Pedagogical booklet

to accompany the DVD

 In memory of Professor Rex NETTLEFORD

The ideas and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors
and are not necessarily those of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization.
The designations employed and the presentations of material throughout
this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever
on the part of UNESCO concerning the legal status
of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities
or concerning the delimitation of its boundaries.

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 7$%/(2)&217(176
INTRODUCTION : WHY THIS BOOKLET? IV

1. THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVERY:

A CHAPTER OF MODERN HISTORY 7
1.1 The transatlantic slave trade and the shaping
of the modern world .......................................................................7
1.2 Slave routes ...................................................................................7
1.3 The preference for African slaves..................................................10
1.4 The transatlantic slave trade and its effect
on African development ................................................................11
1.5 The transatlantic slave trade and its effect on European
and North American development .................................................13

2. WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES

BETWEEN THE VARIOUS SLAVE TRADERS? 15
2.1 The historical relationship of Africa to international slavery ...........15
2.2 Philosophical problems with the slave trade and slavery ...............16
2.3 The internal African slave trade.....................................................16
2.4 The international African Slave Trade before
Transatlantic Slavery ....................................................................17
2.5 The transatlantic slave trade .........................................................18
> Table 1: Traffic in enslaved Africans (1400-1900) .....................19
> Table 2: Geographical distribution of the trafficking
of African slaves (1400-1900) .....................................20
> Table 3: Departures from Africa (1500-1867) ............................20

3. RESISTANCE AND SURVIVAL 23

3.1 Resistance ....................................................................................23
3.2 Revolts .........................................................................................24
3.3 Escape .........................................................................................25

4. ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENTS 29
4.1 The slaves of Santo Domingo impose abolition .............................30
4.2 The influence of the Haitian Revolution .........................................31
4.3 Federal action against the Slave Trade ..........................................32

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4.4 Modes of action ............................................................................33
4.5 Abolitionist decrees ......................................................................34
4.6 From abolition to liberty ................................................................34
4.7 Underpaid manual labour ..............................................................35
4.8 Abolitionist movements in the Americas ........................................35
4.9 The end of institutionalized slavery in the USA ..............................37
4.10 The age of colonization and the abolition of slavery ......................38
> Table 4 : Chronology of the abolition of slavery .........................40

5. FOCUS: THE REPERCUSSIONS

OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION 43
5.1 Major population movements........................................................43
5.2 Long-lasting upheavals in the geography of production ................44
5.3 Administrative measures of prevention .........................................45
5.4 The remarkable extension of revolts .............................................46
5.5 Solidarity with the liberation of South America ..............................47

6. BUILDING ON THE CREATIVITY AND IDENTITY

IN POST SLAVERY SOCIETIES 49
6.1 The arts ........................................................................................53
6.2 Languages....................................................................................54
6.3 Religion ........................................................................................54
6.4 Science and technology ................................................................54
6.5 The construction and perpetuation of racial theories .....................55
6.6 Social and psychological legacies .................................................58

7. HISTORICAL SLAVERY AND MODERN

FORMS OF SERVITUDE 59
7.1 International instruments prohibiting slavery.................................59
7.2 Slavery today................................................................................60
7.3 Similitudes and continuity .............................................................61
List of illustrations ........................................................................62

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 INTRODUCTION – WHY THIS BOOKLET?

6
ince its creation in 1946, UNESCO has been the organization
in the United Nations system in charge of combating
ignorance and promoting mutual understanding between
peoples. UNESCO, convinced that the silence surrounding
major historical events constituted as such an obstacle to
this mutual understanding, and to the reconciliation and
cooperation between peoples, therefore decided to launch
in 1994 the Slave Route Project in order to dissipate ignorance of the
black slave trade and slavery. All the continents were involved in this
tragedy, which caused enormous upheavals which continue to affect
modern societies.

The purpose of this booklet is to accompany the documentary in order to

provide a fuller explanation of certain points, and to open up avenues of
reflection for a debate on this issue. It provides an opportunity to place
the black slave trade and slavery in a broader context and to shed some
light on the various questions that can be raised. What, for example, are
the differences and similitudes between slave trading in the various
regions of the world? How did forms of resistance, measures of abolition
and the processes of emancipation of slaves contribute to bring such
practices to an end? How did the enslavement of Africans contribute to
transforming the modern world? What are the differences and similitudes
between historical slavery and modern forms of slavery? What is the
heritage of slavery? How can new identities and citizen status be built in
post-enslavement societies?

This booklet is aimed at helping users of the documentary and more

especially those who intend to show it at public screenings or in schools
in order to foster greater awareness of the subject.
With that aim in mind, two preliminary remarks must be emphasized to
ensure a better understanding of the documentary. They refer to the use
made of images and figures.
The images concerned, which now lie in the public domain, do not always
reflect reality. They are works of the human intellect and consequently
the result of a personal interpretation on the part of their authors, many
of whom have never directly witnessed the facts which they describe.
Furthermore, they are a reflection of a particular period and patterns of

,9
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thought which were specific to it. Bearing the influence of a colonial and
ethnocentric discourse, these images often provide a vision that is tainted
with exoticism and paternalism and therefore only provide a limited
perception of reality, which in itself was far more complex. In order to
counterbalance this incomplete and partial view of the illustrations and
written archives used, the documentary has given pride of place, through
the various interviews conducted, to the testimony of Afro-descendant
specialists. It is therefore important to warn viewers of the documentary
of the need to be vigilant and critical with regard to the use made of the
images.

A second remark concerns the use of figures for measuring the scale of the
black slave trade. A statistical approach is indispensable in relating the
history of human bondage and servitude and may also play a determining
role in the historiography and discussions to which such phenomena
give rise. The preparation of statistical data has often concealed major
gaps in the knowledge of history. Historians have counted ships and
captives, arguing among themselves as to the so-called exactitude or
comprehensiveness of the data obtained. Their research - the results of
which often fluctuated according to periods of history - have helped to
establish orders of scale. Data obtained in this way nevertheless prompt
a number of observations. Recent research has established, for example,
within the context of the transatlantic slave trade that for every captive
who arrived alive in the Caribbean and the Americas from Africa, four or
five others died at earlier stages of the process, in armed conflicts, raids,
capture, during transfer to the western shores of Africa, during detention
in the “barracoons”, while awaiting the slave ships or, last but not least,
during the crossing, namely the “Middle Passage”.

Statistical figures must be regarded with the greatest caution when

bearing in mind the clandestine nature of much of the slave trafficking
in the so-called legal period of the black slave trade (16th to early 19th
centuries) and the scale of illegal traffic throughout all of the 19th
century. Unrecorded parallel trafficking existed throughout the centuries.
Consequently, current assessments cannot be considered to be definitive.

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 6/$9(65287(6$*/2%$/9,6,21
 1. THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVERY :
A CHAPTER OF THE MODERN HISTORY
Slavery has been a ubiquitous institution throughout recorded human history.
It helped to underpin Egyptian and Greco-Roman civilisations, it was evident in
societies bordering the Indian Ocean throughout much of the last millennium, and it
continued in much of the post-Roman Mediterranean and African worlds, including
sub-Saharan Africa well into the modern period.
Historically, slavery was not a condition confined to particular peoples, though
large proportions of those held as slaves in the Mediterranean, the Middle East
and the Indian Ocean came from Africa. On their arrival in the Americas after 1492,
Europeans sought to enslave the indigenous population and this remained for
some time an important aspect of slavery in some parts of the Americas following
European colonisation of the continent.

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;/,:/(705.6-;/,46+,95>693+
Under European guidance, transatlantic slavery was to take on some exceptional
features when seen in the context of the global history of slavery. One was its
intensity and highly racial character, with some 12.5 million Africans being
transported into transatlantic slavery between 1500 and 1867, almost half of
them in the eighteenth century alone. This was the largest ocean-borne coerced
migration in human history. It speaks, among other things, to the capacity of
slavery in the Americas to consume Africans in the exploitation of the continent’s
natural resources by Europeans to satisfy growing markets in the ‘Old World’ for
colonial products such as precious metals. It also reflects the ability of Europeans
merchants, in tandem with commercial partners in Atlantic Africa, to finance and
manage a complex and intercontinental business operation in the age of sail.

The Atlantic slave trade, more than perhaps any other slave trade in history,
was global in nature. Indeed, in many respects, it was a major instrument of the
processes of globalization that, since Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, have
helped to shape the modern world.

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Trafficking in people has been an important feature of international trade or even
trade within societies from antiquity onwards. It remains an issue today, even
though slavery is universally outlawed. People from Europe and Asia were regularly
seized and sold into slavery, notably in the slave-owning empires that bordered the
Mediterranean and extended into the Middle East. Major arteries through which

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 peoples passed en route to enslavement in societies around the Mediterranean
include the Balkans, the Crimea and the Caucasus.
From the beginning, however, Africans were regularly sought after as slaves and
a number of routes linking both North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa with slave
markets outside the continent developed. Among the most important were slave
trades across the Sahara, through the Red Sea and the Gulf, and around the Indian
Ocean.
We also know that, as within Europe during the Dark Ages and the medieval period,
trafficking in people was quite common within sub-Saharan Africa itself. All these
African-centred slave trades pre-dated the Atlantic slave trade, in the case of
the trans-Saharan traffic by many centuries, and they continued, seemingly with
increased intensity, during and after the ending of the Atlantic slave trade.
Compared, however, to the latter, historical records relating to other forced
migrations of African people are much less detailed or abundant. Some have
estimated, nevertheless, that throughout its very long history, the trans-Saharan
slave traffic may have accounted for the deportation of more Africans than the
Atlantic slave trade. In common, too, with the Red Sea, Gulf and Indian Ocean slave
trades, it may have reached its all-time peak during the nineteenth century. When
all is considered, peoples of African origin seem to have been among the most
vulnerable to enslavement in the modern era. The Atlantic slave trade dramatically
underlined that situation.

 ;/,79,-,9,5*,-69(-90*(5:3(=,:
There has been some debate about why, in their
search for enslaved people to develop commercially
their resource-rich American colonies, Europeans
relied so heavily on Africans. Arguments rooted in the
alleged capacities of different racial groups to work in
tropical or semi-tropical conditions have given way
to other suggestions. Long familiarity with enslaved
African labour in the Mediterranean, the reliance on
Africans to re-people the Atlantic islands conquered
by Portugal and Spain after 1450, the willingness
of African societies to exchange captives for
imported goods, and resistance among indigenous
Americans to enslavement may collectively help to explain the speed with
which the Iberian nations resorted to African slaves in exploiting their new lands
in the Americas. They provided, moreover, a model that other European nations,
notably the Dutch, the English and the French, would follow when they joined the

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‘scramble’ for American colonies
from the late sixteenth century
and propelled the expansion of
transatlantic trafficking in Africans
to new heights.

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(5+0;:(--,*;65(-90*(5+,=,3674,5;
Whatever specific motivations drove Europeans to enslave Africans, the implications
of their decisions to do so have arguably profound implications for the distribution
of income and wealth in the modern World. For continental Africa, it can be said
that the removal of people from the continent retarded demographic growth and
therefore economic development. Energies that were directed in enslavement and
population displacement might have been used to better effect without slavery.
The net population loss arising from the departure of enslaved people and the
corresponding and related death and destruction that was associated with war
and enslavement had a long and steady impact on Africa, affecting different parts
of the continent according to relative involvement in the global system of slavery.
In terms of overall population, therefore, the number of Africans has steadily
increased when those who are descended from Africans in the Americas, Europe
and Asia are included. Thus continental Africa contributed to the populations of
other parts of the world in substantial numbers. The contributions of diasporic
Africans and their descendants
to the development of Europe,
the Americas and Asia has
been considerable, therefore,
and the extent to which
African energy was forced
into development projects
elsewhere, there was less
labor, intellect, and enterprise
in Africa itself.

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 Some Africans undoubtedly profited in both financial and political terms from
involvement in the seizure, internal movement and sale of captives to European
carriers. Slavery was integral to economic and political power in many parts of
Africa and the Atlantic slave trade offered new
opportunities for advancement of their status by
existing and emergent elites. Their gains, however,
were sometimes temporary and in any case were
achieved at the expense of both the direct victims
of trafficking, many of whom did not survive the
voyage to American slavery, as well as the wider
communities from which they came.
Slavery and slave trafficking were rooted in
violence and the enslavement of people typically
involved wars, raids, kidnapping or even the deliberate manipulation or distortion
of local political and judicial processes. Moreover, given the preference for young
slaves and especially young adult males among European buyers of African
captives, prolonged exposure of African societies to enslavement activities helped
to distort demographic structures and to lower population levels below what they
would otherwise have been.
It is impossible to measure precisely the social
and human costs to Africa of the Atlantic slave
trade. Some historians may have exaggerated
them, attributing Africa’s relative poverty today
almost wholly to its encounters with Europe
through the slave trade and colonization.
Given the weight placed by some on political
stability and social order as foster parents of
long-term economic development and welfare, it remains
difficult, nonetheless, not to believe that African involvement in the transatlantic
slave trade – and maybe other slave trades, too – brought more pain than gain for
those whose lives were affected by it.
The contemporary situation has some similarities with the past, although in recent
times Africans have moved abroad for reasons of economic and educational
opportunity, not because of slavery. Nonetheless, again, Africa is experiencing a
loss in manpower, experience, and enterprise due to emigration. To the extent that
the modern African diaspora has contributed to the development of other parts of
the world, the African homeland has been deprived. The contemporary migration of
Africans out of the continent is complicated because of the legacy of slavery and
the corresponding racism that immigrants encounter.

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 ; /,;9(5:(;3(5;0*:3(=,;9(+,
(5+0;:(--,*;65,<967,(5
(5+569;/(4,90*(5+,=,3674,5;
If Africa was almost certainly a net loser, how much, if anything, did Europeans
gain from the Atlantic slave trade? Specifically, was transatlantic slavery pivotal in
fostering European industrialization and thereby promoting the wide income and
wealth differentials between Europe and Africa that have become such a feature
of the modern era?
The contribution of coerced labour to wealth
accumulation in Europe and North America is
a long-running theme dating from at least the
nineteenth century. It was given new life by
the Caribbean-born Eric Williams, who in 1944
claimed that transatlantic slavery provided one
of the main streams of capital accumulation that
nurtured Britain’s industrial revolution. Williams’
argument has generated much controversy, in part because of his suggestion that
slavery and the slave trade yielded abnormally high profits and in part because
of widening inequalities in global income and wealth distribution. Seen purely in
financial terms slavery may not have been the bonanza that Williams imagined.
Nor were profits from it probably sufficient alone to propel Britain (or any other
European or North American nation) on the way to industrialization.
There is, however, evidence that transatlantic trades in commodities produced by
enslaved Africans were among the more dynamic elements of eighteenth-century
international trade and continued to be major contributors to global economic
exchange well into the age of European and North American industrialization.
This is not to say that developments in consumption, industry and finance within
the more advanced capitalist nations after 1750 were wholly or even primarily
dependent on economic gains from enslaved Africans but it does require us to
recognize their possible contribution to promoting change in the so-called ‘West’.
When the ‘gains’ for the “West’ are set alongside the ‘losses’ for Africa, the Atlantic
slave trade was thus a central element in shaping globalization and defining the
modern world.
Population wise, Africa made a huge contribution to the Americas. In different
moments of history, the figures vary, depending on the need for labor and the
reproduction rate of the Africans. A large part of the population of Uruguay, Brazil,
Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, a Mexico, were of African descent at
particular points of their history. For example, in Argentina 11% of the population
in 1852 was African descent, while 62% of the Colombian population in 1820 and
59% of Venezuelans in 1815 were of African descent.

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 These figures explain the actual composition of the Latin American population,
which includes a mestizo majority (mixed Spanish-indigenous-afro), that is, an
esteemed 180 million Afro descendants (of whom 30 million live in the United
States, 500 thousand in Canada, and the rest in Latin American and the Caribbean).
Brazil has at present, the second largest Black population in the world (second only
to Nigeria).

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 2. WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES
BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT SLAVE TRADES?

As is clear from history, the trade in human

beings as slaves is ancient and was common
throughout the world. The trans-Atlantic
traffic in enslaved Africans was brutal and
dehumanizing, perhaps more so than any other
trade in slaves in history. It is impossible to make
such comparisons for lack of evidence, but it is
safe to say that the traffic in human slaves was
terrible everywhere. Any comparison of the ways
human beings were bought and sold as slaves must focus on other factors than the
relative degree of brutality and inhumanity that was involved. In understanding the
history of the forced migration of Africans along the “Slave Routes,” therefore, it is
important to examine various situations and conditions under which people were
traded as slaves in Africa, and where the enslaved were sent when they left Africa
and went elsewhere in the world.

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;605;,95(;065(3:3(=,9@
Historically, it is important to recognize that there has been a continuous outward
migration of Africans leaving the continent, as reflected in the slave trade, for over
one thousand years. The result of this population movement out of Africa has had an
impact demographically that has been global. The growth of the African population
included the expansion of African peoples abroad, often under conditions of slavery,
which included the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and much of Europe, before the
movement of enslaved Africans to the Americas and continuing during the trans-
Atlantic migration.
Historically, therefore, Africa suffered the scourge of many slave trades, not just the
transatlantic “slave route” to the Americas. In considering the relationship of Africa
to international slavery, it is important to remember that slavery was pervasive in
all societies until the spread of the abolition movement. From the perspective of
the victims, those who were enslaved, theoretical and political controversies over
relative degrees of harshness and alienation were certainly irrelevant.

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  7
 /036:67/0*(3796)3,4:>0;/
;/,:3(=,;9(+,(5+:3(=,9@
The external slave trade from Africa was closely related to an internal trade,
which supplied victims for deportation. There was slavery in Africa as old as
recorded documentation can testify. Slavery involves the alienation of the body;
that an individual could be sold, and purchased, like any other commodity, and
had a value that was monetized. The
calculation was cold and not humane,
but the enslaved were of course people,
nonetheless. The difficult part of
understanding why slavery could exist
in history is the confrontation of the
contradiction of treating people as if
they are not people, but goods, when in
fact they are still people. Transatlantic
slavery and its particular brutalities
and its racialized social relationships was a variant on a more general dichotomy
of how people have treated each other, as belonging to a community, however
defined, or not.

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The internal African slave trade covered the entire continent, and far back into
the distant past. It is important to recognize this historical reality. As noted,
slavery was common throughout the world, not just in Africa. Nonetheless, over
the past thousand years and more, Africa was
a source of enslaved people, and this could
only have been the case if there was a trade
in slaves within Africa. Individual slaves might
be exchanged locally or between communities
through occasional and informal networks,
usually because they were captured enemies
or outcasts who were not wanted in the
community. How these individual slaves
entered into long-distance trade depended
upon access to centralized states and organized
trading networks that connected with places and
markets outside of Africa. For a long time into

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the past, slaves were traded over considerable distances within Africa, along with
other commodities of organized trade. They were traded in market places and
through brokerage arrangements in commercial houses. Slaves were moved in
caravans, and where permissible, by river or lagoon, along with other commodities.
Like other goods of trade, slaves had to be guarded, but not because they might be
stolen - because they might escape.

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),-69,;9(5:(;3(5;0*:3(=,9@
Hence slavery was widespread in Africa before the opening of the trans-Atlantic
slave trade, both within the continent and to various parts of the Muslim world and
throughout the Indian Ocean. In Islamic law, slavery was a recognized institution
that was the subject of legal discussion and the reason for formal prohibitions
against the enslavement of Muslims who had been born free. Because Arabic is the
language of Islam and was spoken widely within the Islamic world, it is sometimes
thought that “Arab” merchants as an ethnic group were responsible for this trade,
but in fact Muslim merchants of many origins were involved in the slave trade,
whether or not they used Arabic as the language of commerce. Moreover, the
people who were enslaved in the Muslim world came from many parts of Europe
and Asia as well as from Africa.

Similarly, in the Indian Ocean, enslaved Africans

were taken north along the East African coast
and across the Red Sea into Arabia, Persia
and beyond. In general, Africans followed
routes dominated by Muslim merchants,
and to a considerable extent, the movement
of enslaved Africans across the Sahara
and across the Indian Ocean were parallel
movements, although from different parts
of Africa. Moreover, as in other areas of Muslim trade and administration,
there were many slaves who came from the frontiers of Islamic rule in Asia and
Europe. There were many slaves in the great Muslim states of the Ottoman Empire,
Persia and Moghul India, some of whom were Africans but by no means all. In the
Ottoman Empire, slaves came from central Asia, the Balkans, and even Poland and
Russia, while in Persia slaves came from Georgia and Circassia.

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  ;/,;9(5:(;3(5;0*:3(=,;9(+,
Both the trans-Saharan trade in slaves
and the Indian Ocean traffic continued
throughout the period of the trans-
Atlantic trade, and continued long after
the abolition of transatlantic slavery.
Moreover, during the centuries when
Africans were taken to the Americas from
the sixteenth to the nineteenth century,
it can be shown that there was a global
market for slaves, with enslaved Africans
moved in all directions. The development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was
an innovation in the forced movement of enslaved populations that resulted in
the rapid increase in the number of Africans who were leaving the continent, and
whose loss was compounded by the number of people who died in association
with enslavement. Moreover, the parts of Africa that were most seriously affected
by the trans-Atlantic traffic had only marginally if at all been associated with the
export trades across the Sahara and Indian Ocean. The areas that had been drawn
into trade to Muslim countries continued to supply slaves, while areas along the
Atlantic coast that had not previously been heavily drawn into the slave trade now
were entangled in trans-Atlantic slavery.

The development of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans marked a major

transformation in the existing trade in slaves from Africa. Whereas before the
opening of the Atlantic, enslaved Africans remained in Africa or went north across
the Sahara or east into the Indian Ocean, now many Africans crossed the Atlantic,
and from the late seventeenth century through the middle of the nineteenth
century, far more Africans went to the Americas than into the heartlands of Islam
and the Indian Ocean. The estimated numbers of enslaved Africans sent into and
beyond the Islamic world before 1650 was substantially greater than the number
of Africans sent to the Americas before c. 1650. Indeed, for the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries combined, it is likely that as many people went into the
Islamic world, defined here as that part of the Islamic world from the Maghreb to
the Indian Ocean, than the number of Africans who went across the Atlantic. In the
last decades of the seventeenth century, the number of people crossing the Atlantic
began to increase rapidly, a trend that lasted until British abolition of its slave trade
in 1807, although thereafter the trans-Atlantic traffic continued on a large scale
until the 1850s. This trans-Atlantic era of enforced migration was a new phase

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in population displacement and migration and as such had a major impact on the
history of the affected areas encompassing the Atlantic but also to a lesser extent
the Indian Ocean coast.
TABLE I: TRAFFIC IN ENSLAVED AFRICANS
(1400-1900)
Period Transatlantic traffic Islamic World
1400-1500 0% 100 %
1500-1600 30,10 % 69,90 %
1600-1700 65,30 % 34,70 %
1700-1800 83,30 % 16,70 %
1800-1900 77,40 % 22,60 %

From 1400 to 1900, more than 17 million Africans were forcibly exiled across
the Sahara, Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The really significant point here is that
over the long term trend there was the removal of population from Africa through
slavery, not only across the Atlantic but throughout the Islamic world as well.
Moreover, the number of people
involved increased from the
fifteenth to the eighteenth century
and remained substantial into the
nineteenth century.

The most significant increase

occurred in the eighteenth century
and related to the trans-Atlantic
traffic to Brazil and the Caribbean,
which received the overwhelming
number of enslaved Africans and
almost in equal proportions. Before c. 1650, the actual number of enslaved Africans
leaving Africa for the Americas was relatively small, at least by comparison with the
scale of the migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In that period,
more people were sold across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean than
were sent to the Americas. After 1650, the number of Africans who went to the
Americas greatly increased, and in the eighteenth century, the forced migration
to the Americas was five times larger than the trade to the Islamic world and the
Indian Ocean. For the whole period from c. 1400 to 1900, almost three quarters
of all Africans who left the continent went to the Americas as slaves, even though
the trade of Africans into the Islamic world began earlier and lasted longer than the
trans-Atlantic migration.

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 TABLE 2: GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF THE TRAFFICKING
OF AFRICAN SLAVES (1400-1900)

ricans
120%
affic in Enslaved Af
100%

80%

60%
Transatlantic
Percent of Trotal Tr

40%
Islamic World
20%

0%

900
800
700
600
500

0-1
0-1
0-1
0-1
0-1

180
170
160
150
140

Century

TABLE 3 : DEPARTURES FROM AFRICA

(1500-1867)
Bight of Biafra
Bight of Benin

West Central
Sierra Leone
Senegambia

Gold Coast

South East
Windward
Country

Africa

Africa
Coast

Percent 6.00% 3.10% 2.90% 9.70% 16.00% 12.70% 45.50% 4.30%

1,209,000

1,999,100

1,594,600

5,694,600
755,000

388,700

336,900

542,600
Number

The main feature to note in the estimates for the number of Africans who went to
the Americas is the relative importance of different regions of the Atlantic coast
of Africa. In this regard, west central Africa stands out, and when combined with
southeast Africa amounted to over 6.2 million people. When the people from south
eastern Africa are included, then it can be seen that half of all Africans who went to
the Americas came from Bantu speaking regions alone.

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Within West Africa, there are several important distinctions that have to be taken
into account, including whether the enslaved came from relatively close to the
coast or from distances of more than 100-150 km inland. In fact the overwhelming
majority of people who came from the regions denoted as the Bight of Biafra,
the Bight of Benin, and the Gold Coast came from relatively close to the coast –
virtually everyone from the Bight of Biafra and at least two-thirds or more from the
Bight of Benin and the Gold Coast. Together, these three regions accounted for 4.8
million people, or 38 percent of the total number of deported Africans. There was
also a discernable Muslim population, perhaps 10 percent of the total, who came
mostly from the interior of Sierra Leone and from Senegambia. There were also
recognizable ethnic concentrations of West Africans, including Igbo, Yoruba, Akan,
and Mande (Mandingo, Mandinka, etc.).
More than half of all Africans went to Brazil, while most of the rest of the enslaved
population went to the islands of the Caribbean. Relatively few Africans actually
went to North America, fewer than the number who went to Barbados, even if
allowance is made for the large numbers of Africans who first stopped in Barbados
and were sold on to other destinations, especially the Hispanic mainland. As an
analysis of the impact of this traffic makes clear, the trans-Atlantic migration
affected certain regions more than others, and especially west central Africa, the
Bights of Biafra and Benin, the Gold Coast and parts of the upper Guinea coast.
Moreover, the trans-Atlantic traffic was concentrated in the eighteenth century,
reaching a peak in the last quarter of the century and extending to 1807, where
upon the trade was completely restructured following British abolition.

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 3. RESISTANCE AND SURVIVAL

Many manifestations of resistance occurred in all parts of the world where

capture and enslavement developed throughout the centuries. Evidence of refusal
of servitude by the earliest slaves concerned, traded captives, slaves in mines
and on plantations are to be found in the archives, in oral traditions and can still
be revealed through archaeological evidence. In addition to direct opposition to
slavery in colonial territories, organized anti-slavery movements emerged from the
mid-18th century onwards in the West. The campaigns undertaken from the 1780s
onwards in North America and in Europe were conducted in parallel with a long
cycle of bans on human trafficking and the suppression of slavery which continued
until the end of the 19th century.

 9,:0:;(5*,
Manifestations of opposition to enslavement
appeared in Africa itself and during the lengthy
transfer of captives towards the coast, the shores
and ports where they were traded. Archaeological
research and records of the oral tradition provide
testimony of the reactions of populations to the
major raids to which villages in many parts of
Africa were subjected and to forced labour. Such
resistance which continued in the baracoons
established along the coast lines as far as
the slave ports resulted in the death of a part,
sometimes the whole of the cargoes. Off the shores of West Africa, the kolombos of
the Angolares of São Tomé, major fortified camps, foreshadowed the shelters built
subequently in the Caribbean and Americas to house the communities of cimarrón
Negroes from the 16th to the 19th century. In point of fact, active resistance on
the part of slaves in the Caribbean and Americas is best known, in those places
where servitude was at its highest density, where 70-85% of the populations of the
Caribbean islands were enslaved and where servitude lasted longest.

Surviving uprooting, deportation, separation, arduous working conditions,

malnutrition, disease, physical violence through blows and the whip, together
with moral pressure, made up a long-lasting pattern underlying the resistance of
slaves in the Caribbean and the Americas. Adapting to such constraints meant
resisting but also refusing, slowing down or sabotaging working activities, stealing
food, attempting to poison the local commander or the livestock on the plantation.

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 Resorting to abortion or killing a newborn were also manifestations of resistance
as were suicide as an extreme form of rejection of slavery.

The term “underground life” was used to describe a range of means of survival for
slaves through establishing parallel social relations and the formation of slaves’
associations closely monitored by the colonial authorities. Evidence of these means
of survival is still available today through the music, chanting, dancing, tales and
funeral ceremonies which have travelled down the centuries.

 9,=63;:
One of the earliest recorded major
revolts among slaves from sub-Saharan
Africa occurred at the end of the 11th
century in lower Iraq, in the Basra region
where sugarcane was cultivated. The
Persian, Ali ibn Mohammed al-‘Alawi
led the movement of the Zendj which
emerged in 869, to which adhered the
poor peasantry of the region, workers
in the salt marshes and the African
troops in the Caliph’s army. Several
cities were besieged by the rebels. After more than a decade of virtual warfare, the
Government of the Caliph Al-Mou’tamid captured and executed the leader of the
rebels in 883. Insurrection occurred again in 890 – known as the Qarmates revolt
– extending over a major part of Iraq, Syria and Palestine, up until the death of
its chief, Zikrawayth in 906. Other, particularly archaeological, sources record the
violent destruction of sugar production installations in the Sous area of Morocco
where slaves were employed.

Cane cultivation and the production of sugar were followed, during their vast
expansion from the Middle Ages – in the
Mediterranean and the Middle East
– until the 16th to the 19th centuries
in the Caribbean and the Americas by
revolts on the part of their numerous
slave labourers, working in particularly
arduous conditions.
It was in La Española, in Cuba, Mexico
and in the mines of Colombia that the

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earliest revolts occurred among slaves of African origin of which traces remain in
the reports of local administrators. In La Española in December 1521, the sugar
plantation of Diego Colomb was devastated by a rebellion of its slaves. In Cuba,
a revolt occurred in 1533 in a gold mine in the eastern part of the island. From
the onset of colonial settlement in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Christopher and
Barbados in the 17th century, there are reports of the early slave revolts after
repeated damage caused by early bands of fugitive slaves working sometimes in
collaboration with the native populations.

The first of a long series of slave revolts in Jamaica broke out in 1673. On the
northern coast of the island some 200 Coromantes, Akans from the Gold Coast,
attacked the plantations before disappearing into the mountains, thereby becoming
the first Leeward Bank of Marrons. In the British and French colonies of the Eastern
Caribbean between 1720 and 1740, slave rebellions grew in intensity, thereby
creating, according to a British Governor a “dangerous spirit of freedom”.

When rebellious slaves from the plantations and

fugitive slaves from the major fortified camps were
able to combine forces, as was the case in Jamaica
during the 18th century, the result was veritable
warfare which the European colonial authorities had
to wage against them. The uprising led by Tacky in
1760 was sufficiently forceful to be subsequently
compared to the slave rebellion in Santo Domingo
which occurred 30 years later. The most ambitious
rebellion, however, experienced by Jamaica broke out
in December 1831, involving approximately 20,000
slaves. More than 500 of them were executed. The
event occurred a few months before the renewal of some of the members of the
British Parliament. The abolitionist trend became a majority and the Abolition Bill
was passed on 1 August 1833. In the eastern Caribbean the Karibe populations
joined forces with the fugitive slaves and their opposition to European settlement.
Hence, the Black Karibs were born. They found refuge on “neutral” islands such as
Saint Vincent, from where the British deported them in 1796 to the island of Roatan
and the shores of the Bay of Honduras. They are the ancestors of the present-day
population of Garifunas.

,:*(7,
Escaping into the hinterland was one of the most frequent forms of resistance to
slavery. This phenomenon developed particularly in the mountainous and forested

6/$9(65287(6$*/2%$/9,6,21 
 territories where any clandestine settlement could enjoy natural protection. In
Granada, for example, several expeditions failed and the Spaniards had to resort
in 1612-1613 to granting freedom to the fugitives from the San Basilio camp
established in 1599-1600 near Cartagena. In Santo Domingo, the fugitives had
found refuge in the Bahoruco Mountains since the 17th century. In Cuba, a “Law
on the fugitive black slaves” facilitated the capture in 1796 of 16,000 fugitives in
the Havana region, but the pursuit of slaves by the rancheadores and their dogs
continued until the abolition of slavery on the island in 1886.

It was within the fortified confinement areas,

such as quilombos, palenques, grands camps
and ajoupas that the black maroons forged
a culture of resistance, from Brazil – where
the revolts of slaves from Pernambuco and
the quilombo of Palmares resisted regular
assaults from the Dutch and subsequently
the Portuguese initially throughout the 17th
century – Cuba and Florida. Forms of worship
originating from the Gulf of Guinea, Cape
Verde and São Tomé were sustained while
sometimes evolving, benefiting from the
somewhat fragile preservation of ceremonies
which the cimarrón organized and which
slaves who had temporarily escaped from
local plantations also attended. Voodoo,
santeria and candomblé emerged under the
auspices of the Yoruba divinities which also
crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of the
slave ships. The first maroon war in Jamaica, from 1725 to 1740, ended with
negotiations between the British and the Cudjoe, Accompong, Cuffee, Quaco and
Johnny leaders. In March 1738, the British Government signed a peace treaty
with the maroons of Trelawney Town and granted them not only freedom but also
15,000 acres of land.

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The Amazonian forest and the sparse numbers of European colonists in the Guyana
territories enabled fugitive Negroes, as early as the 17th century, to establish
their own communities which have survived until this day. In 1749, those who
had settled along the Saramaka and Suriname rivers, in Dutch Guyana, obtained
recognition of independence from the colonial authorities. They adopted the name
of Saramaka. In 1760, a similar treaty gave recognition to the Djuka, who had
settled along the Djuka Creek, an affluent of the River Maroni. In 1772, Boni waged
a war against the Dutch in order to emancipate the Maroni so that they could settle
in French territory. The Boni, a community which adopted the name of its former
chief, were recognized in 1860 by a Franco-Dutch Convention. In the Indian Ocean,
the flight of slaves developed considerably on Mauritius (Île de France) and on La
Réunion (Île Bourbon) during the 18th century.

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 4. ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENTS

The West reacted more belatedly with regard to the fate of the
slaves in its colonies. The populations were ill-informed.
Tradesmen, economists and lawyers were more concerned,
in the numerous publications on the colonial issue as early
as the 17th century, with the efficiency of maintaining the
slavery regime and the profitability of the exploitation system
than with the fate of the captives. Nevertheless, from the mid-
18th century onwards, the black slave trade and the slavery
system were brought more and more frequently into question. From Montesquieu
to Diderot and subsequently Condorcet, the writers of the Age of Enlightenment
referred to these matters with more or less determination, emphasizing the need
however to put an end to such practices. The religious and social principles of the
North American Quakers fostered greater awareness among English-speakers. In
Pennsylvania, in 1688, the Community of Friends of the Quakers condemned the
practice of “buying and keeping Negroes”. A hundred years later,
in 1772, Anthony Benezet stated, in An Historical Account of
Guinea, that the time had come to grant the slaves in the
Americas their freedom.

The article entitled “Slavery” in the Encyclopédie ou

Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers
published in Paris in 1755 provided a straightforward
argument: “Slavery is the establishment of law based on force,
law according to which a man is rendered so subservient to another m a n
that the latter becomes the absolute master of his life, his goods and his freedom.
(….) All men are born free, nature has made them all equal. (…) After having
examined the history of slavery, from its origins until the present day, we shall
prove that it offends human freedom, that it is contrary to natural and civil law, that
it offends the best systems of government and, lastly, that it is inherently useless.”

After the publication in 1770 of Histoire philosophique et politique

des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les
deux Indes under the name of Abbé Raynal, and Réflexions sur
l’esclavage des Nègres by Condorcet under the pseudonyme
of Joachim Schwartz in 1781, the prompting of governments
to act came from England. Thomas Clarkson, author in 1786
of a famous Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human
Species, particularly the African, undertook an active abolitionist

6/$9(65287(6$*/2%$/9,6,21 
 campaign, in which he was joined by James Ramsay, Granville Sharp and the
parliamentarian William Wilberforce. The movement was strengthened thanks
to the publication of an autobiographical testimony from a former African slave,
Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa), author in 1789 of The Interesting Narrative
of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. In February 1788,
the creation in Paris of the Société des Amis des Noirs, at the initiative of Jacques-
Pierre Brissot, modelled itself on the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade
founded by the Society of Friends in London one year earlier in May 1787.

4.1. THE SLAVES OF SANTO DOMINGO HAITI IMPOSE ABOLITION

The decisive event occurred when the colonies themselves,
more precisely the rich French colony of Santo Domingo
where the planters had longed for several decades for
greater commercial independence. Several rebel
leaders achieved fame in the mid-18th century,
such as Makandal and, during the decade from
1775 to 1785, Boukman, Georges Biassou and
Jean-François. The order of the day, “Freedom or
death” spread not only to Santo Domingo, but also
to neighbouring colonies, while the Negro maroons
intensified their guerrilla tactics through pillaging, setting
fire to plantations, kidnapping and poisoning. At the time,
Santo Domingo had a slave population of approximately 500,000,
representing 85% of the total population. The major uprising took place on the
night of 22-23 August 1791, causing thousands of slaves to desert the plantation
workshops. Their movement imposed the abolition of slavery there in 1793 and
subsequently on the occasion of the Convention révolutionnaire parisienne on 4
February 1794.

While Toussaint Louverture was gradually

establishing autonomous power in Santo Domingo
through the Constitution he edicted in 1801,
and succession of slave revolts had occurred in
Guadeloupe since 1791, Napoleon Bonaparte
decided that the authority of France and slavery
would be re-established through the law of 20
May 1802 which re-established legislation in force
prior to 1789. He sent a military expedition to each
of these colonies. Toussaint Louverture was made
prisoner and transferred to France in July 1802. He

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died on 7 April 1803 after several months of captivity at the Joux fortress in the
Jura. A veritable colonial war then continued in Santo Domingo until the French
troops were defeated in November 1803 and the proclamation of independence of
Haiti on 1 January 1804.

In Guadeloupe, the military expedition under the command of General Richepance

landed in May 1802 and began a ferocious repression which resulted in over 10,000
deaths. The conflict worsened between the colonial authorities and the defenders
of freedom whose motto was “Live free or die”. On 10 May 1802, Colonel Delgrès,
“a coloured man” from Martinique and his companions launched a proclamation
entitled “To the whole universe a last cry of innocence and despair” before jumping
to their deaths in a collective suicide along the flanks of the La Soufrière volcano.
Slavery was re-established on the island in July 1802.

4.2. THE INFLUENCE OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

The events in Santo Domingo/Haiti had
repercussions throughout the Americas
for more than a century. In Cuba, slave
uprisings occurred between 1792 and
1986 on the sugar plantations in the
vicinity of Havana, Puerto Principe and
Trinidad. The French were suspected
of “plotting”, and exerting an influence
on “coloured folk” and among the
palenques of Cimarrón Negroes which were increasing in number at the time.
In Jamaica, the Governor suspected French immigrés of importing black slaves
from Santo Domingo to Kingston, who, in his opinion, would threaten the colonial
order on the island. In the United States, unrest on the plantations between 1800
and 1830 was attributed to black refugees who had come from Santo Domingo.
The second war of the maroons of Jamaica from 1795 onwards was seen as
an effect of the Santo Domingo rebellion. Uprisings had occurred in the Dutch
colonies at Curaçao in 1795, and Guyana, in the province of Demerara-Essequibo.
The Cimarrón Negroes and slaves combined their efforts and put out revolutionary
watchwords such as “Freedom” and “Equality”.

From 1795 and 1800, the Spanish and Portuguese possessions were also
undermined by insurrections among the slaves. In Venezuela, for example, the Coro
region was shaken on 10 May 1795 by a rebellion on the part of 300 Negroes and
pardos, under the leadership of two emancipated slaves, José Léonardo Chirino
and Josef Caridad Gonzales. The insurgents roamed the streets of the city of

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 Coro after having proclaimed their objectives openly, namely application of the
“law of the French”, namely the establishment of a democratic republic and the
emancipation of slaves. The Haitian influence was felt as far as Brazil and Uruguay
where slaves rebelled and gathered together on the island of Rio Yi, proclaiming
a republic under the auspices of the Ley de los Franceses with the watchwords,
Libertad, Igualdad, Fraternidad. In Brazil, the protagonists in the conspiracy referred
to as the Inconfidência da Bahia, in Salvador de Bahia in August 1798, heralded a
forthcoming rebellion.

Throughout the first half of the 19th century and when abolition was introduced
in 1848, the authorities in the French colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique kept
watch over the coastline for fear that the arrival of Haitian emissaries might incite
local slaves to rebellion. This fear continued until the early 20th century when the
Governor of Guadeloupe suspected Haitian ringleaders of lending support to the
major strikes held by agricultural workers as from 1910.

4.3. FEDERAL ACTION AGAINST THE SLAVE TRADE

The slave trade and the slavery system were closely linked. Banning the slave
trade and abolishing slavery were less so. To be more precise, those who called for
the interruption of the black slave trade did not commit themselves immediately
to banning slavery. There were those who felt that tackling both phenomena
simultaneously would lead to rejection of both proposals by the colonial
governments. There were others who believed that the end of the slave trade
would have one major repercussion, namely the eventual end of slavery.

In the United States, the slave trade was banned by the Federal government,
thanks to a Congressional decision in 1794, a law that was confirmed in January
1807 by the Senate and the House of Representatives and which came into force
as from 1 January 1808. The United States did not, however, decide to abolish
slavery until 1863, during the Civil War. Ships flying under various flags supplied
their slave markets. England banned the slave traffic on the African coastline on
25 March 1807, but did not vote for the emancipation of slaves in its own colonies
until August 1833. Denmark banned the black slave trade as from 1 January 1803
but did not accept the entry into force of the decree regarding the emancipation
of slaves in its Caribbean colonies until 1848. France did not take any relatively
efficient measures to ban the trade until 1831 but did not abolish slavery as such
until 1848. In the meantime, however, the captives of illegal trafficking continued

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to land at night along the shores of Brazil, the United States and the French, Dutch,
Danish and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. In the United States, the trial held to
decide on the fate of the captives of the Cuban vessel Amistad in 1839 illustrates
how complex the illegal transatlantic trade networks were.

4.4. MODES OF ACTION

England, after having controlled
the black slave trade for
two centuries, took over
the leadership of worldwide
abolitionist movements for
more than a century. The British
committees had recourse to a
variety of modes of action in
order to foster great awareness
of slavery among the public and
in government circles. Public
meetings were held in every
county, in small towns where anti-slavery propaganda posters were placarded,
where there was a call to boycott goods from slave colonies and where pamphlets
and brochures were distributed describing the conditions of deportation of African
captives and the work of slaves on the American plantations. Abolitionist petitions
collected hundreds of thousands of signatures. Protestant groups and women’s
committees were particularly involved in this fight which grew on an exceptional
scale at the end of the eighteenth century. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society, in accordance with this international ambition, organized two worldwide
anti-slavery conventions in 1840 and 1843.

At the end of the eighteenth century, economists such as Adam Smith and Jean-
Baptiste Say had concluded that the work of a free worker was more profitable
than that of a slave. As early as the 1830s, colonial economies based on the quasi
exclusive export of sugarcane were widely challenged by sugar beet produced in
Europe. As for Great Britain, it had focused its economic and commercial interests
on Asia. It was tardily and on a very small scale that the various churches tackled
the question of the black slave trade, slavery and its abolition. While the earliest
English-speaking anti-slavery advocates came from the ranks of the Quakers
and other Protestant bodies, the Catholic church remained silent on the matter, in
spite of Pope Gregory 16th’s bull in 1839 which advised the faithful not to possess
slaves.

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 4.5. ABOLITIONIST DECREES
The Abolition Bill passed by the British Parliament in 1833 came into force on 1
August 1834. It imposed a period of unpaid apprenticeship on former slaves. Twenty
million pounds sterling were allocated by the Bank of England to compensate
planters. In France, the Provisional Republican Government, within the context
of the 1848 revolution which brought the monarchy to an end, signed a decree
which adopted the principle of the emancipation of slaves. The abolitionist, Victor
Schoelcher, chaired the Slavery Abolition Committee which ensured the signing
on 27 April 1848 of the decree abolishing slavery and
a set of decrees providing for the social and political
reorganization of the colonies. The essential aim was to
‘propose wiser means of ensuring work with freedom’.
The French decree granted immediate freedom to
the slaves and parliamentary representation for the
colonies in the National Assembly elected by universal
suffrage. Furthermore, strongly inspired by the British
decree, it provided for the payment of compensation
to slave owners. The slaves, for their part, received
neither land nor compensation.

4.6. FROM ABOLITION TO LIBERTY

The clergy were widely solicited once the emancipation of slaves had been
promulgated in the British and French colonies. What was asked of the clergy was
to encourage former slaves to work on the plantations, to marry and to establish
legal families. An arsenal of measures made up a framework for social control
aimed at filling the gaps left by the disappearance of the slavery system. A limit
was imposed on the surface area of land which the newly freed slaves were
authorized to rent or buy and the crops they could grow were regulated. The aim
was to bring as many of them as possible back to the major plantations for wages
that were paid irregularly. In the British West Indies, land ownership conferred
voting rights and could lead to eligibility to local assemblies. Consequently, every
measure was envisaged in order to hinder the progress of former slaves towards
political responsibilities.

In the French colonies, the watchwords of emancipation were public law and order,
the preservation of work and the effacement of the past. These slogans were
purveyed by very efficient mediators, namely the clergy in charge of teaching and
the press. The aim was to protect property through reinforced social control, to
attract external investment in the context of the industrial revolution and single crop

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sugar production through the creation of banks and colonial credit organizations,
and lastly to develop consumption among the ‘newly emancipated’ while paying
them the lowest wages.

4.7. UNDERPAID MANUAL LABOUR

The flows of inter-Caribbean migrant labour developed again in the wake of
each process of emancipation. Negotiations were immediately launched for the
employment of workers under contract recruited in Africa, India, China, Malaysia,
Indonesia and even
in Japan. France had
launched the process
of illegal recruitment of
Indian workers for La
Reunion in 1818-1819,
a traffic which only
became legal in 1830,
coming mainly from
Pondicherry and Karikal.
From 1844 onwards,
the British drew amply on a supply of Indian labour, opening up a migratory flow
which only came to an end in 1917. The Danish colonies where slavery had been
abolished in 1848, had recourse to this type of labour from 1862 onwards. The
Dutch colonies, where slavery had been abolished since 1863, had been recruiting
workers in China, Madeira and Barbados since 1853. The earliest arrivals of Indian
coolies occurred in 1872. The Dutch recruited workers for the Caribbean and
Guyana/Suriname in their Indonesian possessions from 1872 until 1933.

4.8. ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENTS IN THE AMERICAS

However, the Quakers in Philadelphia set the tone and gave the starting signal for
the European abolitionist campaign while on their own territory, the emancipation
of slaves only occurred in 1865 in the wake of a terrible civil war in which
slavery was one of the major issues. The countries of South America of Hispanic
dependence – to which should be added the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico –
declared themselves in favour of immediate abolition when their slave population
was numerically limited, or very gradually when it constituted one of the essential
pillars of their economy. Another mode of emancipation of male slaves emerged,
subject to their enlistment as soldiers in the liberation armies raised against
Spain. This, for example, was the case in Venezuela and in Bolivia, and at least
temporarily, in Cuba.

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 In the Spanish colonies which obtained their independence during the first half
of the 19th century, the emancipation of slaves occurred within the context of
military conflicts. In Venezuela in 1812, Francisco de Miranda granted freedom
‘to slaves who would enlist and would serve in the army for ten years, promising
their masters to compensate them in better times’. In Chile in 1814, in Brazil in
1817, slaves who refused such enlistment in return for a promise of freedom were
returned to “perpetual slavery on a ruling by the government”. Simon Bolívar in
exchange of logistical aid received from the President of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion,
had promised to abolish slavery. He began as early as 1816 by freeing some 800
slaves on his family estate and proclaimed abolition in the same year in Venezuela.
The enfranchised slaves had to enlist in the Republican army. That was the
condition underlying their liberation. The decrees issued by the Libertador,
however, were not recorded by the Venezuelan Congress.

The Civil War in the United States, the creation in Madrid in 1864 of the
Sociedad Abolicionista Espanola, the majority accession to the Cortès of the
liberals in 1868 and lastly, the ten-years war in Cuba had a decisive effect
in favour of voting a law of emancipation by the Spaniards. In Madrid the
Government in power since 1868 declared itself in favour of gradual abolition, on
the basis of age brackets. The bill proposed by Segismundo Moret y Prendergast
was passed by the Cortès in June 1870.

In Cuba, revolts linked to the intensification of work in the sugar plantations

increased in number during the first half of the 19th century. The Aponte
conspiracy in 1812, followed by that of La Escalera in 1843-1844 have
remained part of the collective memory. In the 1840s, Cuba was the
most prosperous of sugar-producing slave colonies, with a population of
approximately 400,000 slaves. From 1800 until the 1870s, the Spanish
colony flouted all the bans on the black slave trade by importing more than
700,000 African captives, in addition to the purchases of slaves on the Caribbean
markets. On this large Caribbean island, the destruction of slavery took on a variety
of forms: immediate liberations of slaves, the authority of slave owners on their
slaves, and gradual abolition of slavery in accordance with the Moret law. In Brazil,
lastly, where Joaquim Nabuco was undoubtedly the most active of abolitionists,
Princess regent Isabel signed the “Lei des Oro” on 13 May 1888, bringing an end
to slavery in the country.

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4.9. THE END OF INSTITUTIONALIZED SLAVERY IN THE USA
The slavery abolitionist movement in the United States, as in Europe, developed
in two phases. The incessant campaigns conducted by the Quakers, confined to
the Northern States where the slavery system was not a fundamental economic
component, had led to the creation of relatively active committees ensuring that
abolition was inscribed in the Constitution of several states as early as the late 18th
century. A second phase in the abolitionist process in the United States developed
in the 1830s and went on to emancipation in 1865.

The petition put forward by the Quakers of Germantown in 1688, is considered to

have been the first collective protest against slavery. It was not, however, until the
19th century that a coherent abolitionist campaign came into being in the North
of the United States after a series of slave uprisings in the southern States, led
in particular in Virginia by Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Nat Turner in 1831 and John
Brown in 1855, and in South Carolina by Denmark Vesey in 1822. Politicians,
religious figures, women’s committees and freed Blacks who had fled the
southern plantations set up groups of sympathizers and newspapers. The
Tappan brothers and William Lloyd Garrison gave new impetus to the
movement. In 1845, Federick Douglas, who had just fled towards the
North, published an account of his life as a slave and his escape.

The Underground Railroad was a means of escape with various

clandestine stops for slaves coming from the southern States to the
North where slavery had been abolished and on towards Canada.
This clandestine route was made famous in the novel Uncle Tom’s
Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had been involved in helping
fugitives, published in 1852. The 1850 law on Fugitive Slaves, the
Fugitive Slave Act, authorized capturers of fleeing slaves to pursue them in
the Northern States where they had found refuge. Harriet Ross Tubman, a slave
born in Maryland, fled in 1850 and settled in Philadelphia where she became a
driver on the Underground Railroad.

In order to meet the wishes of certain Southern States which did not want to see
free slaves established on their territory, the American Colonization Society was
founded in 1816. Its aim was to transport affranchised slaves towards Africa –
with the foundation of Liberia – in the same way that the British had done in Sierra
Leone since 1787.

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 In 1854, the Republican Party inserted the abolition of slavery in its political
agenda. Its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, elected President in 1860, drew up a law
of emancipation and proclaimed the abolition of slavery on 1 January 1863. This
measure was brought into force as from early 1865 in all of the States of the Union.
Some 4 million slaves were thereby recognized as free and the banning of slavery
in the United States became the 13th amendment to the Federal Constitution on 18
December 1865. In December 1865 also, however, the Ku Klux Klan which denied
any right granted to any former slaves, was founded in Tennessee.

In Canada, where slavery had been abolished in 1834 following the British vote for
abolition, the increase in the number of fugitive slaves from the United States led
to the foundation in Toronto by George Brown, of the Canadian Anti-slavery Society
on 26 February 1851.

4.10. THE AGE OF COLONIZATION AND THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY

The last quarter of the 19th century was marked, in Europe, by the formation of
several anti-slavery societies which focused on Africa as their field of action. In
actual fact, however, the lines of penetration which the missionaries choose were
those of the trading companies and colonial lobbies which had become particularly
powerful in the 1880s.

Bringing slavery to an end in Africa was frequently presented as something that

was as complex and multifaceted as the very statuses of servitude across that
continent. In the British and French colonies in Africa, abolition decrees were only
partially implemented. The protectorate regime allowed considerable laxity in
respect of the law. In East Africa, the Zanzibar and Pemba Island, trading posts
remained platforms for the distribution of slaves throughout the Indian Ocean until
the early 20th century. Slavery was officially abolished there in 1897.

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According to the aims of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and the Brussels
Conference of 1890, Europe was to coordinate the fight against the black slave
trade in Africa and it was in the name of freedom that it colonized that continent.
Nevertheless, the title of ‘forced labour’ was given to the method of recruitment
and employment of labour which could no longer be reduced to slavery. In London,
in July 1900, participants at the first Pan-African Conference called for respect for
the ideals of Wilberforce and Garrison and an end to forced labour in Africa.

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 TABLE 4 :
CHRONOLOGY OF THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
1777 The abolition of slavery 1829 Abolition of slavery in Mexico
included in the Constitution
of Vermont
1780 Abolition in Pennsylvania 1831 Last French law banning black slave trade
1783 Abolition in Massachusetts 1833- Abolition of slavery in the British colonies
1838
1784 Abolition in Rhode Island 1846 Abolition of slavery in Tunisia
and Connecticut
1793 Abolition of slavery in 1847 Abolition of slavery in the Swedish colony
Santo Domingo after the of Saint Barthélemy
slave rebellion launched in
August 1791
1802 Re-establishment of slavery 1848 Abolition of slavery in the French and
in the French colonies Danish colonies
1803 Banning of black slave 1851 Abolition of slavery in Colombia
trade by Denmark 1853 Abolition of slavery in Argentina
1854 Abolition of slavery in Venezuela

1807 Banning of black slave 1855 Abolition of slavery in Peru

trade by Great 1863 Abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies
Britain
1808 Banning of black slave 1863- Abolition of slavery in the United States
trade by the United States 1865
1814 Banning of black slave 1870 Moret Abolition Act passed in Spain
trade by the Netherlands 1873 Abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico

1815 European powers meeting 1876 Abolition of slavery in Brazil

at the Congress of Vienna 1880- Abolition of slavery in Madagascar
undertook to ban the black 1886 Abolition of slavery in Zanzibar
slave trade
1822 Abolition of slavery in Santo 1909 The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Domingo Society founded in 1839 became Anti-
Slavery International
1910 Abolition of slavery in China
1823 Abolition of slavery in Chile 1919 Creation of the International Labour
Organization
1920 Abolition of slavery in Somalia
1826 Abolition of slavery in
Bolivia

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 1923 Abolition of slavery in
Ethiopia and Afghanistan
1924 Theoretical abolition of
slavery in Sudan
Abolition of slavery in Iraq
1974 Creation by the Commission on Human
Rights at the United Nations of a Working
Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery

1926 League of Nations 1980 Abolition of slavery in Mauritania (after

Convention on Slavery the abolitions in 1905 and 1961).
Abolition of slavery in Nepal Reduction to slavery considered a “crime”
1928 Abolition of slavery in Iran by Mauritania in 2007

1930 Convention concerning 1992 Abolition of slavery in Pakistan

forced labour of the
International Labour
Organization (ILO).
1936 Abolition of slavery in
Nigeria

1949 UN Convention for the 2000
repression of the trade
in human beings and the
exploitation of prostitution 2003
1952 Abolition of slavery in Qatar
The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the
European Union prohibits slavery, forced
labour, and traffic in human beings
Banning of slavery in Niger

1956 UN Supplementary 2004 UN and UNESCO: International Year to

Convention on the Abolition commemorate the Struggle against
of Slavery, the Slave Slavery and its Abolition
Trade, and Institutions and
Practices Similar to Slavery
1957 ILO Convention on the 2008 Banning of forced labour in Nepal
abolition of forced labour
1962 Abolition of slavery in
Yemen and Saudi Arabia
1963 Abolition of slavery in the
United Arab Emirates
1970 Abolition of slavery in Oman

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 5. FOCUS: THE REPERCUSSIONS
OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

The revolutionary slave movement in Santo Domingo

in 1791-1803 produced considerable resistance
throughout the Caribbean and the American Continent.
Three fundamental factors can help to appreciate
the scale of the phenomenon. The first of these
concerns the substantial modifications that occurred
in the distribution of the population and the way the
productive system functioned in certain neighbouring
regions of the colony in revolt. The second factor refers
to the very significant effect which political and social
agitation occurring there had on the preoccupations
of the governmental authorities in certain States and
on the relations between States that were already
conditioned by the constant acute rivalry between colonies. The third factor
involves the increasingly marked trend in the emergence of acts of rebellion within
the American sphere inspired by the audacity of the Santo Domingo slaves. From
1804 onwards, with the birth of the anti-slavery, anti-colonial and anti-racist State
of Haiti, these new circumstances were to exert, until the victory of Ayacucho in
1824, considerable influence on the development of the liberation process of the
Spanish colonies of South America. In a similar perspective, mention must also be
made of the persistent fear kept alive by the slave owners over many years in other
territories in the region who feared that this “baneful example” would repeat itself
in their own sphere.

5.1. MAJOR POPULATION MOVEMENTS

During this period of political and social
effervescence, many of the major land owners in
Santo Domingo left the colony to seek refuge in
France or elsewhere. Many of them settled either
on other islands, particularly in Jamaica and
Cuba, or on the continent, as in the United States,
particularly in Louisiana and Virginia as well as
in Venezuela. The largest contingents were to be
found in Jamaica, Cuba and the United States. In
1803, some 30,000 people had arrived in Cuba, two thirds of whom were blacks
and mulattoes, slaves and emancipated slaves who were part of the migratory

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 flows from Haiti. Approximately 10,000 of them abandoned the major Spanish
island in order to settle in Louisiana and more particularly in New Orleans. Others
settled in Virginia, in Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York.
This migratory movement also affected the sectors of combatants for freedom.
It was the case of auxiliary troops trained by former rebellious slaves in Santo
Domingo who joined the ranks of the Spanish army to fight against France. When
peace was signed between those two countries, the whole island came under the
control of the French Republic and 700 officers among the troops left the colony
for Spain, Florida and Central America. In the latter region, they settled towards
1796 along the Atlantic coast of Honduras and Guatemala, in particular, where
they were joined a year later by the Garifunas, a community from the island of
Saint Vincent born of the inter-breeding that had occurred since the 17th century
between Caribbean Amerindians and Black maroons.

5.2. LONG-LASTING UPHEAVALS

IN THE GEOGRAPHY OF PRODUCTION
These transfers of population, directly linked to the
sudden deterioration in the economic situation and
the accentuation of political conflicts in the colony in
turmoil, were also to bring about durable change in
the regional geography of the production of foodstuffs
for export, particularly sugar and coffee. From that
time on, Santo Domingo’s hegemony in the economic
system of plantations was definitely shattered to
the advantage of other Spanish and English colonial
establishments in the Caribbean as well as in some
more remote parts of the continent such as Louisiana
and Venezuela. Jamaica alone produced 110,000 of
the 120,000 tones of sugar exported in 1805 by all
the British islands in the West Indies in 1791. It therefore benefited considerably
from the gradual disappearance of Santo Domingo in this international trade.

It was, however, the most extensive of the Caribbean territories which was to
benefit from these new circumstances. In 1788, Cuba exported 14,000 tons of
sugar annually. Towards 1825, the Spanish colony, with more than 40,000 tonnes,
widely overtook the quantity exported by Santo Domingo at its most prosperous
period, namely approximately 30,000 tonnes. The first phase of major sugar
production in Cuba corresponds precisely to the period of the Haitian Revolution.
It must not be forgotten how important coffee became during that period of time.

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After it was introduced into Cuba in 1768, coffee cultivation was to undergo
remarkable expansion with the settlement of the fugitives from Santo Domingo in
the Eastern part of Cuba. These changes in the geography of regional production
also led to an increase in the slave population quite in contrast to what occurred in
Santo Domingo during the same historical period. In Jamaica, the number of slave
captives grew overall from 257,300 in 1788 to 328,447 in 1810. As regards Cuba,
the increase was even more spectacular. From 84,500 in 1792, the number of
slaves rose to 225,000 in 1817. It is not difficult to guess what consequences such
phenomena were to entail both in terms of inter-State relations and in resistance
movements worldwide in the oppressed sectors of enslaved society in the phase
of the speeding up of liberation processes in Santo Domingo.

5.3. ADMINISTRATIVE MEASURES OF PREVENTION

The effect of the increasingly radical
transformations that occurred in the
French colony between 1791 and 1803
can also be detected in the measures
adopted and recommendations
edicted by the colonial powers and
their government apparatus in order to
prevent any possible extension of such
upheavals in their respective areas
of jurisdiction. First of all, local troop
numbers were systematically reinforced, by strengthening either the militia or the
regular army units. In Jamaica, for example, the number of militia was raised to
20,000 men with new weapons. At the same time, the number of regular soldiers
rose from 4,000 to 6,000 men.

In a context governed at the same time by strong colonial rivalry, bitter struggles
for the control of new markets together with a strong attachment to the slave
and racist ideology, the major question facing the expansionist States of the day
consisted in controlling and limiting as far as possible the circulation of information
on the reality of contemporary revolutionary events. In spite of strict surveillance,
there were many channels through which the influence of the rebellion movement
in Santo Domingo could pass. Communications between the islands and with the
continental coastline facilitated a multiplication of human contacts outside official
circuits. Furthermore, the migratory flows of colonists with their slaves towards
other regions, the transfer to other countries of fugitives from among the “auxiliary
troops”, and the reappearance of privatering activities all made up channels for
propagating ideas which rocked the whole area.

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 5.4. THE REMARKABLE EXTENSION OF REVOLTS
In such conditions, it is hardly surprising that between 1791 and
1803, numerous slave revolts, varying in intensity, occurred in
the overall Caribbean area, related either directly, or in more or
less imaginary fashion to the insurrectional atmosphere that
prevailed in Santo Domingo. In the United States, the North
America historian, Herbert Aptheker, has estimated that
approximately 250 acts of sedition in all were organized
by Afro-Americans to free themselves from slavery during
the history of that “particular institution” in that country. He
points out in particular that in Louisiana, Virginia and North
Carolina where many captives were present, who had arrived
in the wake of the Santo Domingo troubles, the subsequent
twelve years following 1790 were precisely those during which unrest
and rebellions were most intense and widespread. It is therefore no coincidence
that during those 12 turbulent years, the fear of rebellions led to the imposition
of severe vigilance over the arrival of new hands destined to slavery. Numerous
restrictive and control measures were taken both by the Federal Government and
by State Governments, between 1784 and 1800.

In Venezuela, the first major revolt against slavery was led by the descendant
of the slave and an Amerindian, José Leonardo Chirinos who, in the company of
his master, a rich tradesman from the city of Coro had had the opportunity of
visiting more than once the French colony in full turmoil. He took advantage on
occasion to acquire information as to how the social unrest occurred. In his own
country, with the confirmation that the information collected during his previous
crossings, he launched in 1795, with the assistance of José Caridad González,
an armed movement of contestation of the slavery system and a rejection of the
exorbitant taxes which put a strain on modest folk. This action failed in the face
of superior forces and the two leaders as well as many participants fell under the
blows of their enemies. Four years later, on 6 May 1799, the Port of Maracaibo
hosted the schooners “La Patrouille” and “Brutus”, which had come directly from
Port-au-Prince with their crew under the respective command of two mulattoes
from Santo Domingo, Jean Gaspar Bocé and Augustin Gaspar Bocé. An insurrection
against slavery was prepared for the 13th of that month but failed as a result of a
denunciation. The two captains and their companions were executed.

In Cuba, many of the slaves, who had arrived from Santo Domingo with their
masters were feared by the authorities as potential troublemakers. The presence
of emissaries from Santo Domingo was recorded here and there in the West Indies
for participation in organizing the fight against slavery.

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Lastly, the effect of the Haitian revolution did not fail, already in those days, to make
itself felt in cultural terms. In the field of dance and music, new practices were
introduced in Cuba by émigrés from the French Colony, particularly the slaves,
including the cinquillo, the rumba, the conga and songs in the Creole language.
Lastly, the figure of Toussaint Louverture was the hero of popular songs, as among
the Garifunas, a population which had settled on the Caribbean coastline of Central
America from 1796 onwards and spread from Belize to Nicaragua. In Brazil,
during the same period, the municipality of Rio issued a ruling prohibiting blacks
from wearing an insignia of recognition which displayed the words “Toussaint
Louverture Rei dos Negros”.

5.5. SOLIDARITY WITH THE LIBERATION OF SOUTH AMERICA

After 1804, the renown of the insurrectional movement of the former captives of
Santo Domingo was to spread. With the triumph of Independence a new political
entity took shape. From the outset, on the world stage dominated by colonialism,
slavery and racism, this symbolized a peril, a permanent threat which had at any
cost to be isolated, for want of actually eliminating it. At the same time, all those
who aspired to rid themselves of the chains of their servitude were to find in the
existence of this State a source of moral encouragement, and irrefutable proof of
the possibility of succeeding in their struggle and the need for material assistance.
In the eyes of more than one, the Haitian experience showed how a community, a
victim of the most barbarous forms of oppression, could also, as Wilberforce wrote
“devise major projects (…) and implement them with vigour”.

It was particularly in the two years 1815 and 1816 that the movement of solidarity
with the American countries was to attain its greatest intensity. In a letter sent to
Pétion on 19 December 1815, Bolívar acknowledged that Haiti was “the asylum
of all Republicans in this part of the world”. Cities
such as Port-au-Prince, Les Cayes and Jacmel were
teaming with exiles, conspirators, revolutionary
leaders, secret agents and Spanish spies who kept
a close watch over the comings and goings of the
South American leaders in their efforts to destabilize
the colonial order. Mexicans such as Franciso Javier
Mina, accompanied by Pedro Girard, J. Cadenas and
some 200 combatants, including Haitians, found all
the assistance they needed to mount an expedition
with a view to liberating Mexico.

When Cartagena was re-won in 1815 by troops loyal to the Metropolitan

authorities, some 2,000 people, abandoning this ultimate bastion in the first wave

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 of independentism and crowded into ten or more ships under the command of
Commodore Louis Aury, arrived in the Southern Haitian capital on 6 January 1816
to find refuge there. The complete, unwavering support given successively to
Bolívar and all of his partisans by the Government of Pétion during that year was
decisive for launching a second wave, which proved definitively victorious, of the
movement of liberation of South America. Nothing was spared in order to ensure
the success of the venture, whether it be recruitment of men, supplies of weapons,
munitions, ships, money and printing equipment, agreement on a new strategy to
establish close links between the claim for the abolition of slavery and that of the
fight against foreign domination, without forgetting maintaining discretion on the
inestimable support provided by Haiti.

Nonetheless, as early as 1824, the old racial prejudices against the Haitian
revolution were soon to triumph. The country in full battle for its rightful admission
to the international stage, was refused the signing of a treaty of friendship, alliance
and trade with partisans of those whom it had supported so generously shortly
before. Hence, the mission given to Jean Desrivières Chanlatte, an official envoy
sent to the authorities of Greater Colombia failed. Two years later in 1826, the
leaders of that country, within the context of a machination orchestrated by the
United States, formally rejected the representatives of the Haitian Government at
the Pan-American Congress in Panama, thereby bringing to an end, in a completely
unexpected and deplorable fashion, the cycle of Haitian solidarity with the struggle
for liberation in the countries of South America. This manifestation of ostracism
was to last for many more years, throughout the whole of the nineteenth century.

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 6. BUILDING ON THE CREATIVITY AND IDENTITY
IN POST SLAVERY SOCIETIES
If the system of Plantation slavery in the Americas
which received fuel from the trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade did nothing else, it forced on all involved in
the centuries-old obscenity the challenge of an on-
going quest for an identity following the survival
of an oppressive dehumanizing situation of co-
incarceration of both masters and slaves. For the
jailers and the jailed are, by definition, in jail.
The Americas, otherwise known as Plantation
America running from Nova Scotia down the eastern littoral of the United States
and Latin America and including the insular Caribbean, are the result of the historic
encounters over the past half a millennium on foreign soil. Those who met came
from Europe (the source of conquerors, adventurers, commercial investors and
fugitive settlers fleeing religious persecution), from Africa (through the trade in
enslaved Africans), from Asia (providing indentured servants to replace the liberated
Africans from India’s Deccan Plateaus and China’s Hakka-speaking Cantonese
valley) and much later from the Levantine Coast providing Lebanese and Syrian
souls, themselves fleeing religious anti-Christian persecution, along with fortune-
seekers. All these “migrants” in turn had to come to terms not only with each of
their other fellow migrants but all in turn with the Native Americans who enjoyed
prior tenancy if not effective occupation.
Only the Africans, forcibly severed from ancestral hearths, came as “individuals”
without any contractual guarantee of return. In fact, for ease of control and
peaceful management by slave masters of the exploited labour, African slaves
with a common culture by way of a common language, a common religion, or
consanguineous family ties were best separated by sale to various plantation
owners – a security measure no less than a guarantee for profit.
For such persons, survival meant discovering as soon as possible tenancy in a
zone of psychic comfort following on the severance from ancestral homelands
to a land of no return and throughout the suffering on plantations manifested in
the vilest forms of punishment meted out for wrongdoing, in the deepening of
racial discrimination against people of African origin and the denigration of things
African supported by the philosophical and anthropological “findings” by European
scholars and embalmed into “laws of nature”.
The striving “to be” and the struggle for identity became central, therefore, to a
good deal of the concerns of the people of African ancestry further deprived of
the status of citizenship being property (chattel) and not “persons” in law. The
reality of a diverse and deeply stratified human landscape not only during but

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 immediately after the abolition of slavery and throughout the period of sustained
colonial subjugation made the people of African ancestry in the Americas, stake out
spaces of inviolability beyond the reach of oppression in order to facilitate their ability
to function as human beings, especially in the Caribbean which to this day is a living
laboratory of the intertextuality of interacting encountering cultures in praxis.

Such is the legacy of the management by such people of the cultural diversity and the
building of cultural pluralism as well as the management of the memory of slavery in
what has become a multi-ethnic society but one that could not easily ignore the force
and impact of the African Presence. The Caribbean citizen can today be described
as part-African, part-European, part-Asian, part-Native American (mythically if not
biologically so) but totally Caribbean – a claim to multi-layered texturing which is not
well understood by many of the people who inhabit societies and see themselves as
ethnically (and therefore culturally) homogenous. The same is true of persons who
share a perceived common ethnicity and with the experience of hegemonic control
over others considered not fit to rule or fit to govern themselves because they are
seen to lack any capacity for thought and reasoning and have no life and history
worthy of Explanation and Theory.
The African Diaspora in the Americas has seen the United States of America dividing
itself into “Minorities” and a Majority that is ethnically white and of Anglo-Saxon
stock with Protestant religious leanings. Despite the folly of the persistence of such
misperception, the society continues to place into the Minority sector Blacks (once
called Negroes, now African-Americans, for a long time without the vote or access
to centres of power), Jews (who despite their acquired wealth and intellectual power
remained outcasts if only because Christian fundamentalism continued to feel they
had crucified the Holy One – himself a Jew -- but whom Gentiles have long hijacked
into a crusading faith), Hispanics themselves a mixed bag of multi-ethnic beings and
certainly not of Protestant persuasion), Native Americans (long exiled into reservations
and marginalized despite their historical claim to prior discovery of the land later
claimed by the Whites on the basis of effective
occupation), and all Others (especially those
defiant of the cozy categorizations determined/
dictated by the ruling group.

The people of unmistakable African ancestry

have continued to bear the burden of
racial discrimination and psycho-social
marginalization. Jim Crowism, the US version
of South African apartheid, no longer technically exists in the form of institutionalized
separation; but there is need for continued engagement of the parlous state of affairs
not made easier by the persistent immiseration of persons of African ancestry evident
in the high rate of unemployment and un-employability among Blacks, low quality
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education, minimal and unaffordable healthcare and the high incidence of disease –
from hypertension and diabetes to HIV AIDS – among that section of the population
throughout the Americas.

The advent into the White House of an African-American incumbent in the person
of Barrack Obama (who carries a Muslim name) naturally causes unease among
die-hard advocates of a homogenously White power structure. Such persons have
difficulty managing the reality of cultural pluralism and cultural diversity which are
the reality of the Third Millennium globalised world of the 21st century. Never mind
that many who carry the stain of Africa in their veins have led governments of nations
in other parts of the Americas as in Haiti whose iconic slave liberation revolution of
1804 failed for decades to get the support of the young White United States Republic
despite its own “revolutionary” pedigree. The rest of the Commonwealth Caribbean
from the Bahamas to Guyana have since 1962 had many a Black head of government
on the basis of free elections. But then they are none of them of Superpower ranking
that can be said to have a far-reaching impact on the Planet. Such is the reality that
leads the descendants of African slaves to continue the struggle for a human identity
and to advocate for themselves rights and freedom, justice and respect coupled with
a feverish pursuit of economic prosperity or the opportunity to have access to it.

The field of the arts bearing the fruits of the exercise of the creative imagination
has long provided an excellent opportunity for
accessing dignity, respect, building a new identity
and citizenship. It is in this sense one must view
the significance of the Black arts movement of
the Americas starting off with jazz, arguably the
classical music of 20th century United States
and the great achievements in musical theatre
featuring African-American life and talents.
In the Caribbean the parallel achievements, all the result of the clear creative
management of cultural pluralism, can be seen in the great festival arts of jonkonnu,
masquerade, carnival (in its various manifestations from Rio de Janeiro to Port of
Spain and the later Hosay driven by the latter-day presence of Mohammedanism in
the Indian population that emerged out of indentureship. “Africans” and “Indians”
are all participants in these festival arts. The arts have been the surest route to
cognition where educators are serious about educating their wards and to personal
and collective liberation for a great many whose ancestors came as human cargo via
the Middle Passage.
An understanding of this shared human thirst for identity and freedom in terms
of its cultural significance is critical. For the impulses that drive the peoples of
the Americas, and particularly of the Caribbean, to independent paths to
development are the same impulses which drive them to the
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 creation of their own music, their own languages and literature, their own gods and
religious belief-systems, their own kinship patterns, modes of socialization and self-
perceptions. Their self-empowerment and sense of place and purpose which endow
them with a sense of self (as human beings, with a sense of personhood) and of
society (making them stakeholders as citizens), comes only when they can make
definitions about themselves on their own terms and have the ability to proceed
to action on the basis of those definitions. Recognition of this and the according
of the status due such achievement is a prized wish of all the creatures of the
multi-ethnicity and cultural pluralism of the peoples of the once slaveholding and
colonized Americas – whether they be Black, White, Mestizo, Indian (indigenous and
transplanted), Chinese or Lebanese. Heterogeneity, not homogeneity, here becomes
the principle of social organization and the basis for tolerance, mutual respect,
understanding and for peace.

The great value placed on racial dignity and racial pride by people of African ancestry
inhabiting former African slaveholding societies should not be seen as an epidermal
indulgence. They have demonstrated a clear understanding of the skill they must
develop negotiating their space in a diverse world but without surrendering to
appropriation a la the “Stockholm syndrome” or with any loss of a sense of the
historical centrality of the African Presence to human development in the Western
world over the past half a millennium. Their emphasis on Black pride, dignity and
decency in treating with Africa’s offspring outside of the African Continent merely
reflects the determination and resolve by a set of people who understand that their
survival as human beings and “citizens” of their countries and the Planet depends
on the final disappearance from human consciousness of (a) that view of the world
which denigrates things African or African-derived phenomena and regards as
superior all things European and White; and (b) that sensibility which violates their
sense of person, place and purpose wherever Western values rooted in the Graeco-
Christian heritage and reinforced by the fantastic modern achievements in science
and technology prevail.

None of this necessarily leads to inverse racism or reprisal hate despite the high
profile of such responses as Black Nationalism and Black Power in the recent social
history of the Americas tenanted by descendants of African slaves. Many a Black in
the Americas are far too sophisticated to be racist but not that stupid not to be race
conscious; and this is so despite the newly crafted myth of the advent of an era of
post-racialism. On that delicate balancing of sensibilities many now live and have
their being. Such indeed is the paradox for multi-ethnic societies. And the ex-slave,
ex-colonial aggregations to be found all over the world are particularly challenged
both now and in the foreseeable future by engaging the would-be imposed persistent
silence in order to break what has indeed been a threatening obscenity for ages.

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6.1. THE ARTS
Whether in the form of fiction or nonfiction, Afro
descendants have made important contributions in the
Americas. Oral tradition, in the form of fiction, has been
the favored means by which the enslaved Africans and
later on, their descendants, have transmitted culture from
one generation to another. The Bantu “sungura” was
creolized to Brother Rabbit or Uncle Rabbit in the United
States; Annancy, the Second Person of the Akan God, evolved into Annancy the trickster
in the Caribbean and found his way into Central America along with brother tiger, brother
lion and tukuma (Van Sertima, in, Goldstein, 1971: 29). Phillis Wheatley and Frederick
Douglass in North America, Juan Francisco Manzano in Cuba, and Francis Williams in
Jamaica produced literature in the colonial slave period. The post revolutionary United
States produced brilliant intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois. The Harlem Renaissance
brought us Arthur A. Schomburg and Langston Hughes. In Latin American there was
Plácido in Cuba and Candelario Obeso in Colombia, while Nicolas Guillen headed a
new Africana perspective, which has been termed “Afrorealism” (Duncan, in Anales
del Caribe 2005-2006: 9), followed by contemporary writers like Nancy Morejón (Cuba)
Lucía Charún Illescas (Perú), Cubena and Gerardo Maloney (Panamá), Blas Jiménez
(Dominican Republic), and Eulalia Bernard and Shirley Campbell (Costa Rica). And of
course there is Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison (U.S.),
and many more.

The contribution in the field of music is predominant.

People of African descent in the Americas, have
maintained and reconstructed their cultural heritage
through music. In some cases, as in the U.S., where
traditional African drums were not permitted, they used
their voices to create drum-like sounds to adorn spiritual
music and nostalgic vocalizations as found in soul music,
or they took European instruments and created jazz. In Latin America bantu phonemes
/mb/ or /ng/ associated with music and dancing are kept in the names of popular
rhythms –cumbia (Colombia), tango (Argentina), rumba and mambo (Cuba), merengue
(Dominican Republic), candomble (Uruguay), and in the names of musical instruments
such as marimba, quijongo and others (De Carvalho, José Jorge, en Moreno Fraginals,
1977:290). From the Garifuna population of Honduras we got punta. In the Caribbean
we have well known tunes and rhythms such as Calypso,
Reggae and Soca (soul Caribbean) and from Brazil we got
Bossa Nova and Samba and later on, Samba-rock and
Samba-reggae (Morales, 2003). And in the latter years steal
bands became popular in Trinidad.

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 6.2. LANGUAGES
Derivates of African words and expressions are present in Latin American and Caribbean
use of language. For example, Richard Allsop (In Moreno Fraginals, Manuel, 1977: 130)
mentions field studies that identify a number of African words in Puerto Rican Spanish.
Also, some 500 Yoruba words were identified in Cuban Spanish. In Jamaican Creole
English, there is no gender. “Him” can be either man or woman, as in Bantu languages
(Ivan Van Sertima, in Goldstein,1971: 20 22) Also, the /th/ sound is absent in diverse
versions of English spoken by Black communities, substituted for with /d/, is a direct
result of the lack of that sound in many African languages. “Unuh” instead of “you
all” corresponds to the Krio language of Sierra Leone. And in Standard English, “O.K.”
has become universal and derives from the Wolof expression “waw kay” meaning all
is well. “Guy” has the exact meaning in Wolof, that is “a person” (Kinney, Esi Sylvia, in
Goldstein: 1971, 6 63).

6.3. RELIGION
In the field of religion, Africans took their traditional religiosity
to the Americas, although colonial authorities did whatever
possible to control or suppress every manifestation of
Africanity. Terms like primitive, savage, native,and pagan were
applied indiscriminately to their culture. While those who were
already Christian in Africa (people from the Kingdom of Kongo)
had no problems adopting Roman Catholicism, others devised
alternative strategies to hold on to their culture –disguising
their African deities as “saints”. In the Protestant world,
hymns and later on, preaching became the most important
tools. “Spirituals” surged as a resistance tool before becoming a universal genre.
Lodges were formed in the Caribbean and “Cofradías” in Latin America as institutions
of solidarity to help the needy and for the betterment of the Afro descendant community.

6.4. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

There are many individual contributions made by Afro descendants to the development
of science and technology in the Americas. Afro descendants like Garrett A. Morgan,
who invented street lights, Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist whose laser based
method for removing cataracts transformed eye surgery, or Charles Drew, who was
instrumental in developing blood plasma processing, storage and transfusion therapy.
Yet the most important contributionswere made indirectly by the enslaved populations,
since the surplus produced from their work allowed Europe and the United States to
advance economically through specialization. Despite the advances of the industrial
revolution, it is difficult to imagine the spectacular developments of the modern world
that have occurred in such a short time without the exploitation of Africans.

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6.5. THE CONSTRUCTION AND PERPETUATION OF RACIAL THEORIES
Racism can be defined as a process of suppression of the human being, based
on socially selected phenotypical traits. This system classifies people according
to their external physical characteristics and establishes a hierarchy of groups.
In the long run, one of those groups defined as the superior race and the others
are placed in inferior positions on the scale. Racism, therefore, is not a product of
ignorance, the result of fear or concern over the ‘other’ or a natural phenomenon.
In the America, in many instances, black women breastfed and took care of many
white children, which did not prevent some of them from becoming convinced
racists.
The criteria used are phenotypical and, therefore, transmitted from one generation
to another by means of genes. A person of oriental race cannot engender a blond
boy with a black person unless there is a White ancestor in the family. But although
these elements are biological, they are historically selected –the features are
genetically transferable (for example, the form of the hair) but the appropriate
markers of a race are socially defined.

Historically doctrinarian racism arose in the context of the conquest and colonization
of the world by the European colonial powers from the sixteenth century as a
means to rationalize the process with a pseudo scientific aura. After Columbus’s
arrival in the Americas in 1492 and the subsequent conquests, imperial authorities
were searching for a legal basis to justify colonialism. Earlier exploration of the
African coast on the part of Portugal was sanctioned by Pope Nicholas V (1447-
1455), who authorized perpetual slavery for Africans (Hart 1984: 19). Fray Juan
Ginés de Sepúlveda, a Spanish historian and clergyman, provided what he termed
“los justos títulos”, that is, “fair titles”. Under this conception, Spain had the right
and Christian obligation to “take care of the natives”, and this implied servitude
and slavery of the native populations and the absolute dominance of the Spanish
(Pozoblanco, España, h. 1490-id., 1573).

European intellectuals weighed in. Voltaire (1694-1778) considered the Black race
an inferior species of man. Linneo, (1758), established the rationale of doctrinarian
racism in his book Systema Naturae, classifying humanity in four groups, and
attributing to each a distinct psyche. Comte Buffon (1774) argued that the original
color of human beings is white but degenerated as people came into contact with
the tropics, losing some of their mental abilities and turning Black. Social Darwinism,
attributed to Hubert Spencer (1820-1903) and building on the ideas of Gobineau,
alleged that the fight between the white race and the others was unavoidable, since
Whites are Christian, civilized, and had superior intellectual capacity, while other
races were barbarous, and suffered from a chronic and incurable childishness.
Religion was used to sustain these racist doctrines. A mission inspector in 1859

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 commented that the Bushman of Papua had the “characteristics of a primitive,
distorted man, the very materialization of sin” (Luepke, 1978).

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the colonial powers created a caste system to
legalize the exploitation of people of African descent and others, giving limited social
mobility that was based on the idea of “whitening” the family through successive
racial mixing. Six generations of constant intermarriage with White persons were
needed to “bleach out” the African. As a result the caste system was full of different
groups of people “that were not White but aspired to be, or were on the way to
achieve such a goal” (Friedemann 1993: 64).
The Nation States in Latin America were founded on very contradictory terms –Blacks
fought for the abolishment of slavery and personal freedom. Whites and mestizo
struggled for economic and political liberty. Initially for the elites, independence
was tied up with the idea of a cohesive and strong national state. This dream took
into account ethno-racial diversity, as laid out by Simon Bolívar at the Angostura
Conference. But racist ideologies impeded the realization of his dreams. As José de
San Martín observed while trying to consolidate Argentine liberation, “it would be a
chimera to believe that by some inconceivable disruption the route would be paved
to allow the master to take position in the same line with his slave” (Anglarill, 1994).
In spite of all of this, liberty was decreed for the enslaved population in the first years
after independence in the majority of the Latin American states.

In Latin America, social Darwinism can be summed up into three basic concepts:
europhilia, ethnophobia and endophobia. Europhilia is European identity and culture,
self assumed by the local Mestizo population, who defined themselves as White. This
paved the way for extermination wars against the indigenous populations and the
exclusion of Afro descendants. Juan Bautista Alberdi, one of the main theorists on the
building of the National States invented the phrase “to govern is to populate,” but the
“population” that he had in mind had to come from the most developed European
countries to fulfill their role as civilizing agents. “To people a country is to civilize it
provided that it is being populated by civilized people, that is, people from the civilized
portion of Europe.” (Alberdi, J. B. “Las bases y puntos de partida para la organización
política de la República Argentina”. La cultura Argentina, Buenos Aires, 1928. Cited
by Graciela Sapriza).

The term ethnophobia applies to the attitude of the Latin American elites, which,
endeavoring to put into oblivion all traces of the caste system, and fully subscribing
to the social Darwinist doctrine, came to consider ethnicity as a menace to national
unity, a position from which they derived a real phobia and fear of diversity. All non
European groups were considered barbarians. Juan Bautista Alberdi, argued a
dichotomy between “the savage Indian and the (civilized) European (..) those of us
born in America and Spanish speaking (…) who believe in Jesus Christ” (Anglarill,
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1994). Another intellectual, Carlos Bunge, alleged at the beginning of the twentieth
century that Africans had a lower thinking and working capacity than Europeans
(Anglarill, 1994). Equally derogative were the comments of the socialist psychiatrist,
José Ingenieros, for whom “Men of color should not be considered (…) persons in
the judicial meaning of the word” (“Las razas inferiores”, 1906).

The third concept, “endophobia,” is self rejection of one’s own group or person. In
some cases, this rejection becomes open self hatred. Carlos Octavio Bunge, speaking
of the psychic composition of the Latin American population, has claimed that “We
get arrogance (…) from the Spanish (…) fatalism and ferocity from the Indians
(…) serviliity and malleability from the Blacks,” but since all three races had come
together he observed “certain psychological disharmony, relative sterility and lack
of moral sense” in the Hispanic Mestizo (Nuestra America, Cited by Devés Valdez,
2000:71).

Some Latin American societies tried to hide doctrinarian racism and racial
discrimination under the myth of an egalitarian and non racial democracy, and
consistently denied racial conflict – a trend that only began to change in the face of
the Durban conference on racism (2001). In the United States, doctrinarian racism
developed into a form known as the “Jim Crow” system. All Blacks were considered
“niggers”. Emphasis was on the absolute superiority of the White man, with strong
racial stigmas claiming intellectual underdevelopment of the Black population. Racial
mixing was prohibited, and public areas were segregated. The access and use of
hospitals, schools, churches, barber shops, libraries, prisons and other facilities were
segregated. In 1930, the city of Birmingham prohibited interracial sports, and Georgia
established separate parks for Whites and Blacks in the 1930s.

In response, in the 1920s and 1930s Jamaican born Marcus Garvey founded the
United Negro Improvement Association, a truly international organization that
mobilized hundreds of thousands of Afro descendants throughout the West. In Europe,
during the 1920s and 1930s, a notable group of African and Afro descendants led the
struggle for the independence of African and Caribbean Nations. Leopold Senghor
from Senegal, Aimeé Césaire from Martinique and León Damas from Guayana. They
created the “Negritude” movement. Trinitarian Henry Sylvester Williams, convened
the first Pan African Congress in London –the final declaration was written by W.
E.B. Dubois and entitled “Message to the Nations of the World”. The Civil Rights
movement in the Americas emerged in the second half of the 1950s by Rosa Parks
and conducted by outstanding Afro descendant leaders like Martin Luther King,
Malcolm X, Ángela Davis and Stokley Carmichael (1966) and others, demolished the
Jim Crow system. Many of these leaders paid for their efforts to liberate the Black
man with banishment or their lives.

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 6.6. SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL LEGACIES
At present, unfortunately, all forms of racism continue. The practice of racism is
often a residual type. Residual racism is present in a situation in which there is
no strict stratification on ethno-racial premises, but the concepts that came to
being during a period of doctrinarian racism are still used. Residual racism today
manifests itself in the form of exclusion from power and political participation,
invisibility in history, exclusion from censuses and textbooks, and is found in
stigmas, extreme poverty and territorial aggression.

The above leads to the suppression of personal identity (racial psycocide).

Invisibility has a direct impact on the Children. There is no reference to the heroes
and distinguished Afro descendants in textbooks to serve as models for children.
Blacks, it is falsely alleged, have made no contributions to the development of
civilization. The victim has no history. And for that reason, there is no place for him
or her in text books.

Because of bias, these ideas become counter values that are repeated daily, told
and explained to children in every possible way, so as to convince them that the
only way out is through “Whitening”. Similar stigmas are commonly used in the
press. When reporting relevant positive news about a Black or Amerindian person,
the tendency is to suppress references to ethnicity; on the contrary, when there
is crime or related delinquencies the person’s phenotypical group or ethnicity is
highlighted.
Equally destructive is the negative image that is created and applied to people
from the said marginalized regions. Terms aimed at causing racial “psycocide”
such as “from the coast” or “from the jungle”, are associated with laziness, drug
addiction, crime, and “dangerous” areas. When a crime is committed in the area,
the specific town or community is not mentioned, but rather attributed to the
whole region or group. Nature itself is stigmatized as “unhealthy” “inhospitable”,
with hostile and carnivorous animals, insects and wild hypnotic plants. Another
dimension of the problem is displacement of diverse groups from their ancestral
territories. Owing to armed conflict, the development of economic projects is often
not possible and what development that does take place is not in the interest of
the local populations.

At present, local and regional groups are actively struggling for Human Rights in
many regions. Writers are producing textbooks and editing videos to combat racism
in all forms. Inclusion is been proposed to confront exclusion, visibility to handle
isolation, equity and non biased programs to deal with detrimental stereotypes.
The struggle is to move on beyond tolerance toward respect, and to escalate
from respect to appreciation of the other. The final goal is to achieve a more just,
inclusive, diverse and egalitarian society.
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 7. HISTORICAL SLAVERY AND MODERN
FORMS OF SERVITUDE
It has always been difficult to define slavery. If only because of the ambiguity often
used in a pejorative fashion to designate abuses of every kind. Besides slavery
as such, people often speak of “slave wages” or “sexual slavery”. The distinction
between “slavery” in the literal sense and the metaphorical uses of the term has
become easily blurred to an extent where it has become difficult to apprehend
the reality of slavery as such and therefore to combat it. Once a particular term
encompasses so many different meanings, it is always difficult to say where
slavery begins or ends.
Traditional forms of slavery in the proper sense, namely that of the transatlantic
black slave trade can be defined from a legal or a sociological standpoint. In
general, legal specialists focus on the notion of ownership and its related rights.
In contrast, sociologists endeavour to define the slave in relation to society by
emphasizing his marginality or his status of “outcast”. In a famous expression,
Orlando Patterson compared slavery to a sort of “social death”. Another sociologist,
Kevin Bales, speaks of “disposable people” with regard to the victims of modern
slavery. In both cases, the emphasis is on marginalization which makes up the very
essence of slavery.

7.1. INTERNATIONAL INSTRUMENTS PROHIBITING SLAVERY

Over the last two centuries, slavery has been denounced
in many ways and the number of people subjected to any
form of servitude reducing them to the status of human
livestock (as in the days of human trafficking) has fallen
to a historically low level, well below that of the estimates
of 1800. Slavery is now condemned by international law.
The various processes entered into in Europe and in North
America at the end of 18th century to arrive at such a ban
enabled the adoption of several international conventions.
Two of these instruments are of particular importance. The first is the Convention
relating to slavery adopted by the League of Nations in 1926. The text defines
slavery in legal terms as “the state or condition of an individual on which are
exerted the attributes of the right of ownership or some of those rights” and asserts
the obligation binding the contracting parties to “pursue the complete suppression
of slavery in all its forms, gradually and as soon as possible”.
It was the rather vague nature of this commitment that led the United Nations
in 1956 to adopt a supplementary convention which added servitude for debt,
serfdom, the marriage of a woman without her consent and the assignment of
children for purposes of exploitation to the list of slavery institutions and practices.

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 Thanks to this new definition, it is possible to focus on slavery in relation to a whole
series of violations of human rights that are more or less similar and establish
regional and global provisions of intervention for combating slavery that pertains
still today.

7.2. SLAVERY TODAY

The legal abolition of
slavery should be seen
as an indispensable
preliminary step towards
bringing to an end slavery
“in all forms” rather than
as some sort of definitive
right. Two points deserve
to be underlined in this
regard. First of all, even
if legal abolition has
contributed to improving
the living conditions of former slaves, it does not necessarily correspond to full
emancipation of the persons concerned. The consequences of slavery continue
to prevent former slaves and their descendants from benefiting from equality of
opportunity and remuneration corresponding to their efforts and their capacities.
Secondly, abolition has not prevented slavery and other forms of abuse from
continuing on a more or less wide scale, with as aggravating factors the corruption
of public authorities, global inequalities and dire poverty, commercial interests,
even modern means of transport and communication and the globalization which
they have made possible. Forced labour, often linked to excessive debt and child
labour are still common currency in some countries. At the international level, the
unprecedented scale of population movements can conceal the illicit trafficking
of human beings for sexual or other purposes and the abusive exploitation of
people reduced to domestic servitude. Consequently, slavery is far from having
disappeared.

On account of the illegal nature of slavery, it is difficult to calculate how many

people today continue to live in servitude. Nevertheless, the estimates available
on a world and regional scale point to several million people, that is to say figures
that are comparable to those concerning the transatlantic black slave trade. In
2004, for example, Bales estimated that 27 million people in the world continued
to live in slavery; even if cases have been recorded almost everywhere (including

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in the United States), the vast majority of people concerned live in southern
Asia. In 2005, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated the number
of victims of forced labour in the world to be 12.3 million. Almost 10 million of
them were the victims of private operators, including traffickers in human beings,
the others working under the iron rule of government or dissident military. Once
again, the phenomenon essentially concerns Asia, but there is evidence of cases in
industrialized countries that are by no means negligible in numbers. Consequently,
slavery continues to be a planetary problem: it is a harsh reality in some regions of
the world where various forms of slavery and servitude of human beings belong to
an age-old tradition or are a manifestation of recent history.

7.3. SIMILITUDES AND CONTINUITY

There are a number of common points and obvious continuity between the slavery
of the past and that of the present. As was often the case in the past, modern
slavery is not confined to skin colour. The exploitation of child labour continues
to flourish. Excessive debt and the subservience of debtors were and continue
to be major aspects in Africa and around the Indian Ocean. While many slaves
served in the past as concubines, sexual exploitation of women and children is
still a significant aspect of slavery. At present, as in the past, human trafficking
is first and foremost a trade. It brings into play enormous financial interests, at
times with the complicity of governments; that is the reason why slavery, even
illegal, continues to be an institution that is as solid and as capable of adapting to
all circumstances.
Scarcely more than two centuries after the major victorious revolt of the slaves
of Santo Domingo/Haiti and the early endeavours of the abolitionist movement in
Europe and North America, the task of anti-slavery activists is by no means over.

6/$9(65287(6$*/2%$/9,6,21 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
 page I Professor Rex NETTLEFORD, (1933- 2010)
 Page 6 Slave Ship Fredensborg II, 1788 © Virginia Foundation for
Humanities
 page 8 Slave Route Map, © Joseph E. Harris/UNESCO, 2006
 page 10 (1) Captive, © UNESCO/The Slave Route
 page 11 (1) Razzia and capture inland, © Schomburg Centre for Research
in Black Culture, New York (2) Caravan of slaves in Africa (Frey),
© UNESCO/ The Slave Route
 page 12 (1) Caravan of captives in Africa : anon. 18th cent.,
(2) Punishment © UNESCO/ The Slave Route,
 page 13 Down in the hold (painting of M. Regundas, 1835)
 page 14 (1) A group of newly arrived slaves, © UNESCO/ The Slave Route
(2) Patel, Saturday. Market’s Day (Haiti)
 page 15 Slaves market in the US, by Gustave Doré, from Deville,
© UNESCO/ The Slave Route
 page 16 (1) Gambia Negroes to be sold (2) A slave gang in Zanzibar”,
sketch by Mr. W. A. Churchill (3) East Africa Slavery was a widely
used form of labor in Africa
 page 17 Slaves in transit, © UNESCO/The Slave Route
 page 18 Zanzibar, Slaves Market, © UNESCO/The Slave Route
 page 19 Slaves Caravan, © UNESCO/The Slave Route
 page 23 Uprising aboard, © UNESCO/The Slave Route
 page 24 (1) Freed Negros hunting maroon negroes, Italian drawing 1825,
(2) Hunted slaves, by R. Ansdell
 page 25 Leonard Parkinson, Maroon Leader, Jamaica, ©Schomburg
Centre for Research in Black Culture, New York
 page 26 Le marronnage, © UNESCO/ The Slave Route
 page 27 An African Kilombo, © UNESCO/ The Slave Route
 page 29 (1) T. Clarkson and Wilberforce (2) Abbé Grégoire
(3) Victor Schœlcher
 Page 30 (1) La guerre à Saint-Domingue (2) Toussaint Louverture,
© UNESCO/The Slave Route
 page 31 Christophe, incendiaire de la ville du Cap, 1802 et Dessaline,
1804, © UNESCO/ The Slave Route
 page 33 Cartoon, ‘The gradual abolition of the slave trade, or leaving off
sugar by Degrees’
 page 34 Decree of abolition of Slavery in France (Convention nationale,
Séance du 16 pluviôse an II (4 février 1794) © Bibliothèque
Nationale de France (BNF)

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 page 35 Arrival of Indian Coolies in Guadeloupe, © UNESCO/ The Slave
Route
 page 36 (1) Frederick Douglass (2) Harriet Tubman en 1880, ©Marc
Ferrez P&P/ Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture,
New York (3) Olaudah Equiano or Ottobah Cugoano, late 18th
cent., © Virginia Foundation for Humanities
 page 39 Slaves going to the farms under the direction of the commander
of the plantation, © UNESCO/The Slave Route
 page 43 (1) Toussaint Louverture, © UNESCO/ The Slave Route (2)
Emancipated Slaves, North Carolina, 1863, Cl Virginia Foundation
for Humanities
 page 44 Negroes shack, 1852, © UNESCO/ The Slave Route
 page 45 Incendie du Cap Français, le 23 juin 1793, © UNESCO/ The Slave
Route
 page 46 Insurrection of plantations, Cuba, © UNESCO/ The Slave Route
 page 47 Simon Bolivar (1783-1830)
 page 49 Haïti, Petite rivière de nippe, Little Haitian Girl, ©Katherina-Marie
Pagé
 page 50 The first colored senator and representatives in the 41st and
42nd Congress of the United States, 1872, © Schomburg Centre
for Research in Black Culture, New York
 page 51 Jazz Musicians © Schomburg Centre for Research in Black
Culture, New York
 page 53 (1) Three Kings Day Festival, Havana, Cuba, ca. 1850 , © Virginia
Foundation for Humanities (2) Slave Festival, Surinam, 1839,
© Virginia Foundation for Humanities (3) The Samba de Roda of
the Recôncavo of Bahia,© Luiz Santos/ UNESCO
 page 54 Lao Simbi (Allegoric Vaudou tradition Picture of André Pierre),
© Danièle Bégot
 page 59 Logo of the UN
 page 60 Campaign against domestic slavery leaflet by Antislavery
International © Antislavery International
 page 61 The Black Maroon, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1970, © Virginia
Foundation for Humanities

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 CLT/CPD/DIA/2010/153
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 6/$9(5287(6
$*/2%$/9,6,21

Contributors to the drafting of this booklet:

> Quince DUNCAN
> Michel HECTOR
> Paul LOVEJOY
> Rex NETTLEFORD

©UNESCO All rights reserved • Graphic design and typesetting: Anne-Sophie Breyne-Fürst asbreyne@wanadoo.fr
> Joël QUIRK
> David RICHARDSON
> Nelly SCHMIDT

Published in 2010 by the United Nations Educational,

Scientific and Cultural Organization
7, place de Fontenoy, 75352 Paris 07 SP, France

COORDINATION AND CONTACT:

The Slave Route Project
Division of Cultural Policies and Intercultural Dialogue
UNESCO, 1, rue Miollis, 75732 Paris Cedex 15- France
Tel: (33) 1 45 68 49 45
www.unesco.org/culture/slaveroute