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http://old.antislavery.org/breakingthesilence/

portugal and slavery

How the Portuguese appear before the King of Kongo Depiction of the meeting between the Portuguese expedition and the Kongolese Royal Family © National Maritime Museum
Slavery has a long tradition in Portugal. Muslims were taken prisoner and enslaved by Christians in the wars in Portugal during the 12th and 13th centuries. Although slavery in Muslim people declined in subsequent centuries a trade in African slaves was established in the 15th century following early expeditions to the continent. Portugal was the first European country to attempt to conquor and exploit Africa, establishing many forts along the coast and treaties with heads of state to help enable this trade in human beings. Initially the trade developed with Portugal as the hub of business, with goods and slaves traded through its capital Lisbon, with most slaves working in cities such as Lisbon, Évora and areas such as the Algarve. By the mid 16th century there were over 32,000 African slaves in Portugal, with the majority owned by the aristocracy, officials and religious institutions. However the number of slaves declined after demand for them in the Portuguese colony of Brazil led to an increase in prices, and gradually Brazil's economic importance, fundamentally linked to slavery, overtook that of Portugal.

african slave trade to the Arab Middle East

Even leading African scholars like our own Prof. Ali Mazrui tend to say little about this sale of Africans to Arab Middle East – in his case, because it raises awkward questions.
   The question then is, why did African slaves perish in the Arab Middle East? One reason is that while in Europe and the Americas African slaves were taken to work in plantations and industries, in the Middle East they were mostly domestic labour.
    Partly for that reason, the African slaves were castrated. As eunuchs, they couldn’t have sex with their “masters’” wives, daughters, sisters, aunts, and cousins. Some (not all) of their owners had another vested in turning them into eunuchs – the slaves became rounded around the hips like women. So in the night the Sultans would be in the embrace of their wives or mistresses, and during the day they would be caressing the buttocks of the eunuchs.
  An even more tragic thing about eunuchs, it that to create one eunuch, according to some accounts, you needed 20 men. The other 19 perish after castration, from infections and bleeding to death!
    Thirdly, unlike the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the one to the Middle East included very few women. Thus even if the African slaves in the Arab world weren’t castrated, they would not have been able to reproduce, because it would have been nearly impossible to find a female companion.
       Even in the Americas, whereas the white slave owners everyday went about picking a strong-backed African woman to sleep with, the male slaves did not have any opportunities to sleep with white women. In this way, the slave footprint largely disappeared in the Arab world, but a few survived in the Americas and Europe! All this is remarkable, considering that millions of African slaves directed in horrid conditions in slave ships on the way to Europe and the America—that they should still survive there, but there is hardly a trace of them up north.
http://greatlakesdemocracy.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html