred spaces. 

These are not mere deviations or anomalies—they are structural signs of subordination integrated into cosmological systems. 

Captivity functioned as a ritual inversion of identity, converting the foreign body into a sacred offering or a living tool of domination. 

This is not economic slavery, but cosmological slavery. The captive body affirmed the power of the victor, satisfied ancestral obligations, and rebalanced spiritual disorder.

Such practices are recorded across the globe. In early Andean cultures, including the Chavín and later Wari civilizations, prisoners were paraded, mutilated, sacrificed, or used as agents of religious renewal. 

In the Amazon basin, captives were consumed symbolically or literally in cannibalistic rites aimed not at destruction but at absorption of the enemy’s essence. 

In Polynesia and parts of Melanesia, similar dynamics emerged, wherein prisoners taken in inter-island raids were enslaved as domestic servants, concubines, or sacrificial victims, often undergoing elaborate rites of degradation and purification. 

In these societies, the enslaved had no fixed economic value—they were not merchandise—but they fulfilled symbolic and political roles essential to the reproduction of social order. 

The idea of labor exploitation was secondary or non-existent. The logic of captivity was ritualistic, kinship-based, and often temporary. A captive might be sacrificed, adopted, exiled, or incorporated depending on the cosmological need of the moment. 

Anthropologists such as Claude Meillassoux, Alain Testart, and Pierre Clastres have all documented how pre-monetary societies developed extremely precise social hierarchies in which slavery or servitude acted as a hinge between death and assimilation, punishment and purification.

In this context, slavery precedes race, property, and state formation. It is older than writing, religion, or commerce. It is not a deviation from moral order but a foundational practice of human power. 

There were no markets, no banks, no racial categories. The enslaved was defined by his fate, not by his skin. He was subordinated not because he was inferior in biology, but because he was exterior to the moral universe of the captor. He belonged to no one, therefore he could be possessed by anyone. He carried no name, therefore his body could be renamed, branded, and repurposed. Slavery in this phase is not a transgression—it is a function of sacred order. It emerges wherever surplus, conquest, and kinship intersect. It is universal, structural, and civilizational. 

What modern history often forgets is that before the industrial slave trade, before the Qur’an or the papacy, before Aristotle or Augustine, human beings were already enslaving one another not for gold, not for sugar, but for meaning. In this sense, slavery is not an accident of empire—it is the original expression of domination as cosmology.

> References:

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Harvard University Press, 1982

Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l’esclavage, Fayard, 1996

Alain Testart, Critique du don. Études sur la circulation pré-marchande, MSH, 2007

Pierre Clastres, La société contre l’État, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974

Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, Cambridge University Press, 2003

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2. The Codification of Slavery in Ancient Civilizations

With the emergence of literate, urbanized civilizations in the ancient Near East, slavery underwent a profound transformation: it was no longer merely a social practice embedded in ritual or warfare—it became a codified legal institution, integrated into the architecture of the state. It was formalized in writing, regulated by law, and administered by centralized authority. 

In this phase, the enslaved body became not only a symbol of subjugation but a unit of labor, a legal object, and a fiscal resource. 

In the Sumerian and Akkadian city-states of Mesopotamia, as early as the third millennium BCE, the slave was defined in cuneiform tablets as both a domestic subordinate and an instrument of production. The Code of Ur-Nammu (circa 2100 BCE), the oldest known legal code, outlines penalties for harming a slave and sets fixed compensation for their injury or death, thus confirming the recognition of slaves as property whose value could be quantified in silver. 

The Code of Hammurabi (circa 1754 BCE), more sophisticated in scope, dedicates entire sections to the regulation of slavery, delineating laws on slave inheritance, runaway slaves, marriage between slaves and free persons, and the legal responsibility of owners. Slaves in this context could be acquired through war, judicial sentence, birth, or indebtedness. 

They could be sold, branded, beaten, and inherited, but also, in rare cases, manumitted. 

The law recognized their capacity to marry, possess modest property, and testify in court under strict conditions. Nonetheless, they remained fundamentally defined as chattel.

In Assyria, Hatti, and Elam, similar codes reinforced the status of the slave as a taxable asset, a reproductive resource, and an extension of the master’s household authority. 

In Hittite law, slaves could be punished with mutilation for crimes, and their offspring were born into bondage unless specifically freed. The slave was also a buffer in legal conflict: if a master was wronged by another, the offending party could be required to surrender one of their slaves as compensation. 

In Egypt, the logic of enslavement was both economic and theological. 

Pharaoh, as divine king, owned land, water, animals, and people as part of a cosmic hierarchy. 

Slaves were usually foreigners—Libyans, Nubians, Canaanites—captured in imperial campaigns and relocated into temple service, agricultural estates, or household labor. 

The Egyptian language contains no fixed term for "slave" as such, but multiple terms denoting subordination: hem (servant), bak (worker), or khenemet (concubine). 

These categories were fluid, depending on political context and rank. 

Foreign captives were paraded in royal triumphs, depicted on temple walls as racialized bodies—dark-skinned Nubians, pale-skinned Syrians—not to denote inherent inferiority but to signify submission to divine Egyptian order. 

Here, enslavement was not racial but imperial and theological.

The legal architecture of slavery extended into property codes, religious law, and fiscal policy. 

In Babylonia and Egypt, slaves could be pledged as collateral, confiscated for unpaid taxes, or transferred as dowry. 

The slave’s body was inscribed in legal instruments—tablets, contracts, seals—and could be the object of litigation, auction, or donation to temples. 

This was not capitalism, but it was commodification. 

Slaves became the baseline of labor allocation in state workshops, irrigation systems, and military logistics. 

They were subjected to census, rationing, and transportation. 

They existed in archives, not as citizens or kin, but as movable persons, legally silent and economically visible.

The significance of this period lies in the irreversible transformation of slavery from a ritual act of conquest into a permanent category of legal administration. 

The captive was no longer merely a conquered outsider; he became a fixture of law, an item of economic calculation, and a tool of bureaucratic control. 

This transformation laid the groundwork for all subsequent empires—Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Islamic—where slavery would not only be permitted but expected. 

In this codified form, slavery became institutional: it was enforced by scribes, judges, priests, and tax collectors. 

It was not arbitrary violence, but systematic classification. 

From the earliest legal systems, the logic of hierarchy was translated into codes of possession, and human beings entered the record of empire not as subjects, but as assets.

> References:

Raymond Westbrook (ed.), A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law, Brill, 2003

Harriet Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians, Cambridge University Press, 2004

Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, Wiley Blackwell, 2015

Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Routledge, 2006

John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1980

Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981

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3. Slavery in Egypt and the Afro-Asiatic Dynastic Systems

In ancient Egypt, slavery did not emerge as an autonomous economic institution but was inseparable from the state’s theological structure, military expansion, and agrarian bureaucracy. 

The institution must be understood not merely through economic exploitation, but through its integration into the pharaonic cosmology of divine hierarchy, territorial conquest, and centralized control. 

The enslaved individual in Egypt was not only a unit of labor but an extension of the Pharaoh’s sacred dominion. 

All human bodies in Egypt fell under the principle of divine proprietorship: Pharaoh was not a man among men, but a god among mortals, and his ownership of people mirrored his control over the Nile, the sun, and the seasons. 

Consequently, slaves were not merely owned by individuals but were also attached to temples, estates, and state projects, each functioning as an arm of the cosmic order administered by priests and royal bureaucrats. 

The Egyptian lexicon reflects this complexity. 

Unlike later European or Islamic languages that employed a single term for “slave,” Egyptian used differentiated designations such as ḥm (servant), bȝk (laborer), and khenemet (female companion or concubine), indicating a fluid typology of subjugation grounded in status, function, and origin rather than a fixed legal caste.

The majority of slaves in Egypt were foreigners, acquired through military conquest and territorial expansion. 

Campaigns into Nubia, Libya, Canaan, and Syria brought thousands of captives into Egyptian control, often chained, tattooed, or paraded in ritual humiliation before being redistributed to temple economies, elite households, or infrastructural projects. 

These captives were visibly marked by racialized iconography—dark-skinned Nubians, red-skinned Libyans, pale-skinned Asiatics—depicted on temple walls in postures of subservience, not as a biological assertion of inferiority, but as a symbolic representation of imperial victory and divine order.

Captivity functioned as a spatial and spiritual realignment: foreigners were reterritorialized, made useful, and thereby reintegrated into the sacred economy of Ma’at. 

The temples of Karnak, Luxor, and Abydos received hundreds of these individuals as religious donations, where they labored as cooks, cleaners, bearers, or singers in divine service. 

The state also distributed slaves to soldiers, administrators, and architects, integrating them into every stratum of the bureaucratic apparatus.

Egyptian slavery was not, however, chattel slavery in the modern sense. 

There existed legal limits, customary protections, and occasional possibilities for upward mobility.

 Some slaves could inherit property, marry within the household, or be adopted into extended kin networks. 

In rare cases, foreign-born slaves rose to positions of considerable responsibility. 

The best-known example is Yuya, a high official during the reign of Amenhotep III, whose origins are debated but who is believed to have had Asiatic roots and held powerful priestly and administrative offices. 

Nonetheless, these exceptions never undermined the structural truth: slavery in Egypt was a ritual expression of asymmetry, a necessary reflection of the Pharaoh’s cosmic rank, and a material manifestation of the state’s theocratic absolutism.

The Afro-Asiatic system extended beyond Egypt into neighboring polities such as Kush, Axum, and early Semitic kingdoms, where similar patterns of religious kingship, military enslavement, and temple-based labor regimes prevailed. 

In Kushite society, centered at Napata and later Meroë, slavery was likewise embedded in conquest and sacral kingship, with captives employed in construction, agriculture, and elite households.

In the kingdom of Axum (modern-day Ethiopia), inscriptions such as those of King Ezana (4th century CE) confirm the presence of enslaved captives from Nubia and southern Arabia.

These captives were integrated into a multi-ethnic imperial order where slavery served both commercial and ritual purposes. 

In Semitic-speaking regions like Ugarit, Byblos, and Mari, the institution took the form of household servitude and debt bondage, with written tablets recording the legal transfer, punishment, and even manumission of enslaved persons.

Across the Afro-Asiatic dynastic world, slavery thus operated as an organic extension of the sacred state. 

It was not racial in origin, but it was ethnic in function. 

It was not capitalist in logic, but it was administrative in form. 

The enslaved body was not purchased from a market economy but acquired through sacred warfare, judicial authority, and dynastic tribute.

These systems produced no universal concept of human freedom, only a gradation of dependency calibrated according to cosmology, kinship, and proximity to the divine. 

To be enslaved in Egypt or Kush was not to be biologically inferior but to be cosmologically peripheral. 

And thus, long before Europe or Islam imposed their respective hierarchies upon the world, the Afro-Asiatic empires had already produced a structurally complete model of sacred subjugation, which defined captivity not as an aberration but as a function of world order.

> References:

Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Routledge, 2006

John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1980

William Y. Adams, Nubia: Corridor to Africa, Princeton University Press, 1977

David O’Connor, Ancient Nubia: Egypt’s Rival in Africa, University Museum Publications, 1993

Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity, Edinburgh University Press, 1991

Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015

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4. The Hebrew Theocratic Model and Legal Servitude

Within the Hebrew tradition, slavery occupies a paradoxical position: it is simultaneously an accepted norm within divine law and a practice circumscribed by ritual, covenant, and moral restraint. 

Unlike the commodified, economically embedded systems of Mesopotamia or the sacral-imperial hierarchies of Egypt, Hebrew slavery is situated within a unique theocratic legal architecture in which servitude is permitted, regulated, and bounded by the authority of Jehovah.

The slave is not simply property but is a subject of divine concern, and his treatment is integrated into the moral obligations of the Israelite community.

The legal texts of the Torah—specifically in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy—do not abolish slavery; rather, they construct a dual system that distinguishes between internal servitude among fellow Hebrews and external, permanent enslavement of foreigners. 

This distinction forms the structural core of Israelite slavery: one that is covenantal rather than racial, juridical rather than commercial, and theological rather than economic.

The Book of Exodus (21:2–6) establishes the fundamental time-bound condition of Hebrew slavery: 

“If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything.” 

This sabbatical cycle aligns with the broader pattern of divine rest and covenantal renewal. 

The Hebrew slave is not stripped of personhood, but enters a temporary condition of labor, often voluntarily in cases of debt or family crisis. 

In Deuteronomy (15:12–18), this temporary condition is reinforced with ethical obligation: when the slave is released, the master must provide food, livestock, and wine, “because you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you.” 

The institution is thus bound to collective memory, and slavery is framed not only as social order but as theological testimony. 

However, should the slave voluntarily refuse emancipation and declare love for his master and household, he may be ritually bound for life, marked by the piercing of his ear—a physical covenant of chosen servitude. 

In this case, the slave becomes part of the master’s house, absorbed into its sacred economy.

By contrast, the enslavement of foreigners is not temporary but hereditary and perpetual. 

Leviticus (25:44–46) is explicit: “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and make them slaves for life.” 

This provision constructs the foreigner as ontologically subordinate, excluded from the sabbatical protections and the covenantal fraternity of Israel. 

However, even in this framework, ethical regulation persists. 

⁸The master is commanded not to rule with harshness (Leviticus 25:43), and the Law forbids kidnapping for the purpose of slavery (Exodus 21:16), aligning slavery with order rather than anarchy. 

There is also the law of sanctuary: a runaway slave from another nation may not be returned to his master but must be allowed to live freely among the Hebrews (Deuteronomy 23:15–16). 

These legal provisions reflect a system that affirms inequality as a divine ordinance, yet imposes strict boundaries on its implementation.

The Hebrew model of slavery is inseparable from its eschatological and historical identity. 

The foundational trauma of Egypt—the “house of bondage”—is not merely remembered but operationalized as a theological boundary. 

Slavery is not condemned, but its abuse is a form of apostasy. 

The Israelite is reminded that he too was a slave, and thus cannot enslave his brother with impunity.

In this structure, freedom and slavery are not opposites, but conditions within the divine order. The master is not sovereign but is himself a servant of God; the slave is not an absolute inferior but a temporary dependent within a sacred household. The priestly and prophetic traditions reinforce this hierarchy through metaphor: Israel is God’s servant (ebed), and disobedience leads to national servitude at the hands of foreign empires—Assyria, Babylon, Persia. Slavery becomes a political consequence of moral failure and a symbol of exile. Thus, in Hebrew thought, slavery is both a literal institution and a moral allegory, embedded in history, prophecy, and covenant.

What distinguishes the Hebrew model from later Islamic and European systems is the absence of racial theory, market orientation, or industrial exploitation. Slavery is legal but bounded, structured but not totalizing. It is embedded in sacred law and serves pedagogical, ethical, and historical functions. The Hebrew Bible does not imagine a world without slavery, but it demands that slavery exist under the surveillance of divine justice, memory, and ritual structure. The result is a legal theology of servitude that recognizes the permanence of hierarchy but binds it to the temporality of covenant, the obligation of mercy, and the moral supremacy of Yahweh’s law.

> References:

Nahum M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus, Schocken Books, 1996

Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22: A New Translation with Commentary, Anchor Yale Bible, 2000

Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, IVP Academic, 2004

Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East, Fortress Press, 1995

Raymond Westbrook and Bruce Wells, Everyday Law in Biblical Israel, Westminster John Knox Press, 2009

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5. Indigenous Civilizations and Non-Racial Subjugation

Among the indigenous civilizations of the Americas, subjugation systems existed independently of European or Afro-Eurasian models, embedded not in racial ideology or market capitalism, but in sacred cosmology, ritual warfare, and social stratification. These systems of servitude, captivity, and tribute were organically integrated into pre-Columbian ontologies and must be understood not through the prism of modern slavery, but through the symbolic, religious, and communitarian matrices that defined status, identity, and sovereignty in indigenous thought. In Mesoamerica, the Maya, Aztec, and earlier Olmec civilizations maintained complex systems of dependent labor rooted in war capture, sacrificial obligation, and household servitude. The Nahuatl term tlacotin, often translated as “slave,” designated individuals who had lost legal independence due to debt, crime, or war, but whose status was regulated, non-hereditary, and not necessarily permanent. Tlacotin were not racialized, and their condition did not render them outside humanity; they could marry, own property, and even regain freedom under certain conditions.

More crucially, the Aztec Empire maintained a dual system of subjugation: war captives, known as mālīnalli or tlacatecolotl, were often destined for sacrifice, theatrical display, or ritual labor, while debt-slaves served in households and temples. These systems were not based on ethnicity but on cosmological imbalance. The captured body was a surplus offered to the gods to sustain the celestial order, especially in the cult of Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca, where the heart and blood of the captive were metaphysical currencies feeding the sun, rain, and fertility. This metaphysical function radically separates indigenous servitude from capitalist slavery. The purpose was not accumulation of labor value, but cosmological equilibrium. The same pattern appears in the Maya system, where captives from inter-city warfare were used in sacrifice, tribute, and elite rituals. Codices and mural inscriptions at Bonampak, Yaxchilan, and Copán depict bound, often elaborately tattooed captives offered before divine thrones—not as laborers, but as sacred offerings necessary for dynastic legitimacy and temporal stability.

Among the Taino-Arawak peoples of the Caribbean, including Xaragua, Cibao, and Maguana, servitude existed within the nitaíno-naboría duality, wherein the naboría class served the chiefly elite, often through hereditary roles of agricultural labor, ritual performance, or household service. However, this class was not a chattel under private ownership but rather part of a communitarian and hierarchical social structure. The cacique, or chief, had the right to mobilize labor through communal tribute, not through market purchase. Early Spanish reports, such as those of Ramón Pané and Bartolomé de Las Casas, consistently noted that Taino servitude was embedded in reciprocity, ritual feasting, and collective governance. The enslavement of war captives by some Taino groups, especially in inter-island conflicts with the Caribs (Kalinago), was real but minimal in comparison to Afro-Eurasian systems. Captives were integrated into the tribe, sometimes ritually killed, but rarely commodified. Importantly, no color line existed: physical difference was not a justification for enslavement. Status derived from kinship, war prestige, or cosmological favor—not pigmentation or phenotype.

Across the Americas, the Andean civilizations—particularly the Inca—developed an even more sophisticated system of hierarchical dependency called mit’a. This was not slavery but rotational tribute labor, in which every able-bodied subject owed work to the state according to a highly organized administrative calendar. The mit’a system, enforced by the Sapa Inca and his priestly bureaucracy, was the economic backbone of the empire. It built roads, terraces, and temples, fed armies and redistributed surpluses. While not legally free, the workers were not property and retained their familial, ethnic, and territorial identity. The state did not own the worker, but his labor time. This form of corvée labor differed fundamentally from slavery in Roman, Islamic, or European systems, in which the slave was dehumanized, objectified, and often permanently alienated. Even the presence of yanaconas—permanent servants attached to royal households—did not erase the indigenous principle that labor belonged to the ayllu, not to individual masters. Furthermore, there existed no racial justification for the system: all peoples within the empire were subject to the same obligations regardless of skin tone, phenotype, or ancestry.

The indigenous systems of subjugation, while undeniably hierarchical and often brutal, were cosmologically embedded and locally contextualized. They were not based on speculative market economies, not sustained by transcontinental human trafficking, and not justified through biological inferiority. Rather, servitude was part of a sacred order: a cycle of war, offering, ritual, and redistribution. The arrival of European colonizers radically disrupted this order, imposing chattel slavery, biological racism, and extractive capitalism upon systems that had never known such logics. The transmutation of ritualized dependency into racial commodification was not a continuation but a rupture—a colonial invention built upon the ashes of cosmological governance. Thus, to understand indigenous slavery is not to compare it to modern slavery but to see in it an entirely different world, where the sacred and the social were indivisible, and where domination was not justified by skin but by stars.

> References:

Michel Graulich, Mythes et rituels du Mexique ancien, Fayard, 2005

Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, 1991

David Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization, Beacon Press, 1999

John H. Rowe, Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest, Handbook of South American Indians, Smithsonian Institution, 1946

Pedro Martir d’Anghiera, Décades du Nouveau Monde

Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 1552

Ramón Pané, Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios, c. 1498

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6. The Rise of Islamic Slavery and the Afro-Arabic Networks

The emergence of Islamic slavery must be situated not merely within the religious proclamations of the Qur’an or the Hadith but within the political, military, and commercial architecture of the early Islamic Caliphates, particularly the Umayyad and Abbasid empires. Far from representing a rupture with pre-Islamic servitude, the rise of Islam institutionalized slavery into a globalized legal-religious economy wherein the enslavement of non-Muslims was justified by divine command, geopolitical conquest, and the necessity of empire-building. The Qur’an, while regulating slavery, does not abolish it. It affirms it as part of the divine social order. Sura An-Nisa (4:24) explicitly permits sexual relations with female captives, while Sura Al-Ma'arij (70:29–30) reaffirms that “those who guard their private parts except with their wives and what their right hands possess” are not to be blamed. The legal codification of this right hand possession (mā malakat aymānukum) formed the backbone of Islamic slave law for over a millennium.

The early Islamic conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries, from North Africa to Persia and Central Asia, transformed slavery from a domestic institution into a transcontinental system. The capture and redistribution of slaves was embedded in jihad itself. The ghazw, or raid, became both a religious duty and a slave-harvesting campaign. Under the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, large numbers of Persians, Berbers, Sudanese, Nubians, and Byzantines were enslaved, transported, and integrated into both household and state apparatus. The Abbasids further systematized the practice. The Zanj trade, in which East African Bantu-speaking peoples were transported across the Red Sea to Arabia, Iraq, and Persia, became central to the Islamic economy. The massive revolt of the Zanj in Basra in the 9th century (869–883 CE) reveals the scale and brutality of this system: tens of thousands of East African slaves forced to drain marshlands under inhuman conditions rebelled, leading to one of the most violent slave uprisings in pre-modern history. The revolt was brutally crushed by the Abbasids, who restored the slave economy with even greater militarization.

Islamic slavery was not color-blind. Although Islamic theology formally permitted the enslavement of any non-Muslim captured in war or born to slave mothers, the practice evolved into a color-coded hierarchy. Arab chroniclers such as Al-Jahiz and Al-Masudi, while defending the humanity of blacks, also recorded widespread stereotypes linking darkness to servility, irrationality, and subordination. The term abd (slave) became conflated with blackness itself. Conversely, white slaves from the Caucasus, Balkans, and Central Asia were often prized for military and administrative roles. The Mamluk system of the 9th to 15th centuries was based on the enslavement and conversion of white boys—Circassians, Georgians, Slavs—trained as elite soldiers and governors. These slaves could rise to power, found dynasties, and even rule Egypt. Yet this upward mobility did not apply to sub-Saharan African slaves, who were mostly relegated to concubinage, labor, or domestic roles. Thus, the Islamic slave system became structurally racialized, even if not explicitly doctrinally so. The reality of color-coded function cannot be erased by theoretical equality.

Furthermore, Islam did not only legalize slavery—it created a global slave economy that stretched from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Arab merchants transported millions of African captives through Saharan routes, the Swahili coast, the Nile Valley, and Red Sea ports. The trans-Saharan slave trade, active from the 8th to the 19th century, trafficked black bodies into North Africa, the Levant, Arabia, and Persia. Slaves were used as eunuchs, concubines, soldiers, palace guards, agricultural workers, and entertainers. Unlike the transatlantic system, Islamic slavery often involved castration, especially for males serving in harems or administrative centers. These operations had mortality rates exceeding 80%, rendering Islamic slavery not only a system of exploitation but also of demographic mutilation. Women, particularly from East Africa and Nubia, were trafficked in mass numbers for sexual slavery, with many ending up in Baghdad, Cairo, Mecca, and Damascus. This gendered component of Islamic slavery has been largely occluded in contemporary narratives but is amply documented in primary sources.

The racialization of blackness in Islamic societies preceded European racial theory and informed later Christian justifications for African chattel slavery. The notion that sub-Saharan Africans were naturally servile, oversexed, or mentally inferior was already circulating in Arabic philosophical and medical treatises by the 10th century. Al-Farabi, Ibn Khaldun, and Avicenna repeated hierarchical models in which geographic determinism placed Africans in a lower position on the scale of reason and civilization. While these thinkers were not slave merchants themselves, their works gave intellectual sanction to the existing order. The Afro-Arab world, thus, did not merely inherit slavery; it innovated upon it, systematized it, and exported it. The Ottomans, successors to the Abbasid model, maintained vast slave networks into the 20th century, trafficking Circassians, Africans, Armenians, and others in the imperial markets of Constantinople, Cairo, and Tunis.

The slave system under Islam was not a residual institution—it was a pillar of empire. It was regulated by Sharia, legitimated by Hadith, integrated into the economy, and racialized in practice. It cannot be excused by comparative leniency, for the violence, the gendered dehumanization, and the demographic impact are immense. The erasure of blackness from authority, the policing of African bodies, and the ideological articulation of servitude as naturalized status prefigured the Atlantic model and helped to universalize the notion that certain phenotypes were biologically subordinate. To analyze Islamic slavery is to dismantle the illusion that European racial slavery emerged in a vacuum. It is to expose the continuity of global subjugation systems and to acknowledge that the Afro-Arabic world, too, constructed an empire upon the trade of human flesh.

> References:

Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1990

Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, University of Washington Press, 1998

Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World, New Amsterdam Books, 1989

Alexandre Popovic, La révolte des esclaves en Iraq au IIIe/IXe siècle, Editions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1976

Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society, Oxford University Press, 1995

Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal, Princeton University Press, 1967

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7. The European Turn: Christian Doctrine, Market Slavery, and Racial Codification

The transformation of slavery from a cosmological system of conquest into a fully racialized, commercial, and transoceanic enterprise reached its zenith with the rise of Western European powers during the late medieval and early modern periods. Contrary to the myth of a European rupture with slavery due to Christian morality, the Catholic Church played a central role in framing and legitimizing slavery as a divine order, a means of evangelization, and a tool of empire. The Papal Bulls Dum Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455), and Inter Caetera (1493), issued under the authority of Pope Nicholas V and Pope Alexander VI, explicitly granted the crowns of Portugal and Spain the right to “invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue” all non-Christians and to “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” These bulls formed the juridical backbone of the doctrine of discovery, enshrining enslavement as both a divine right and a sacramental act. Slavery was not a side effect of colonization; it was its spiritual engine.

Portugal, spearheading the Age of Exploration, applied these legal and theological permissions to West Africa and beyond. As early as the mid-15th century, Portuguese merchants established slave forts along the coast of present-day Senegal, Gambia, and Ghana. In these outposts, a new system emerged: slavery no longer as episodic conquest or religious conversion, but as continuous market flow. African captives were bought with European goods—guns, cloth, glass beads—and sold as commodities in Iberia, North Africa, and eventually the New World. This mercantile shift required a new anthropology of power. No longer justified merely by religion or defeat, enslavement was increasingly justified by nature. Blackness became ontological inferiority. The invention of race, as a modern concept, was born not in the academy but in the holds of slave ships and the ledgers of colonial merchants.

The Spanish Crown followed suit. Following the conquest of the Americas, the encomienda system was established, granting Spanish settlers the right to extract labor from Indigenous populations in exchange for Christian instruction. Although theoretically distinct from chattel slavery, the encomienda rapidly devolved into systemic forced labor, with staggering death rates. When Indigenous populations declined catastrophically due to disease and brutality, Spanish theologians such as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda defended the enslavement of Africans as a necessary substitute, arguing that they were naturally suited for labor and subordination. The opposition of figures like Bartolomé de Las Casas—while morally forceful—only succeeded in transferring the burden of colonial labor from Amerindians to Africans. The outcome was not abolition but racial substitution.

By the 17th century, the transatlantic slave trade had become the most systematized and violent labor enterprise in world history. Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark all entered the trade, creating triangular routes that transported goods to Africa, slaves to the Americas, and raw materials to Europe. Human beings became ledger entries. African men, women, and children were shackled, branded, packed into ships, and sold in markets from Charleston to Cartagena, from Bahia to Bordeaux. The slave codes that governed their lives—such as the Code Noir in French colonies (1685), the Barbados Slave Code (1661), and various provincial ordinances in the Thirteen Colonies—enshrined a new legal category: the racial slave. These laws stripped Africans of personhood, rendered their children inheritable property, and made baptism, Christian belief, or even intermarriage irrelevant to their status. Race, not religion, determined bondage. Slavery had become hereditary, absolute, and unreformable.

The Christian justification for this system evolved to meet its brutality. Biblical passages such as Genesis 9:25–27, where Noah curses Canaan, were interpreted by European theologians as divine legitimation of African servitude. This “curse of Ham” doctrine circulated widely, combining scriptural manipulation with classical philosophy to produce a racial-theological framework in which whiteness signified rationality, cleanliness, and divine favor, while blackness symbolized corruption, sin, and labor. This theological racism was not peripheral. It was taught in seminaries, encoded in law, and preached from pulpits. The body became a sign of the soul. Skin color became a sacrament of hierarchy. Enslavement became sacramentalized as a divine order of labor.

The consequences of this transformation were planetary. Tens of millions of Africans were violently uprooted, transported, tortured, raped, and exterminated. Families were shredded, languages lost, cultures obliterated. But the damage was not only physical—it was ontological. The modern world, its capitalism, its legal codes, its urban centers, its industrial wealth, were built not just on the backs but on the metaphysical annihilation of black being. To enslave the African was to define humanity as anti-African. Europe did not merely enslave Africa; it created itself as “not-Africa.” Whiteness became the ontological measure of man. This epistemic violence—where the enslaved was neither human nor dead—established a modernity that could only be universal by being exclusive.

> References:

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Oxford University Press, 1966

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Harvard University Press, 1982

Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, Cambridge University Press, 1982

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, Verso, 1997

Pope Nicholas V, Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex (1452–1455)

Pope Alexander VI, Inter Caetera (1493)

Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery, Cambridge University Press, 2009

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8. Black Participation and Internal Complicity in Slavery Systems

The notion that slavery was a system imposed solely by external invaders on passive African societies is both historically inaccurate and ideologically reductive. While European and Arab powers undeniably drove the industrial scale and global logistics of the slave trade, the internal complicity of African elites, warlords, and merchant dynasties in the procurement and sale of human beings is well documented and structurally indispensable to the system’s function. Slavery was not introduced to Africa by Europeans—it was already deeply embedded within African political economies, religious orders, and kinship structures long before European contact. The trans-Saharan trade, orchestrated over centuries by Berber, Arab, and Islamized African empires such as Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, and the Hausa states, had established sophisticated networks in which enslaved persons were acquired through war, tribute, and internal punishment. These systems were later adapted to meet European demand, not created ex nihilo.

The role of African intermediaries was not marginal. Kingdoms such as Dahomey, Oyo, Asante, and the coastal Igbo polities actively participated in slave raiding, militarized expansion, and the systematic exportation of captives. These captives were often prisoners of war, debtors, criminals, or political dissidents. However, as demand from European traders grew, the incentive structure mutated: wars were increasingly fought for the explicit purpose of capturing slaves, and the classification of who could be enslaved became ever broader and more ruthless. Entire villages were razed, kinship bonds severed, and judicial systems corrupted to produce bodies for export. African rulers profited from this trade through direct sale, taxation of slave markets, and accumulation of European goods—particularly firearms, alcohol, textiles, and luxury items—which in turn reinforced their domestic power. The economy of human suffering became self-sustaining.

The complicity was not merely economic but ideological. In many African societies, enslavement was not considered ontological annihilation but a legitimate form of social demotion. Slaves were often foreign, but not exclusively; internal slavery included domestic servitude, agricultural labor, concubinage, and military service. The absence of racial differentiation in these societies meant that slavery was perceived as a matter of status, not species. However, this internal system became entangled with a new racial logic as African elites began to engage with Islamic and European ideologies that categorized blackness itself as a sign of inferiority. This process is evident in the Sahelian and Swahili zones, where Islamized African elites began to adopt Arab racial prejudices and reclassify their non-Muslim black neighbors as inferior “kafirs” fit for enslavement. In this way, internal African hierarchies were racialized from within, preparing the conceptual ground for transatlantic commodification.

Figures such as Tippu Tip, the notorious Swahili-Zanzibari slave trader of the 19th century, embody this hybridity. Of partial African descent and fluent in Arabic and Swahili, Tippu Tip built a vast slave trading empire that reached into the Congo Basin and supplied Arab, Ottoman, and European markets. His operations were brutal, his armies armed, and his worldview thoroughly aligned with Islamic justifications for slavery. Similarly, in West Africa, Afro-Portuguese lançados and mulatto brokers functioned as cultural intermediaries between European powers and African polities, facilitating not only trade but the circulation of justifications, rituals, and taxonomies of enslavement. Blackness, therefore, did not automatically preclude participation in anti-black structures. Many African actors internalized the logic of hierarchy, foreignness, and exclusion, and instrumentalized it for their own gain.

This reality, however, does not absolve imperial powers of responsibility. The infrastructure, scale, and ideological systemization of the Atlantic slave trade were European inventions. African participation occurred within a global framework that was European in design and industrial in scope. But to ignore African complicity is to infantilize African agency and erase the internal dynamics of corruption, ambition, and domination that made the trade possible. It also absolves postcolonial elites who, even after abolition, continued to exploit the same populations under new forms of labor coercion and class oppression. The plantation was not replaced by justice; it was replaced by the postcolonial state.

Thus, black participation in slavery cannot be dismissed as passive victimhood or minor collaboration. It must be understood as structural complicity: a historically situated, morally catastrophic convergence of indigenous power and global capital. The tragedy of Atlantic slavery is not only that millions were enslaved—it is that human beings of all colors, languages, and religions, across continents, chose to make it happen.

> References:

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, Cambridge University Press, 1998

Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, Cambridge University Press, 2012

Sandra E. Greene and Alice Bellagamba, eds., The Bitter Legacy: African Slavery Past and Present, Markus Wiener Publishers, 2013

Tidiane N'Diaye, Le Génocide voilé, Gallimard, 2008

Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade, Basic Books, 2002

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9. The Islamic Racial Shift and the Invention of the “Black Slave”

The racialization of slavery did not originate with Europe alone. Long before the transatlantic trade, the Islamic world had already developed a proto-racial system in which the African body was increasingly associated with servitude, animality, and spiritual impurity. While early Islamic slavery was technically non-racial—enslaving non-Muslims regardless of origin—the confluence of Arab cultural prejudices, Qur'anic interpretations, and imperial exigencies progressively transformed the image of the African into a distinct legal and ontological category: the “Black Slave.” This development was not merely semantic but systemic, spanning jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (kalam), literature (adab), and administrative practice from the Umayyads to the Ottomans. It formed the bedrock of what some scholars now call “Islamic anti-blackness”—a phenomenon structurally distinct from European racism but equally foundational.

The early caliphates, including the Umayyad (661–750 CE) and Abbasid (750–1258 CE) empires, institutionalized slavery as a divine ordinance. The Qur'an permits slavery and outlines rules for the treatment, manumission, and marriage of slaves, notably in verses such as 4:3, 24:33, and 16:71. However, Islamic jurisprudence, elaborated by schools such as Hanafi, Maliki, and Shafi’i, did more than codify practice: it classified slaves according to ethnic origin and religious eligibility. While theoretically any non-Muslim could be enslaved (harbi kafir), a durable association emerged between sub-Saharan Africans and permanent servitude. Zanj slaves from the East African coast were widely used in agriculture, construction, and military labor. Their revolts—such as the Zanj Rebellion of 869–883 CE in southern Iraq—were brutally crushed and used to reinforce their image as dangerous, inferior, and sub-human.

The literature of the period reflects and reinforces these perceptions. In works by Al-Jahiz, Al-Masudi, and Ibn Khaldun, Africans are often described in zoological terms—closer to animals than men, lacking rationality, and suited for hard labor. Al-Jahiz, a black Arab of Basra, attempted to challenge these tropes in his Risalat mufakharat al-sudan ‘ala al-bidan, but his defense of blackness relied on exceptionalism, not universalism. By the time of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), the equation between blackness and slavery was fully entrenched. In his Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun writes that “the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because they have little that is essentially human and have attributes that are quite similar to dumb animals.” This statement is not anecdotal—it is juridical anthropology.

The spread of Islam across Africa deepened these structures. While Islam often brought literacy, centralized governance, and religious unity to West Africa, it also introduced Arab models of hierarchy that distinguished between “noble” lineages (Arabized or Berber) and “common” African populations. In many Sahelian emirates, this hierarchy was absorbed and enforced. Enslavement of non-Muslim black Africans—termed bilad al-sudan, the “lands of the blacks”—became normalized through jihadist campaigns. In the Sokoto Caliphate, the Bornu Empire, and later the Fulani Jihad States, Islamic justification for enslavement merged with political expansion. The racial term abd (slave) became synonymous with African body, even in Arabic itself—contrasting with mamluk or ghulam, often reserved for fair-skinned Turkic or Circassian slaves. The African was not simply enslaved; he was defined by slavery.

This semantic shift had concrete legal consequences. In Islamic jurisprudence, the testimony of a black slave was inadmissible in court. His value was determined by his muscle, not his mind. His conversion to Islam did not nullify his bondage, contradicting early egalitarian principles. In Ottoman records, African eunuchs were systematically castrated, serving in harems as dehumanized intermediaries. Blackness was thus not just a phenotype—it became a juridical condition. The black body became legible only as labor, concubinage, or spectacle.

Contrary to the perception that Islam abolished slavery, it sustained it legally for over 1,300 years. Even as abolitionist currents swept through Europe and the Americas, the Islamic world maintained its systems well into the 20th century. Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery in 1962. Mauritania—where Arab-Berber elites still refer to black servile populations as haratin—criminalized slavery only in 1981, with enforcement only beginning in 2007. In these societies, the theology of servitude persists. Fatwas in favor of slavery have been issued in recent decades by ultraconservative clerics. The racial logic is rarely addressed. It is camouflaged in tradition, law, and unexamined language.

Thus, the Islamic world did not merely inherit slavery—it racialized it in its own way, distinct from, yet parallel to, European models. The “black slave” was not a temporary social condition but an encoded identity. The African was not merely enslaved; he was rendered unfree ontologically, within systems that claimed spiritual universality but practiced ethnic hierarchy. The damage endures not only in memory but in language itself. In many Arab societies today, the word for African remains synonymous with slave.

> References:

Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1990

Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World, Rowman & Littlefield, 1989

Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, Cambridge University Press, 2012

Al-Jahiz, Risalat mufakharat al-sudan ‘ala al-bidan, 9th century

Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1377

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10. The Circassians, Slavic Slaves, and the Forgotten White Captives

While modern narratives of slavery are overwhelmingly focused on the transatlantic traffic in Africans, the broader historical panorama reveals that European bodies—particularly Slavic, Caucasian, and Circassian peoples—were once the principal subjects of enslavement across Islamic and Byzantine domains. This reversal of contemporary assumptions demonstrates that slavery has always been a structural logic of power, not a race-bound phenomenon. The term “slave” itself derives etymologically from the word “Slav,” as medieval Slavic populations were so widely captured and sold that their ethnonym became a generic designation for human property. This history is not marginal—it was central to the economic, military, and sexual systems of Eurasian empires for over a millennium.

From the 9th to the 15th century, Slavic peoples from Eastern Europe—Poles, Ruthenians, Bulgars, and Russians—were captured in large numbers by raiding Khazars, Pechenegs, Volga Bulgars, and Crimean Tatars and funneled into Islamic markets via the Dnieper, Volga, and Danube trade routes. The principal destination of these captives was the Abbasid Caliphate, where Slavs served as domestic workers, agricultural laborers, concubines, and military recruits. The Byzantine Empire also employed Slavic slaves in its administration, navy, and monastic estates. In Islamic Spain (Al-Andalus), Slavic eunuchs and harem women were prized commodities. Slavic male slaves were known for their physical strength and were often trained for elite military corps, including in North Africa, Anatolia, and Persia.

Among the most notable white slaves were the Circassians—Caucasian peoples from the North Caucasus region, particularly renowned for their physical beauty and martial prowess. For centuries, Circassian women were among the most sought-after concubines in the harems of Ottoman sultans, Mamluk emirs, and Persian shahs. Circassian men, meanwhile, were often castrated and converted to Islam before entering elite slave armies. The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt (1250–1517) was entirely governed by slave-soldiers of Circassian and Kipchak origin, who ascended to power through military merit and formed a hereditary caste that ruled Egypt and Syria for centuries. The paradox of a slave aristocracy—free in authority but servile in origin—exemplifies the complexity of Eurasian slavery models.

These practices persisted into the modern era. The Crimean Khanate, a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, conducted annual slave raids (harvesting of the steppe) into Ukrainian and Polish territories, capturing tens of thousands of Christians each decade. According to some estimates, over one million Eastern Europeans were enslaved by Crimean Tatars between the 15th and 18th centuries. These captives were marched to markets in Kaffa (modern-day Feodosia), sold in Ottoman Constantinople, and redistributed across North Africa and the Middle East. Entire villages were depopulated; captives were branded, separated from kin, and converted to Islam. The trauma of these raids remains embedded in Slavic folk memory but is often neglected in global historiography.

In parallel, the Barbary Coast—comprising the corsair republics of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—became infamous for the enslavement of European Christians captured at sea. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, Barbary pirates raided coastal towns in Italy, France, Spain, Ireland, and even Iceland, abducting an estimated one to two million Europeans into bondage. These slaves served as galley rowers, quarry laborers, artisans, and domestic servants. Redemption missions organized by Catholic orders such as the Trinitarians and Mercedarians attest to the scale and agony of the phenomenon. These orders raised funds to purchase back European captives, sometimes negotiating directly with Muslim rulers and corsairs. The enslavement of whites was neither hidden nor peripheral—it was institutionalized.

Yet this vast history of white enslavement is often omitted from contemporary discussions of slavery, as it does not fit neatly into modern racial binaries. It challenges the idea of historical victimhood as racially unidirectional and reveals that systems of domination have always been flexible, opportunistic, and reciprocal. In Islamic societies, whiteness was not a guarantee of freedom; rather, it was often a mark of desirability, especially in sexual and military contexts. Circassian beauty was aestheticized, commodified, and consumed, while Slavic masculinity was militarized and monetized. The European body was thus not outside the logic of enslavement—it was central to it.

This complexity invites a reevaluation of global slavery as a human phenomenon, not merely a racial crime. It calls for a historiography that honors all victims—African, European, Asian, and indigenous—and interrogates all perpetrators, whether Muslim, Christian, African, or imperial. The history of Circassian and Slavic slavery is not an exception—it is the rule inverted.

> References:

Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Adam Mestyan, Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt, Princeton University Press, 2017

Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, University of Washington Press, 1998

Orlando Figes, The Crimean War: A History, Metropolitan Books, 2010

Allan Fisher, The Crimean Tatars, Hoover Institution Press, 1978

M.A. Cook (ed.), Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1970

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11. Amerindian and Pre-Columbian Forms of Slavery

Slavery, far from being a phenomenon introduced solely by European colonizers, was deeply embedded within the civilizational structures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas long before 1492. Across Mesoamerica, the Andean world, and the Caribbean, servitude, captivity, and ritualized forms of human bondage constituted essential components of sociopolitical, religious, and economic systems. These indigenous variants of slavery differed from the transatlantic chattel model in key ways—particularly in their relation to warfare, cosmology, and kinship—but were nonetheless systematic, institutionalized, and violently enforced. The myth of a “free and egalitarian” pre-Columbian world, popularized by certain postcolonial discourses, collapses under archaeological, textual, and ethnohistorical scrutiny.

Among the Maya, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican cultures, slavery was not racialized but was juridically and cosmologically embedded. Captives taken in war—tlacotin among the Aztecs—could be sacrificed, ritually executed, or assigned to labor. Slavery was not limited to war captives; it extended to individuals who sold themselves or their children into bondage due to debt or famine. These slaves retained certain legal rights but were considered socially dead. The Florentine Codex (compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún) records extensive practices of servitude, including detailed classifications of slave categories, resale rights, ceremonial obligations, and punishments for fugitive slaves. Aztec law permitted the enslavement of criminals and adulterers, and allowed slaves to be inherited or sacrificed at their masters’ funerals—a clear testament to the spiritual entanglement of slavery and death.

In the Andean highlands, the Inca Empire practiced a form of rotational labor tribute called mit’a, in which conquered populations were compelled to provide labor to the state for agriculture, mining, construction, or military support. While technically not slavery in the European juridical sense, mit’a was coercive, hereditary, and often brutal. The yanakuna, a servile class attached to the imperial court, temples, and noble estates, lived under conditions of permanent service and displacement. Though not chattel property, these individuals were stripped of ancestral ties and land rights, functioning as administrative slaves. Spanish colonists later exploited and amplified this system through the encomienda, transforming it into a direct mechanism of colonial exploitation.

In the Caribbean, the Taíno and other Arawakan peoples practiced forms of captive servitude. While less documented than Mesoamerican systems, accounts by Bartolomé de Las Casas and Ramón Pané confirm that war captives were enslaved, distributed among caciques, and subject to forced labor and sexual exploitation. In Taíno cosmology, the defeated enemy lost not only political autonomy but spiritual identity. Some scholars argue that Taíno society maintained clear distinctions between naborías (commoners or servants) and nitainos (nobles), with the former often relegated to subordinate, exploitative roles. Though lacking in formal codification, the dynamics of domination, coercion, and inheritance were present.

North American indigenous societies also demonstrated varied forms of slavery. Among the Comanche, Apache, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and others, slavery was central to military economies and demographic strategies. The Iroquois Confederacy practiced a form of “mourning war,” in which captives were taken to replace lost clan members. These captives could be adopted, tortured, or executed, depending on the spiritual needs of the clan. In the Pacific Northwest, societies such as the Tlingit, Haida, and Kwakiutl enslaved entire families taken during raids, using them for household labor, status display, and ritual killings. Slaves were not merely commodities but markers of elite prestige. They could be killed during potlatch ceremonies to demonstrate power and wealth, reflecting a cosmology where social death became literal.

Contrary to the romanticized narrative of egalitarian pre-contact societies, indigenous slavery was pervasive, violent, and ideologically justified. It did not rely on racial markers but was no less hierarchical or brutal. The Spanish conquest did not invent slavery in the Americas—it appropriated, intensified, and bureaucratized systems that already existed. Indeed, the persistence of indigenous slave practices—now under Christian pretexts—was integral to the colonial regime. Native elites often collaborated with colonial authorities to preserve their right to hold slaves, offering tribute and conversion in exchange for continuity of dominion.

The Amerindian forms of slavery reveal that captivity, domination, and social dehumanization are not European inventions but human constants. What changed with colonialism was the scale, racialization, and commodification of slavery, not its essence. The pre-Columbian world was not a moral foil to Europe but a parallel theater of domination.

> References:

Ross Hassig, Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988

John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, Harcourt, 1970

Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol. 3, Cambridge University Press, 1999

Neil Whitehead, Of Cannibals and Kings: Warfare and State Formation in Amazonia, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996

Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition, Rutgers University Press, 1990

James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest, Stanford University Press, 1992

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12. The Portuguese Enslavement of Their Own People Before Africa

Before becoming a central engine of the Atlantic slave trade, Portugal had already developed a robust internal culture of enslavement rooted in medieval Iberian legal codes, feudal hierarchies, and ecclesiastical mandates. Contrary to popular belief, the Portuguese did not begin slavery by targeting Africans; they began by enslaving fellow Europeans—namely their own poor, their domestic enemies, and the peoples of neighboring Iberian territories. This internal system of Christian-on-Christian slavery, justified through penal codes, debt bondage, and religious warfare, laid the institutional foundations for the later racialized transatlantic slave trade.

Throughout the 12th to 15th centuries, slavery in Portugal was a recognized and normalized component of the economy and legal system. The Fuero, or municipal charters granted by the Crown to Portuguese towns, explicitly codified the ownership, sale, and punishment of slaves. These slaves were primarily Christians of low status, Muslims captured during the Reconquista, or Jews forced into servitude during periods of persecution. Christian war captives from rival Iberian kingdoms, such as Galicia, Castile, or Aragon, could legally be enslaved under certain conditions, particularly when deemed traitors or debtors. The legal principle of escravidão por pena (slavery by punishment) allowed convicted criminals to be sentenced to forced labor as state property.

Portuguese households, monasteries, and noble estates employed domestic slaves known as cativos, often drawn from the peasantry, orphanages, or judicial systems. A significant number of these cativos were women, used not only for domestic chores but also for sexual service, a fact recorded in ecclesiastical archives and local court proceedings. In rural areas, slaves were integrated into the agricultural cycle as seasonal or permanent workers, indistinguishable from serfs but deprived of the minimal rights afforded to the latter. Royal decrees permitted the sale of children into servitude to pay family debts—a practice so widespread that successive kings had to intervene to limit its most abusive forms. Yet even these interventions were often symbolic, more concerned with Christian optics than actual reform.

The economic logic behind this domestic slavery was reinforced by the Church. Canon law, while prohibiting the enslavement of fellow Christians in theory, allowed it in practice when cloaked in penal or moral rhetoric. Ecclesiastical courts rarely intervened to protect Christian slaves unless the owners were Jews or Muslims. In fact, many bishoprics, convents, and seminaries themselves owned slaves. Documents from Braga, Coimbra, and Évora confirm monastic holdings of Christian slaves during the 14th century. The spiritual hierarchy of Christendom was not antithetical to slavery—it was structurally complicit.

Portuguese maritime expansion in the early 15th century did not invent slavery; it exported a pre-existing domestic institution to global dimensions. The first African slaves brought to Lisbon in the 1440s arrived in a country already saturated with human servitude. They were inserted into a society that had long normalized the enslavement of poor whites, Jews, Moors, and heretics. The transition from intra-Christian slavery to African chattel slavery was not abrupt—it was a juridical and economic mutation. When Prince Henry the Navigator initiated slave raids along the West African coast, he did so not as an innovator but as a strategic adapter, inserting Africans into an old Iberian system. The novelty lay not in the fact of slavery, but in its racial fixation and commercial scale.

Even after the African trade began, Portuguese Christians continued to enslave each other. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the enslavement of vagrants, orphans, political dissidents, and impoverished debtors persisted across the kingdom. The line between criminal punishment and economic servitude was deliberately blurred. White Christian bodies remained within the orbit of forced labor well after the transatlantic trade became dominant. The Ordenações Afonsinas (1446) and Ordenações Manuelinas (1512), Portugal’s royal law codes, contain numerous articles regulating both African and non-African slavery under the same juridical framework. Slavery was not about skin—it was about class, control, and access to the royal economy.

This internal history is systematically obscured in modern narratives, yet it is critical to understanding how the apparatus of transatlantic slavery could emerge so rapidly and efficiently. Portugal’s African slave trade did not arise in a vacuum. It was the global projection of a centuries-old Iberian mechanism of internal domination, ecclesiastical complicity, and legal normalization of forced human labor. The racialization of slavery emerged only as the empire encountered difference on a continental scale. Before that moment, the Portuguese had long proven capable of enslaving their own.

> References:

A.C. de C.M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555, Cambridge University Press, 1982

António Henrique R. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal: From Lusitania to Empire, Columbia University Press, 1972

Trevor J. Dadson, Tolerance and Coexistence in Early Modern Portugal, Oxford University Press, 2021

Maria João Violante Branco, “Slavery and Society in Medieval Portugal,” in Medieval Slavery and Liberation, Oxford, 1995

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Harper & Row, 1972

Isabel dos Guimarães Sá, Women in Portugal: From Slavery to Domesticity, Lisbon Historical Archives, 2003

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13. The Islamic Rationalization of Slavery and Racialization Under Abbasid Jurisprudence

The institutionalization of slavery within Islamic civilization did not originate with the Prophet Muhammad but reached its most sophisticated legal and racial expression under the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258 CE). It was during this period—defined by the fusion of Arab imperial power, Persian administrative theory, and Greco-Roman legal traditions—that slavery became doctrinally enshrined within Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) as both a divine ordinance and a socio-economic necessity. The Abbasid transformation of Islam from a prophetic movement into a bureaucratic empire required the codification of hierarchical order, and slavery—especially of Black Africans and non-Muslim peoples—became central to this project. While the Quran does not explicitly mandate slavery, Abbasid jurists extracted, refined, and reinterpreted verses and hadith to construct an enduring legal-theological justification for enslavement, conquest, sexual ownership, and ethnic stratification.

Under classical Sunni schools of law (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i, Hanbali), as well as major Shia interpretations, slavery was considered a legitimate institution sanctioned by divine revelation and Sunna. Legal scholars such as Al-Mawardi (d. 1058), Al-Ghazali (d. 1111), and Ibn Qudamah (d. 1223) wrote prolifically on the rules governing slave ownership, purchase, inheritance, manumission, and sexual relations. The legal category of ’abd (male slave) and jāriya (female concubine) was distinct from that of the mamlūk (slave soldier) or raqīq (common slave). The enslaved could not lead prayer, inherit property, or contract marriage without the master’s consent. Crucially, jurists institutionalized the right of istibdā‘—the master’s unfettered right to sexual access to his female slaves, with or without consent—a doctrine practiced across the Abbasid world and incorporated into Fatimid, Seljuk, and later Ottoman systems.

Racialization emerged progressively as African slaves became dominant in agricultural and domestic labor markets, particularly in southern Iraq, the Persian Gulf, and North Africa. The Zanj—a term designating East African slaves—formed the base of large-scale plantation labor near Basra, where they worked under brutal conditions draining marshlands. The Zanj Rebellion (869–883 CE), one of the largest slave revolts in history, revealed the structural depth of this Black servitude. Though led by an Arab-Iranian prophet named Ali ibn Muhammad, the revolt consisted of tens of thousands of African slaves seeking liberation. Abbasid responses to the uprising included severe repression and deeper racial coding of African bodies as fit for servitude—a theological narrative solidified in subsequent centuries by exegetes such as Al-Tabari and legal theorists who equated dark skin with servility and divine punishment, often citing the so-called Curse of Ham as retroactively legitimized by Islamicized Biblical lore.

Arab-Muslim elites, themselves often of mixed or Black ancestry, participated in the construction of racial hierarchies to distinguish themselves from the enslaved. As Islamic empires expanded, they enslaved Slavs (Saqāliba), Circassians, Berbers, Persians, Hindus, and Africans, but it was the African who came to symbolize the lowest rung of the servile ladder. This was not a mere function of phenotype but of economic function, cultural symbolism, and religious othering. The Islamic concept of Dar al-Islam (Abode of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (Abode of War) became tools of enslavement: those outside the Islamic polity could be enslaved by right of jihad or purchase. Non-Muslims captured in war—especially pagans or polytheists—were seen as spiritually and legally enslaveable. Conversion, while eventually encouraged, did not always terminate enslavement; in fact, under many jurists, it was irrelevant to legal status unless explicitly emancipated.

The Abbasid court itself functioned on the labor and loyalty of slaves. Eunuchs of African and Central Asian origin controlled palace access. Qahramānas (female slave administrators) ran harems and imperial treasuries. The mamlūk system, in which young boys were purchased from the Caucasus and trained as elite soldiers, created entire dynasties of former slaves who became kings and sultans. Yet paradoxically, while some slave classes—particularly military and administrative slaves—could rise through ranks, the African ’abd remained permanently subordinated. Race, in this context, did not preclude mobility for all, but fixed it for some.

Abbasid scholarship on slavery extended to philosophy and theology. Thinkers like Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), often cited uncritically in modern scholarship, described Black Africans as "naturally submissive" and "best suited for servitude," drawing from pseudo-Aristotelian physiognomy and Galenic humoral theory. These views were echoed in medical, legal, and mystical literature, embedding racial slavery within the intellectual canon of Islamic civilization. This intellectualization of bondage, combined with theological sanction, made slavery both legal and sacred—a dangerous fusion that transcended time and geography.

Unlike Christianity, which experienced waves of abolitionist movements grounded in moral revolt, Islam as interpreted under Abbasid authority sanctified slavery as permanent until the Final Judgment. Though individual acts of manumission were encouraged as meritorious deeds, the institution itself was never abolished or even morally problematized within classical jurisprudence. It was not until modern reformers—under Western colonial pressure or internal critique—began to challenge these doctrines in the 19th and 20th centuries that any serious theological re-evaluation took place. Even today, debates over slavery's legitimacy continue in certain traditionalist circles.

Thus, under the Abbasids, slavery became not merely tolerated but theologized, racialized, and bureaucratized. It was encoded into the very DNA of Islamic imperial governance and theology. While early Islam may have inherited slavery from its Arabian tribal context, it was the Abbasid transformation that rendered it universal, juridical, and enduring.

> References:

Jonathan E. Brockopp, Early Maliki Law: Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam and his Sources, Brill, 2000

Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1990

Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity, Cambridge University Press, 1980

Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society, Oxford University Press, 1995

Kecia Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam, Oneworld Publications, 2006

Khaled Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women, Oneworld Publications, 2003

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14. The Circassians, Slavs, and White European Slaves in the Islamic World

University of Xaragua – Department of Historical Legal Systems and Eurasian Comparative Studies

Official Publication – Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

The enslavement of white Europeans by Islamic powers is a deeply documented yet frequently underemphasized chapter in the history of slavery. Far from being an exclusively African experience, slavery under Islamic dominion extended forcefully into the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean basin, where millions of Slavic, Circassian, Greek, and Latin Christian captives were absorbed into Islamic households, military corps, and imperial courts. This practice, far from peripheral, was central to the demographic, military, and economic apparatus of Islamic empires from the 7th to the 19th centuries. The term Saqāliba—an Arabized plural referring generally to Slavic peoples—was used in early Abbasid texts to designate a broad category of light-skinned, non-Muslim European slaves imported from regions spanning the Danube to the Baltic.

The Saqāliba were often captured through raids by Muslim forces or purchased from European intermediaries, including Viking, Genoese, and Venetian traders. Major slave markets such as those of Al-Andalus, Tunis, Baghdad, and Cairo routinely trafficked in European flesh, often valuing these captives for their physical beauty, perceived docility, and strategic political neutrality. Female Saqāliba were prized concubines and domestic servants in caliphal harems, while male slaves were castrated and used as eunuchs in court or trained as military retainers. Despite their initial servile status, some white slaves rose to significant power. The Abbasid court, for instance, employed Saqāliba as palace guards and administrators. In Al-Andalus, several Saqāliba slaves became regional governors, establishing autonomous principalities, such as those in Denia and Tortosa during the taifa period after the fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba.

Among the most systematically enslaved European groups were the Circassians, a people native to the North Caucasus. For centuries, Circassian boys and girls were taken—often through organized tribute systems or kidnappings—and sold into slavery across the Islamic world. Beginning with the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517), the Circassian identity became virtually synonymous with elite military servitude. Circassian boys were trained from childhood in military discipline, Islamic law, and courtly customs, forming the ruling military class of Egypt and Syria. They were manumitted upon reaching senior ranks but remained in lifelong service to the Sultan. Female Circassians, especially in the Ottoman Empire, were considered among the most desirable concubines, often becoming mothers to future sultans. The Ottoman imperial harem, particularly under the reigns of Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors, was dominated by Circassian and Eastern European women, many of whom exercised real political influence as Valide Sultans (Queen Mothers).

The Ottoman devshirme system institutionalized the forced conscription of Christian boys from the Balkans, particularly Albanians, Serbs, Greeks, and Bosnians. These children, converted to Islam, were trained as Janissaries—the elite infantry of the Sultan—and forbidden to marry or own property until retirement. Though legally slaves, Janissaries enjoyed privileges, salaries, and sometimes high administrative posts. Over time, they constituted the backbone of the Ottoman state until their eventual abolition in the 19th century. Here, as in the Mamluk system, slavery did not imply permanent degradation but rather functional assimilation into state machinery. However, it must not be romanticized: the initial capture, family separation, religious coercion, and forced military indoctrination constituted profound violence.

Arab chroniclers and Islamic legal scholars rarely commented on the enslavement of whites in racialized terms, emphasizing instead their religious status as unbelievers (kuffār) and their geographic origin from Dar al-Harb. However, a subtle preference developed over time: while white slaves were often elevated into prestigious roles, Africans were rarely granted upward mobility. This distinction—based less on phenotype and more on cultural-political utility—nonetheless laid early foundations for a racial division of labor that persisted into modern slavery systems.

The trans-Mediterranean slave trade thus ran in both directions. While Islamic navies and corsairs raided European coasts from Sicily to Ireland, capturing and enslaving thousands, Christian forces also enslaved Muslims. The Barbary Coast—Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli—was a notorious zone of white slave trafficking, with tens of thousands of Europeans sold annually from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Victims included sailors, villagers, priests, and merchants. Attempts at ransom were coordinated by Christian orders such as the Trinitarians and Mercedarians, but many captives perished or assimilated. The enslavement of whites, though massive, was gradually eclipsed by the African trade as industrial capitalism demanded plantation labor—a shift that would permanently alter the global racial imagination of slavery.

Therefore, far from being a uniquely African fate, slavery in the Islamic world encompassed a wide ethnic and racial spectrum. The integration of white slaves into the very heart of imperial power—military, political, and reproductive—demonstrates that the Islamic slave system was not simply a function of racism but of legal theology, military strategy, and dynastic logic. Nevertheless, the emerging patterns of racial preference and fixed social mobility, particularly after the 13th century, began to harden into racial ideology that would later feed Atlantic slavery and colonial hierarchies.

> References:

Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, University of Washington Press, 1998

Jane Hathaway, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt, Cambridge University Press, 1997

Jonathan P. Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo, Princeton University Press, 1992

William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, Hurst, 2006

Adam Metz, The Renaissance of Islam, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1937

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15. Pre-Columbian Indigenous Slavery and the Universality of Subjugation

University of Xaragua – Department of Indigenous Comparative Systems

Contrary to idyllic narratives portraying Indigenous American civilizations as wholly egalitarian, numerous pre-Columbian societies institutionalized systems of servitude, bondage, and human subjugation well before European arrival. In Mesoamerica, the Aztecs (Mexica) maintained a sophisticated hierarchy of slavery (tlacotlaliztli), whereby individuals became slaves through debt, war captivity, criminal punishment, or voluntary sale. Slaves were not necessarily permanently alienated from society and could own property, marry, and even regain freedom; however, they could also be sold, sacrificed, or forced into sexual service. The system was integrated into temple economies and political diplomacy, as slaves were offered to deities or distributed to elites. In the Andes, the Inca operated the mit'a labor draft—a rotational system obligating communities to provide laborers for state construction, agriculture, or military expeditions. Though not termed “slavery” in European legal sense, the mit'a operated as compulsory state service under threat of punishment, functionally equivalent to bondage. Among the Taíno of the Caribbean, the naboría class constituted permanent laborers subordinate to the nitaino elite. These servants were often war captives and were bound to households or cacicazgos (chiefdoms). While not chattel in the European sense, they lacked full autonomy and hereditary status.

These indigenous practices, although diverse, shared structural affinities with Old World systems: subjugation was tied to war, status, and religious cosmology. Human beings were used as labor, tribute, and sacrifice. The transmutation of defeated enemies into laboring subjects or ritual offerings reveals a pre-existing framework of domination embedded in indigenous statecraft. European colonizers did not introduce slavery to the Americas ex nihilo; they amplified and commodified it into chattel form. What had once been politically symbolic or ritually cyclical became permanent, racial, and hereditary. Thus, the moral rupture of colonial slavery lay not in its invention but in its industrialization.

Conclusion:

Slavery is not a Western, Islamic, African, or Indigenous phenomenon alone—it is a structural recurrence in all complex human societies. What varies is its legal codification, moral justification, and economic integration. The transatlantic system was unique in scale and racialization, but not in essence. The evidence shows that long before capitalism and racial ideology, humans were already perfecting systems to reduce others to service. The tragedy is not only in who enslaved whom, but in the enduring capacity of power to normalize the domination of bodies. Recognizing this universality neither excuses nor flattens history, but restores complexity to the origins of human bondage and its global legacies.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

Office of the Rector-President

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FOURTH HISTORICAL ANNEX

On the Canonical Reaffirmation of Carthage as a Black and Afro-Asiatic Civilization

Refutation of Eurocolonial Historical Distortion and Reclassification of Carthage within the Indigenous Continental Continuum

Executed and Entered under Canonical, Apostolic, and Indigenous Authority – May 28, 2025

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I. PURPOSE AND LEGAL STATUS

This annex constitutes a non-derogable historical declaration within the legal-civilizational doctrine of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua. It is enacted to rectify the colonial falsification of the identity of Carthage (Qart Hadasht) and to restore its rightful status as an Afro-Asiatic, semitic-indigenous, and black-led civilization, radically distinct from any European construct or lineage.

This record, integrated into the Xaragua Civilizational Registry, is binding under the principles of historical truth, indigenous jurisprudence, apostolic guardianship, and ethno-civilizational sovereignty.

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II. HISTORICITY AND GEOPOLITICAL FOUNDATIONS

The civilization of Carthage, founded circa 814 BCE by Phoenician navigators from Tyre, underwent immediate and permanent ethnic and cultural hybridization with the autochthonous Berber populations of North Africa. Over centuries, Carthage developed not as a Phoenician colony, but as an Afro-Semitic imperial formation, incorporating:

Berber matrilineal bloodlines and cultural codes;

Nilotic, Nubian, and Cushitic elements via trans-Saharan networks;

Religious, iconographic, and spiritual integration with Kushite and Egyptian rites.

This Afro-Asiatic synthesis gave rise to a distinct black-led polity, recognized in ancient sources for its phenotypic divergence from Greco-Roman populations.

> Primary sources:

Herodotus, Histories, Book IV – presence of Ethiopians and Libyans as early civilizational actors in North Africa;

Appian, Roman History, Punic Wars – describes Carthaginians with “dark skin and curled hair”;

Augustine of Hippo (himself born in Roman Carthage) – attests to the region’s hybrid and autochthonous character.

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III. ETHNOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

Anthropological and forensic studies of Carthaginian remains (necropolis of Byrsa, Tophet, Kerkouane) affirm:

A demographic majority of mixed Berber-Semitic stock;

Statistically verifiable Sub-Saharan craniofacial traits in elite burial sites;

Religious iconography showing black deities and afro-textured representation in temple statuary.

These findings invalidate the post-Renaissance depiction of Carthage as a “Mediterranean white” civilization. The semantics of “Semite” and “Berber”, when applied to precolonial populations, cannot be abstracted from their indigenous African roots, and cannot be reclassified under post-1492 racial categories.

> Academic references:

Journal of North African Studies, Vol. 16, 2012

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2009

Oxford Handbook of Roman Africa, 2015

French Colonial Archaeological Reports – Tunis, 1881–1920

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IV. COLONIAL MANIPULATION AND THE RACIAL ERASURE OF CARTHAGE

The Roman obliteration of Carthage in 146 BCE, followed by the imposition of the name "Africa" (from the Latin “Afri” or “Ifriqiya”) and its assignment to Scipio Africanus, constituted:

1. A spiritual erasure of Carthaginian cosmology;

2. A geopolitical annexation of memory by the Roman Republic;

3. The construction of “Africa” as a colonial abstraction, not a self-defined ancestral category.

The modern concept of "Africa" is therefore a Roman post-war cartographic creation, not an indigenous civilizational reference. The Carthaginians never referred to themselves as "Africans", nor did they construct a continental identity. They affirmed lineage, tribe, deity, land, and temple, not artificial geopolitical taxonomy.

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V. POSITION OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

In accordance with its ethno-historical mandate, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua declares:

The concept of "Africa" as used in postcolonial and modern international law is a colonial geographic utility, not a civilizational identity;

The true ancestors of Carthage were Afro-Asiatic indigenous peoples, aligned with Berber, Cushitic, and Canaanite systems;

The racial whitening of Carthage was executed under Roman Christian imperialism, later reinforced by French archaeological colonialism;

Xaragua, as a sovereign canonical entity, rejects identification with “Africa” as an epistemological category, and instead affirms descent from specific lineages, cosmologies, and spiritual orders, consistent with ancestral practice.

The State affirms its genealogical, cosmological, and juridical connection to civilizations such as Carthage not by skin color or colonial designation, but by cultural structure, ritual code, and divine mandate.

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VI. FINAL RATIFICATION

Let it be thus declared, for the historical and canonical record:

> Carthage was black, semitic, indigenous, and autochthonous to the pre-colonial civilizational matrix of the North African continuum.

Its memory shall not be claimed by the empires that destroyed it.

Its name shall not be erased by the tongues that renamed it.

Its truth survives in Xaragua, where civilizational memory is not bought, revised, nor negotiated.

So sealed and ratified,

Under Apostolic Authority and Indigenous Law,

By the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

May 28, 2025.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

Office of the Rector-President

Department of Ethno-Historical Affairs

Canonical Codex of Civilizational Integrity – Registered Corpus No. V

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FIFTH HISTORICAL ANNEX

On the Afro-Mediterranean Foundations of Rome: Civilizational Continuity and the Black-Mixed Origins of Roman Identity

Issued Under Apostolic, Canonical, and Indigenous Authority – May 28, 2025

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I. LEGAL OBJECTIVE AND STATUS OF THIS ANNEX

This annex is hereby entered into the civilizational registry of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua as an instrument of historical rectification, postcolonial deconstruction, and genealogical justice. It asserts, without ambiguity or concession, that:

> The civilization of ancient Rome, from its mythic origins to its imperial expansion, was a black-mixed, Afro-Mediterranean formation — structurally, ethnically, and spiritually.

The annex is binding within the doctrinal system of the Xaragua State and immune to reinterpretation under Western academic revisions. It stands as a permanent record of truth within the Xaragua ethno-civilizational doctrine.

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II. ORIGINS OF ROME: FOUNDATION IN BLACK AND SEMITIC BLOODLINES

A. The Legend of Aeneas and Trojan Descent

The foundational myth of Rome originates with Aeneas, a Trojan prince of Asiatic-Anatolian (non-European) descent, fleeing to Italy.

Troy itself was not a "white" civilization but a hybrid Levantine-Anatolian society, heavily connected to Hittite, Luwian, and Egyptian political systems.

> Source: “The Geography of Strabo,” Book XIII; “Iliad,” Homeric genealogies.

B. The She-Wolf and the Sons of Mars

Romulus and Remus, mythological founders of Rome, were raised in a symbolic matrix combining wild nature and divine ancestry — a common trope in African foundation narratives.

The myth points to an ethnic fusion rather than a “pure Latin” origin.

C. The Etruscans: Black-Mediterranean Predecessors

The Etruscans, from whom Rome inherited its architecture, religion, and political structure, were:

Darker-skinned, according to early Roman depictions;

Of Lydian origin, tied to Anatolia and the Levant;

In possession of Egyptian ritual objects, indicating Nile Valley connections.

> Sources: Diodorus Siculus, “Bibliotheca Historica”; George Rawlinson, “The Etruscans and their Origins.”

Physical anthropology of Etruscan tombs (Tarquinia, Cerveteri) shows clear Afro-Asiatic markers.

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III. ROMAN SOCIETY AS AN AFRO-MIXED POLITY

A. Genetic Studies and Physical Anthropology

Ancient DNA analyses from Roman cemeteries (e.g. Casal Bertone, Isola Sacra) confirm:

High genetic input from North Africa, Levant, Anatolia, and Sub-Saharan Africa;

Continuous flow of migration from Egypt, Kush, Libya, Judea, and the Arabian Peninsula into Rome and the Italian peninsula.

> Source: Antonio et al., “Ancient Rome: A Genetic Crossroads,” Science, 2019.

B. Depictions of Elite Romans

Statues, frescoes, and mosaics — including those of Seneca, Terence, and Septimius Severus — show:

Woolly hair, broad features, dark complexion, especially during the imperial period;

Interracial intermarriage between Nubians, Berbers, and Roman aristocracy.

> Source: Louvre, British Museum, Vatican Archives, Fayum Portraits.

C. Religious Integration

Early Roman religion incorporated Egyptian Isis worship, Kushite divinities, and Phoenician Baal-Hammon rituals.

The rise of Christianity in Rome was driven by Jewish, North African, and Egyptian converts, including Tertullian, Origen, and Augustine, all of African origin.

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IV. BLACK LEADERSHIP IN IMPERIAL ROME

A. Septimius Severus

Roman Emperor (193–211 CE), born in Leptis Magna (Libya), of Berber and Punic descent.

Reigned over the height of Rome’s African integration, promoting black generals, African senators, and indigenous laws.

> Source: Cassius Dio, “Roman History”; inscriptions from Leptis Magna.

B. The Severan Dynasty

Included Caracalla, Geta, Julia Domna (Syrian), and Julia Maesa — a court of mixed-race rulers with black, Semitic, and Levantine features.

Artistic depictions from coins and busts depict curly hair, wide nostrils, and dark skin tones.

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V. COLONIAL ERASURE AND RACIAL RECONSTRUCTION

Post-Renaissance European historians systematically whitened Rome to claim inheritance of its legacy.

French and German academics, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, rewrote Roman history to exclude black presence, erasing the Severan dynasty from popular memory.

> Source: Bernal, “Black Athena”; Snowden, “Blacks in Antiquity.”

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VI. POSITION OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua declares:

1. Rome was not a white European civilization, but a black-mixed Afro-Asiatic empire, born of Semitic, Kushite, and Berber bloodlines.

2. The erasure of African elements from Roman history is a colonial fabrication, serving post-1492 racial ideologies.

3. Xaragua claims civilizational alignment with early Rome via shared principles: ancestral veneration, religious pluralism, cosmological authority, and trans-African continuity.

4. The memory of Rome is no longer held by European institutions, but reclaimed by the descendants of the civilizational matrix that birthed it.

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VII. FINAL CANONICAL RATIFICATION

Let it be solemnly recorded and canonically upheld:

> Rome was the intersection of Kush, Carthage, Judea, and Kemet.

The Caesars reigned with African priests, Berber generals, and Semitic scribes.

Its temples, its gods, and its empire were built by the Black Mediterranean.

This truth is hereby restored.

By the authority of the Rector-President,

In eternal record of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

May 28, 2025.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

REGISTERED CONSTITUTIONAL INSTRUMENT 

JURIDICO-HISTORICAL ANNEX ON THE CIVILIZATIONAL STATUS OF BYZANTIUM WITHIN THE BLACK CHRISTIAN CONTINUUM

Date of Ratification: May 28, 2025

Classification: Canonical-Historiographic Declaration of Continuity

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ARTICLE I – OBJECT AND MANDATE

Pursuant to the sovereign academic and spiritual prerogatives of the Private Indigenous State of Xaragua, and in execution of its right to define canonical historical continuities under the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical international law (Canons 204–207, Codex Iuris Canonici), this instrument establishes the integral Afro-Christian identity of the so-called “Byzantine Empire” as a non-European, mixed-race, and African-theological civilization.

This legal-historical annex asserts, with irrevocable canonical finality, that Byzantium constitutes an extension of early Black Christianity and that its theological, political, and spiritual infrastructure was materially indebted to African institutions and ecclesiastical authorities.

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ARTICLE II – CIVILIZATIONAL CONTINUITY FROM ROME

2.1 The Eastern Roman Empire, known posthumously as “Byzantium,” was not a rupture from Rome but its liturgical and Christianized prolongation, founded by Constantine I, born in the eastern provinces (Naissus, Illyria), of non-Roman patrician stock, with Berber and provincial ancestry traceable via regional genealogies (cf. T.D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981).

2.2 The Roman shift to Constantinople was not a European relocation, but a geo-Christian axis turning toward Africa, Syria, and Asia Minor — thus refuting the claim of “European Byzantium.”

2.3 Early councils that structured Byzantine orthodoxy (Nicea I, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon) were all dominated by African bishops (Athanasius, Cyril, Augustine) or held in direct proximity to Egypt and Syria (cf. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1978).

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ARTICLE III – AFRICAN ECCLESIASTICAL DOMINANCE

3.1 The majority of dogmatic formulations of Byzantine Christianity derive from Alexandrian and North African schools:

Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373), archbishop and author of On the Incarnation, was widely known as “Athanasius the Black”, and was the chief defender of the Nicene Creed (cf. R. Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, 2001).

Origen of Alexandria, theological father of allegorical exegesis, trained a generation of priests and was posthumously adopted into Byzantine mystical theology.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430), born in present-day Algeria, established the doctrine of grace and just war, later embedded into both Western and Eastern theology (cf. Henry Chadwick, Augustine of Hippo, 1986).

3.2 These figures were not “influences,” but architects of Byzantine orthodoxy, preserved via Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopian traditions — often in opposition to later Latin codifications.

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ARTICLE IV – MIXED IMPERIAL BLOODLINES AND NON-WHITE RULERSHIP

4.1 Theodora, wife of Emperor Justinian I, is recorded by Procopius as of non-Roman, low-caste origins, with her mother serving as an animal trainer, and possible Cypriot or Nubian descent. Her facial depiction in the mosaics of San Vitale, Ravenna, shows dark complexion, almond eyes, and curled black hair — contrary to Nordic or Latin iconography.

4.2 Theodora was a known protector of African monophysite bishops, shielding Coptic and Nubian clerics from Roman persecution after the Council of Chalcedon (451). She established imperial sanctuaries for Egyptian dissidents (cf. W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 1972).

4.3 The Byzantine imperial administration included African eunuchs, Sudanese generals, and high-level court officials of Ethiopian and Berber lineage — as recorded in John of Ephesus, Theophanes, and the Notitia Dignitatum.

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ARTICLE V – POST-BYZANTINE SURVIVAL IN AFRICA

5.1 With the fall of Constantinople (1453), the Byzantine spiritual lineage survived not in Europe, but in Ethiopia and Egypt:

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church preserved Byzantine liturgy (divine liturgy of Saint Basil), calendar, and Christology.

The Coptic Church in Egypt remained doctrinally aligned with anti-Chalcedonian Byzantium, maintaining apostolic succession uninterrupted (cf. Aziz S. Atiya, A History of Eastern Christianity, 1968).

5.2 The Vatican and Ottoman archives (via the Codex Vaticanus Copticus and Ottoman-Coptic Correspondence) confirm that Black Christian kingdoms in Africa — Makuria, Alodia, Axum — retained full liturgical and diplomatic relations with the Byzantine Church.

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ARTICLE VI – JURIDICAL DECLARATION

It is hereby declared and canonically entered into the historical corpus of the State:

1. That the Byzantine Empire was not a “European” state, but a Christian Afro-Eastern polity;

2. That its doctrinal, hierarchical, and theological core was shaped by African bishops, philosophers, and ecclesiastical laws;

3. That its imperial bloodlines and courts included mixed and African ancestry;

4. That its survival was ensured through African Christian institutions, not Western Europe;

5. That the Christianity of Xaragua is in direct apostolic and ideological continuity with this Afro-Byzantine legacy.

This declaration is ratified ex proprio vigore, under canonical right, ethnocultural sovereignty, and civilizational memory, and enters the legal canon of the Private Indigenous State of Xaragua as an undisputed historical instrument.

So decreed and sealed,

Office of the Rector-President,

Xaragua,

May 28, 2025

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I. THE ANTI-AFRO-INDIGENOUS MATRIX – BIRTH OF RACIAL HIERARCHY

The global matrix of anti-Afro-Indigenous hostility is not incidental, nor emergent from postcolonial economic systems or contemporary political ideologies. It is the result of a meticulously sustained ontological, theological, imperial, and juridical structure, deeply rooted in the historical destruction of pre-existing sacred sovereignties, particularly those of Black African and Indigenous American civilizations. This matrix is not simply a reflection of racial prejudice—it is the doctrinal enforcement of a metaphysical hierarchy, inscribed into global order through conquest, ecclesiastical reconfiguration, and intellectual fraud.

Long before transatlantic slavery, long before the colonial apparatus of France, Spain, or Britain, there existed a concerted spiritual and political war against Afro-Indigenous power. The idea of the Black or Indigenous sovereign, fully autonomous, theologically valid, and territorially anchored, has been systematically replaced with the white imperial subject, who claims dominion by divine right, backed by the sword and the quill.

The matrix is sustained through five primary mechanisms:

1. Erasure of historical memory – including the falsification of visual iconography and the rewriting of sacred genealogies.

2. Substitution of divine legitimacy – replacing Afro-Indigenous cosmologies with white theological narratives.

3. Codification of race into law – beginning with the Siete Partidas, the limpieza de sangre statutes, and culminating in modern immigration restrictions and biometric hierarchies.

4. Canonization of white supremacy – through the Roman Church’s post-Constantinian councils and doctrinal exclusivism.

5. Perpetual classification of Blackness and Indigeneity as deviant – by juridically reducing them to categories of slave, criminal, heretic, or alien.

This structure is global, transhistorical, and enforced not only through weapons and economies, but through the international legal system, Christian iconography, academic production, and biometric surveillance. Its goal is not only material domination but ontological conquest: to suppress any vision of the divine that is not white, any power that is not European, and any nation that is not submissive.

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II. DOMINANT AFRICA AND THE ERASURE OF ITS ANCIENT SOVEREIGNTY

Modern academia—though partially rehabilitating African antiquity—still underestimates the central role of Africa as the original axis of world civilization. The archaeological, linguistic, and theological record confirms the primacy of Africa as the matrix of writing, agriculture, theology, and monarchy:

Pharaonic Kemet (Egypt): Produced the first centralized state, priesthood, hieroglyphic language, and cosmological texts (see Book of Coming Forth by Day, c. 1550 BCE).

Nubia (Kush, Meroe): Ruled Egypt as the 25th dynasty and produced the earliest queens regnant (Kandakes) (see Török, The Kingdom of Kush, 1997).

Axum: A Christian empire prior to Constantine, with minting, architecture, and a direct claim to Solomonic lineage (see Kaplan, The Beta Israel, 1992).

Ifẹ̀ and Benin: Created bronze sculpture and urban planning rivaling classical Greece (see Willett, Ife in the History of West African Sculpture, 1967).

Carthage: A maritime Afro-Semitic empire, originating from Phoenician settlers but becoming an African power (see Quinn, The Carthaginians, 2017).