George Lyon was one of the world’s greatest adventurers. Starting from England, he travelled to Africa, to the Arctic and still managed to climb up the career ladder in the navy. He was the first to experience a razzia. In his entertaining book, A Narrative of Travels to Northern Africa, which was published in 1821, he describes a group of Arabs headed by a sultan who plunder a slave market and then divide up the slaves between them. The relevant page heading is “Return of the razzia”. A fine girl 13 years of age would go for 35 dollars, a boy of the same age at about half the price. Naturally enough the local Bedouins did not approve of this at all.
Actually George Lyon had been sent by the British government to reach Bornu, but he did not make it. So the government appointed a second expedition, which included Hugh Clapperton and Dixon Denham. The intrepid duo filled the reader in about how a razzia or slave raid was actually organised. In a description of their African travels published in 1826, they described how “These people could lead 3000 men into action, for his razzia was to consist of that number”.
The idea of a razzia as a raid to capture slaves was gradually replaced by the general idea of a raid. During the French conquest of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, the French army used similar attack methods as those used by the West Africans to break their resistance.
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