Doha slavery museum confronts past to help Qataris shape future

The Bin Jelmood House museum explores the history of a trade rarely addressed in official narratives.

Newly planted trees stand solemnly over the whitewashed courtyard of a traditional mansion in old Doha that less than a hundred years ago was often filled with shackled men, women and children from east Africa — the main commodities in a booming Gulf slave trade.

The large home once belonged to Doha’s most prominent slave trader, a man his neighbors called “jelmood”, or “rock” — an allusion to his hard heart. Today, in the old house, this story and the larger history of slavery in the Indian Ocean world that brought, by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people to the Arabian Gulf is being explored for the first time in a museum confronting the past and, its curators hope, helping Qataris shape their future.

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