ABSTRACT
The history of the Arabs in Africa has included a number of contradictions. The Arabs have been both conquerors and liberators, both traders in slaves and purveyors of new ideas. From the point of view of the role of the Arabs in the slave trade, the history of Eastern Africa has to be treated differently from the history of Western Africa. The interlocking experience between the politics of the Middle East and the politics of Southern Africa was forging a link between the wars of the Middle East and the wars of Southern Africa. The internal political system of Israel was one of the most genuinely socialist in both the Middle East and Africa. There is a strong temptation among oil-rich Muslim countries to cultivate the rich industrialized countries and to invest either in white Christian countries or in black Muslim countries. In South Africa the ideology of apartheid is based on a profound distrust of a bi-national state.
