One of the frequent topics of contention in slavery studies is the mortality rate in the production of eunuchs. The anti-slavery activists in the 19th century generally claimed that up to 90% (or even more) of the boys died as a consequence of their castration in African cases. More modern researchers, such as Jan Hogendorn (1999; 2000), have noted that the slave traders were successful businessmen and they would have lost money with a death rate anywhere near that high. The rate claimed for production of Chinese court eunuchs was generally 3% to 5%. Both the African and Chinese cases involved removal of the penis as well as the testicles. The mortality rate for castration of Italian castrati (testicles only) is unknown, although the surgery was considered “minor” and low enough to not be recorded.

I just ran across a master's thesis about slavery in northern Sudan that includes information about the mortality rate from a number of contemporary sources. The section quoted below follows a brief mention of the purchase of intact slave boys by Egyptian pederasts.

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Hogendorn, Jan. S. (1999). The Hideous Trade: Economic Aspect of the 'Manufacture' and Sale of Eunuchs. Paideuma 45: 137-160.

Hogendorn, Jan. S. (2000). The Location of the "Manufacture" of Eunuchs. Slave Elites in the Middle East and AFrica: A Comparative Study. T. Miura and J. E. Philips (eds). London: Kegan Paul International: 41-68.

<<oooOOOooo<<

Wealthy slave-owners valued another group, eunuchs, not for their sexuality but for their lack of it--that is, for the eunuch's inability to impregnate their womenfolk. The great majority of eunuchs seem to have supplied external markets in Egypt and Istanbul, rather than Sudanese markets147. Aside from the Upper Egyptian production centre run by Coptic monks at Zawiyat al-Dayr, near Asyut148, another centre existed in El Obeid, the capital of Kordofan.

No one, incidentally, seems to agree on the mortality rates faced by eunuchs as a result of the operation. Referring to the Kordofan centre, Pallme says that a shaykh named Tehme performed the operation on boys of eight or nine years old. He claims that over half of the boys died from the operation, in which all the sexual organs (i.e., not only the testicles) were removed149. Supposedly these eunuchs were destined for the harems of the Turks. Holroyd contradicts Pallme regarding death rates. Having talked to the same shaykh (whom he calls Tamar), Holroyd agrees that all the organs were removed but says that the operation proved fatal only about 5% of the time150.

Statistics presented on the Asyut branch of the trade are just as mysterious. Burckhardt says that two boys out of sixty died from the [pp. 49-50] operation in 1813 (about 3%), though normally the rate was two in two hundred (1%)151. Henry Light, travelling a year later, saw two Istanbul- bound boats full of 150 new boy eunuchs. Supposedly only eleven out of 160 had died (about 7%)152. But Thomas Legh, who journeyed in the region around the same time, talks about a form of emasculation performed by the jallaba (traders) themselves, and says that only one out of three survived (67% mortality rate)153!

The few eunuchs that did remain in the Sudan remained a preserve of the very rich, often intended to protect wives and cherished concubines. While visiting Berber, for example, Taylor passed a group of Cairene ladies taking a stroll under the supervision of a eunuch154. Not all eunuchs were harem guards, though. When Gessi, the Italian official who worked to suppress the slave trade for the Turco-Egyptian regime, was on his deathbed in 1881 and was being sent from Khartoum to an Egyptian hospital in Suez, he begged to take along his trusted servant Almas, "who happened to be a eunuch." However, the Governor-General, Ra'uf Pasha, feared that it might create a scandal among European circles in Egypt, and hesitated before letting the eunuch go along155.

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147 See, for example, Ehud Toledano, "The Imperial Eunuchs of Istanbul: From Africa to the Heart of Islam," Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3, July 1984, pp. 379-90.

148 See Burckhardt, John Lewis. 1819. Travels in Nubia. London: Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, pp. 329-31.

149 Pallme, Ignatius. Travels in Kordofan. London: J. Madden & Co., (1844), pp. 86-87. See Ch. Pellat, "Khasi," The Encyclopaedia of Islam: New Edition, Ed. E.

van Donzel, B. Lewis, and Ch. Pellat, Vol. 4 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978), p. 1087, for a discussion of the various types of eunuchs.

150 Holroyd, Arthur T. "Notes on a Journey to Kordofan, in 1836-7," Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. 9, 1839, pp. 163-91, p. 178.

151 Burckhardt (1819), pp. 329-31.

152 Henry Light, Travels in Egypt, Nubia, Holy Land, Mount Libanon [sic], and Cyprus, in the Year 1814 (London: Rodwell & Martin, 1818), p. 46.

153 Thomas Legh, Narrative of a Journey in Egypt and the Country beyond the Cataracts, 2nd edition (London: John Murray, 1817), p. 94.

154 Taylor, Bayard. Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the White Nile, Being a Journey to Central Africa. London: Sampson Low, Son & Co., 1854, p. 205.

155 Slatin, Rudolf C. Fire and Sword in the Sudan: a Personal Narrative of Fighting and Serving the Dervishes, 1879-1895. Trans. from the German F.R. Wingate. Popular edition. London: Edward Arnold, 1898, p. 35.

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Sharkey, Heather Jane. 1992. Domestic Slavery in the Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Northern Sudan. A thesis submitted to the University of Durham in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. Centre for Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies University of Durham, 232 pp. [quotation from pp. 49-50]

With those widely varying survival rates, genocide and causing fear in enemy males might have been a goal in the slave castrations with high mortality rates. Captured and conquered males might have been sold as slaves if the wartime castrations did not kill them. Subjugation and pacification and ending conquered male blood lines might have been the primary goals of some of the high mortality castration methods used by some castrators. Probably castration methods were widely shared and observed by competing slave traders searching for higher eunuch survival rates for their valuable slaves. But some castrators might have had slave selling profits being a secondary priority for the castrators and not decided by the less in control and later acquiring slave traders. Castrators were apparently not seeking the highest slave profits when choosing to use castration methods with the higher death tolls. Slaves generated by wars, selling conquered enemy soldiers, and selling conquered populations younger males might have gotten rid of the surviving eunuchs by selling the survivors as slave eunuchs ?

I have always wondered myself about the accuracy of the historical record, or our (my?) interpretation of it. A couple of months ago, I posted a note about the statutes of William the Conquerer, of which the 10th one reads: "10. I forbid that any one be killed or hung for any fault but his eyes shall be torn out *or* his testicles cut off." Another source writes the same text this way: "No one shall face execution for committed crimes, but if a person is found to be guilty they will be blinded *and* castrated. This law should not be challenged." I don't have access to the original text, but the different conjunction makes a big difference. Castration and blinding combined was a punishment for men considered treasonous, from the time the Normans were from Norway onward. No troops could follow a blind man because he couldn't lead. And no troops would follow a castrated man because he wasn't a man. On the other hand, I read many years ago a source that said the having the peasant troops castrated would eliminate them as a threat but allow them to return to the feudal estates and continue to till the land. After all, any new king wants his tribute and he wouldn't get it if all the men who could cultivate were dead or castrated *and* blinded. So, I am confused about the truth.

Another example was this quotation from Sexual Life in Ancient Greeks" by Hans Licht: "Castration was occasionally undertaken for lustful purposes; nothing of the kind is indeed know to the Greeks, but it is said the Medes, according to Clearchus, 'castrated many of those who lived round about to excite lust." As a youngster excited by the bdsm aspects of castrating, I thought that this quote meant that the Medes waylaid innocent young adult male passersby and castrated them for their (the castrators) lust. But it is unclear whose lust was being excited. It may be that the author of the book and the primary source, Clearchus was speaking of the lust of men the newly castrated would be sold to as sex slaves.

There are many many examples in which it is unclear whether the victim was a child or an adult, or the purpose, and so on.

This following communique from the Italian government to the League of Nations may be somewhat off message about how accurate some accounts of castration are, but here is a report of a massacre of workingmen from Italy in Ethiopia. The Italian government is complaining about how barbaric the Ethiopian troops were, but of course, what were Italians (including civilians) doing in Ethiopia in the first place. It is of interest because many of us eroticize battlefield castration, but there are a number of photos that accompany this communique that are really rather grizzly. They are on the web, but I am not going to insert a link unless a moderator tells me it is okay to do so.

Geneva, March 19th, 1936.

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

COMMUNICATION FROM THE ITALIAN GOVERNMENT

[■Translation from the Italian.] Note by the Italian Government. —

The Italian Government very much

Regret that they should be obliged to

make public such revolting documents.

These documents, however, give the

measure of Abyssinian barbarity .

ABYSSINIAN ATROCITIES COMMITTED

AGAINST ITALIAN WORKMEN

PROTEST BY THE ITALIAN GOVERNMENT

TO THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

No. 208481/9.

Rome, March 9th, 1936 — Year X IV .

Sir,

In the early hours of February 13th last, in t h e zone between the Mariband the village

of Darô Taclé, an Abyssinian band consisting of about 600 men was detached from a group

of about 2,000 men coming from the Arbaté zone and made a surprise attack on No. 1 Road - builders’ Labour Camp of Gondrand and Co., situated at Utok Emni in the neighbourhood of MaiLalhala.

The labor camp, which was under the direction of Engineers Cesare Rocca and Roberto

Di Colloredo Mels, was overwhelmed, pillaged and destroyed ; sixty-eight persons (including one woman, the wife of Engineer Rocca) were killed and some of them horribly mutilated.

I transmit a list of the names of the killed and twenty-seven photographs illustrating the worst brutalities perpetrated by the Abyssinians.

The Italian Government is quite aware that military operations have necessarily a

character of their own, and it certainly does not desire to constitute a museum of horrors

by selecting certain isolated episodes.

The present instance, however, is not one of military operations ; i t is a case :

(1) Of savage and bloodthirsty aggression against non - combatant workmen ;

(2) Of bestial attacks on wounded men and corpses, some of whom were totally or

partially castrated (by cutting or pulling off the genital organs) or subjected to

other horrible mutilations such as evisceration, the cutting-off of hands or the

gouging-out of eyes ;(3) Of the employment, as reported on many previous occasions, of dum-dum bullets with the shocking effects of bursting and gashing shown in the attached photographs.

This attack reproduces all the typical characteristic s of the various ferocious onslaughts by Abyssinians in the last forty years against all the colonies bordering on Ethiopia.

it also shows the dangers and treatment to which even workmen engaged on work of benefit to the community are exposed at the hands of the Abyssinians.

We have here, in fact, a series of systematic and barbarous crimes which not only arouse irrepressible horror, but bear witness to the uncivilised condition of Ethiopia.

I would request you to be good enough to bring this note, and the documents accompanying it, to the notice of all States Members of the League of Nations.

( Signed

Suvich.

S- d- N. 88D. (F.) 655 (A.) 3 36. Imp. Atar.

Series of League of Nations Publications

VII. POLITICAL

1936. VII. 3.