Slavery among primitive peoples

The most primitive societies at the beginning of the 20th century were Australian tribes. Accordingly, we do not encounter slavery here in the strict sense: all the labor lies with women who play the role of real slaves: they are always cruelly treated - worse than dogs; often, in addition to the role of pack animals, they also play the role of slaughter cattle. The Papuans do the same, although some islands ( Fiji ) already have the seeds of slavery. Here the savages are so prudent that they leave prisoners alive as food, but in the interval between capture and eating prisoners of war are used as working hands, especially since the rudiments of agriculture are already encountered here. On other islands - the Solomon Islands , New Guinea - slaves are also used as exchange values.

In Africa, the classic country of slavery, blacks have a wide variety of relationships with slavery. The Hottentots do not have slavery, and in their economic organization they do not feel the need for it; even the situation of women here is not as difficult as that of the natives of Australia . But prisoners of war are killed without mercy.

Kafra women take the place of slaves.

The savages of the tropical belt (from the Gulf of Guinea to the Great Lakes region and the Mozambique Channel ), where civilization is higher and farming already exists, slavery is quite established: prisoners are often killed, sometimes eaten, but some are always preserved; the more the tribe is devoted to cannibalism , the less the number of slaves in it. A very strong incentive to increase slavery here was the slave trade , which took on especially enormous proportions and became especially terrible since the time when Europeans took an active part in it. The source of slavery in this part of Africa was war and raids , but also debt, paternal power, and judicial punitive measures.

The tribes of the tropical belt - the "slavery belt" - are sharply divided into fetish and Muslim countries. Of the inhabitants of the fetishist countries that are at a lower stage of development, some (for example, among the inhabitants of Manbuttu ) captives, if they are alive, only as slaughter cattle; for others ( Uganda ), although slavery exists, it is still poorly organized; among the third ( Ashanti , Dahomey ) it is a completely organized institution: there is already a class of domestic slaves who are not treated very cruelly, and prisoner-of-war slaves whom they are cruel and who are trying to sell as soon as possible. In Muslim states, there are much more slaves: for every free person, there are three or four slaves, many private individuals have a thousand slaves. Such widespread slavery is due to the fairly significant development of the economy in these states. Prisoners of war and slave children born out of wedlock belong to the lowest category of slaves: these slaves are a walking coin and pack animals; the owners treat them in the most ruthless way - no better than pets. Domestic slaves live a little better: they are part of the family and often enjoy influence; the attitude of gentlemen is almost always affectionate. The position of the third category of slaves is even better: they are serfs serving a certain corvée labor; having completed what they are supposed to, they can freely dispose of themselves. However, such freedom is only the result of the tolerance of the masters, and not their legal status. Finally, there is another group of slaves - government, constituting an organized corporation and having their own boss, in the choice of which the king is consistent with their desires. Of these, soldiers are recruited, often officials and officers. They even have the right to own slaves.

In the American savages, slavery did not reach the same development as in African blacks. And here the tribes that are closest to the primitive communal system , or have not yet entered into slavery, or women take the place of slaves. This is the situation on Tierra del Fuego .

Patagonians and other stray tribes of the South American pampas capture women and children, but rarely leave their lives captive men, exchanging them for horses and cattle.

The closer to the north, to Peru and Mexico , the more often slavery occurs and the more developed it is ( Maya ). The American Eskimos , who live on the northern shores, and Indians living in the interior of the mainland, generally did not know slavery, or is it a rare and exceptional phenomenon here. On the northwest coast, among the tribes descended from the mixing of the Eskimos with the Indians, slavery took root. Among the Tlingit and Indians of the Canadian province of British Columbia, slaves made up about a third of the total population. These tribes treated slaves very cruelly. Slaves did all the hard work here; they conducted significant trade, they also replaced the walking coin. At the Tlingit , when a slave was old, he was killed. Often slaves slaughtered at the grave of their owner; they were often sacrificed to the gods. The slaveholding tribes of the Chinook and Apache Indians are just as cruel to the slaves.