Qatar’s slavery museum at Bin Jelmood House in Doha, part of the Msheireb Museums, confronts the uncomfortable history of slavery. It also addresses modern human trafficking, while glossing over Qatar’s role.
Uncomfortable artefacts tell ancient stories
The artefacts inside Qatar’s slavery museum make for an uncomfortable realisation. There’s an amphora depicting enslaved workers from the height of Ancient Greece’s power.
A statue of a young Roman slave sits nearby. Shackles from a transatlantic slave ship complete the display.
And it keeps going, until it clicks — most great human civilizations have been powered by slavery in some form.
A slave trader’s house becomes a museum
Indeed, this building would not be here if it wasn’t for slavery. Bin Jelmood House is one of four neighbouring heritage houses that have been turned into niche museums.
Others in Doha’s Msheireb Museums collection concentrate on oil, Qatari history and Qatari family life. But this former slave trader’s home is the most arresting.
Not least because there’s considerable irony in having a slavery museum in Doha, given Qatar’s notorious treatment of World Cup stadium workers.
Indian Ocean slave trade focus
Using projections, screens, signage and a handful of old photographs, it focuses on the centuries-old system around the Indian Ocean. It can be traced back to the Sumerian civilization of the third millennium BC.
Unlike its transatlantic counterpart, it has never been limited to a particular race, ethnicity or religion.
Complex trading networks
Slave trading routes followed goods trading routes, and it was something of a free-for-all. Some were tricked or trapped into captivity, others captured as prisoners of war.
Others were punished for a crime or forced into slavery to pay debts. In practice, this meant that slaves generally came from the poorest areas.
Traditional sources included:
- Abyssinia and Nubia in Africa
- Baluchistan in the late 19th and early 20th century
Systematic exploitation networks
It may not have been quite as systematic as the western slave trade, but lucrative networks were in place. A person could be resold several times during the course of a land journey.
Raiding and kidnapping parties were prevalent in conflict zones. Traders based in ports would organise to have victims marched from hundreds of kilometres inland.
Gender and role dynamics
Two-thirds of slaves were women — many entered domestic servitude, others harems. But enslaved people filled a wide variety of roles, from administrators and entertainers to 20th century pearl divers.
Some — the mamluks — even formed warrior castes and founded caliphates.
Lack of group consciousness
But an interesting point brought up is the lack of group consciousness. Unlike with the transatlantic system, where slaves would often be working together on plantations or large labour projects, many Indian Ocean slaves were embedded in families.
They had little contact with others sharing their predicament.
Islam’s complex role
Also thought-provoking is the role of Islam, which the museum sells as a positive force on the matter, even though it didn’t forbid slavery. Kindness and manumission were encouraged, while slavery as punishment was banned.
Enslavement of Muslims was prohibited. Whether the enslaved people felt grateful for these new parameters is left unaddressed.
Modern slavery statistics
One thing that is addressed, however, is modern day slavery. Some of the statistics presented are stark:
- 2.5 million people are in forced labour as a result of trafficking
- 1.2 million children are trafficked every year
The walls have images of enslaved sex workers in Cambodia, a nine-year-old girl working in an Indian brick factory and, perhaps more notably, ‘Workers having lunch in Doha’.
Qatar’s response to human trafficking
The museum is very keen to talk about Qatar’s National Strategy For Combatting Human Trafficking, and legislation outlawing child camel jockeys. But it also gives the briefest of nods to the kafala sponsorship system.
This system is regularly abused by unscrupulous employers in the Gulf states. Workers — who will often have taken out exorbitant loans from those promising them jobs in the Middle East — will then be charged massive amounts for bad food and poor accommodation.
Their documents are taken from them. In effect, they have no realistic way of leaving their job or going home.
The elephant in the room
This contractual enslavement — a critical element of the controversy over the World Cup stadium construction — is the elephant in the room. How it works is covered in detail.
What is done to eradicate it from Qatar? Less so.
And this doesn’t half detract from what’s otherwise a noble attempt to tackle an uncomfortable subject.
Visiting Qatar Slavery Museum
- Entry to the Msheireb Museums is free
- Location: Bin Jelmood House, Msheireb Downtown Doha
