From the ninth to the early 20th century, probably as many black Africans were forcibly taken across the Sahara, up the Nile valley, and across the Red Sea, as were transported across the Atlantic in a much shorter period. This work provides an introduction to this "other" slave trade.

A concluding segment provides a first-person account of the capture, transportation, and service in a Saharan oasis by a West African male, as related to a French official in the 1930s.