slave routes - a global vision

Pedagogical booklet to accompany the DVD

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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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��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 .......................................................................71.2 Slave routes ...................................................................................71.3 The preference for African slaves ..................................................101.4 The transatlantic slave trade and its effect on African development ................................................................111.5 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 ...........152.2 Philosophical problems with the slave trade and slavery ...............162.3 The internal African slave trade .....................................................162.4 The international African Slave Trade before

Transatlantic Slavery ....................................................................172.5 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 233.1 Resistance ....................................................................................233.2 Revolts .........................................................................................243.3 Escape .........................................................................................25

4. ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENTS 294.1 The slaves of Santo Domingo impose abolition .............................304.2 The influence of the Haitian Revolution .........................................314.3 Federal action against the Slave Trade ..........................................32

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4.4 Modes of action ............................................................................334.5 Abolitionist decrees ......................................................................344.6 From abolition to liberty ................................................................344.7 Underpaid manual labour ..............................................................354.8 Abolitionist movements in the Americas ........................................354.9 The end of institutionalized slavery in the USA ..............................374.10 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 ........................................................435.2 Long-lasting upheavals in the geography of production ................445.3 Administrative measures of prevention .........................................455.4 The remarkable extension of revolts .............................................465.5 Solidarity with the liberation of South America ..............................47

6. BUILDING ON THE CREATIVITY AND IDENTITY IN POST SLAVERY SOCIETIES 49

6.1 The arts ........................................................................................536.2 Languages ....................................................................................546.3 Religion ........................................................................................546.4 Science and technology ................................................................546.5 The construction and perpetuation of racial theories .....................556.6 Social and psychological legacies .................................................58

7. HISTORICAL SLAVERY AND MODERN FORMS OF SERVITUDE 597.1 International instruments prohibiting slavery .................................597.2 Slavery today ................................................................................607.3 Similitudes and continuity .............................................................61

List of illustrations ........................................................................62

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INTRODUCTION – WHY THIS BOOKLET?

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

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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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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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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.

�� 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, traffi cking 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 traffi c 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 traffi c 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.

�� 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 traffi cking in Africans to new heights.

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Whatever specifi c 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 profi ted in both fi nancial 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 traffi cking, many of whom did not survive the voyage to American slavery, as well as the wider communities from which they came. Slavery and slave traffi cking 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 diffi cult, 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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If Africa was almost certainly a net loser, how much, if anything, did Europeans gain from the Atlantic slave trade? Specifi cally, 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 profi ts and in part because of widening inequalities in global income and wealth distribution. Seen purely in fi nancial terms slavery may not have been the bonanza that Williams imagined. Nor were profi ts from it probably suffi cient 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 fi nance 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 defi ning the modern world. Population wise, Africa made a huge contribution to the Americas. In different moments of history, the fi gures 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 fi gures 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 traffi c 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 traffi c 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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Historically, it is important to recognize that there has been a continuous outward migration of Africans leaving the continent, as refl ected 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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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, n o n e t h e l e s s . The diffi cult part of u n d e r s t a n d i n g 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 defi ned, or not.

�� 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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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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�� Both the trans-Saharan trade in slaves and the Indian Ocean traffi c 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 traffi c 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, defi ned 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 traffi c 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 traffi c 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 signifi cant 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 fi fteenth to the eighteenth century and remained substantial into the nineteenth century.

The most signifi cant increase occurred in the eighteenth century and related to the trans-Atlantic traffi c 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 fi ve 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)

1400

-150

0

1500

-160

0

1600

-170

0

1700

-180

0

1800

-190

0

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%

120%

100%

Century

Perc

ent o

f Tro

tal T

raffi

c in

Ens

lave

d Af

rican

s

Transatlantic

Islamic World

TABLE 3 : DEPARTURES FROM AFRICA(1500-1867)

Coun

try

Sene

gam

bia

Sier

ra L

eone

Win

dwar

d Co

ast

Gold

Coa

st

Bigh

t of B

enin

Bigh

t of B

iafra

Wes

t Cen

tral

Afric

a

Sout

h Ea

st

Afric

a

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

Num

ber

755,

000

388,

700

336,

900

1,20

9,00

0

1,99

9,10

0

1,59

4,60

0

5,69

4,60

0

542,

600

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 traffi cking and the suppression of slavery which continued until the end of the 19th century.

�� 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 fortifi ed 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.

�� 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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 fortifi ed 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 suffi ciently 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.

��Escaping into the hinterland was one of the most frequent forms of resistance to slavery. This phenomenon developed particularly in the mountainous and forested

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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 fortifi ed confi nement 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, benefi ting 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 fi rst 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 affl uent 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 fl ight 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 effi ciency of maintaining the

slavery regime and the profi tability 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 Réfl exions 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

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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 intensifi ed their guerrilla tactics through pillaging, setting

fi re 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 confl ict 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 fl anks of the La Soufrière volcano. Slavery was re-established on the island in July 1802.

4.2. THE INFLUENCE OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTIONThe 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 infl uence 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 TRADEThe 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 ACTIONEngland, 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 fi ght 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 profi table 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 DECREESThe 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 LIBERTYThe 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 fi lling 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 effi cient 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 LABOURThe fl ows 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 traffi c 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 fl ow 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 AMERICASHowever, 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 fi rst half of the 19th century, the emancipation of slaves occurred within the context of military confl icts. 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 intensifi cation of work in the sugar plantations increased in number during the fi rst 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 fl outed 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 USAThe slavery abolitionist movement in the United States, as in Europe, developed in two phases. The incessant campaigns conducted by the Quakers, confi ned 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 fi rst 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 fi gures, women’s committees and freed Blacks who had fl ed 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 fl ed 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 fl eeing slaves to pursue them in the Northern States where they had found refuge. Harriet Ross Tubman, a slave

born in Maryland, fl ed 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 SLAVERYThe 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 included in the Constitution of Vermont

1829 Abolition of slavery in Mexico

1780 Abolition in Pennsylvania 1831 Last French law banning black slave trade

1783 Abolition in Massachusetts 1833-1838

Abolition of slavery in the British colonies

1784 Abolition in Rhode Island and Connecticut

1846 Abolition of slavery in Tunisia

1793 Abolition of slavery in Santo Domingo after the slave rebellion launched in August 1791

1847 Abolition of slavery in the Swedish colony of Saint Barthélemy

1802 Re-establishment of slavery in the French colonies

1848 Abolition of slavery in the French and Danish colonies

1803 Banning of black slave trade by Denmark

185118531854

Abolition of slavery in ColombiaAbolition of slavery in ArgentinaAbolition of slavery in Venezuela

1807 Banning of black slave trade by Great Britain

18551863

Abolition of slavery in PeruAbolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies

1808 Banning of black slave trade by the United States

1863-1865

Abolition of slavery in the United States

1814 Banning of black slave trade by the Netherlands

18701873

Moret Abolition Act passed in SpainAbolition of slavery in Puerto Rico

1815 European powers meeting at the Congress of Vienna undertook to ban the black slave trade

18761880-1886

Abolition of slavery in BrazilAbolition of slavery in MadagascarAbolition of slavery in Zanzibar

1822 Abolition of slavery in Santo Domingo

1909

1910

The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society founded in 1839 became Anti-Slavery International Abolition of slavery in China

1823 Abolition of slavery in Chile 1919

1920

Creation of the International Labour OrganizationAbolition of slavery in Somalia

1826 Abolition of slavery in Bolivia

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1923

1924

Abolition of slavery in Ethiopia and AfghanistanTheoretical abolition of slavery in SudanAbolition 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

1928

League of Nations Convention on SlaveryAbolition of slavery in NepalAbolition of slavery in Iran

1980 Abolition of slavery in Mauritania (after the abolitions in 1905 and 1961). Reduction to slavery considered a “crime” by Mauritania in 2007

1930

1936

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

1992 Abolition of slavery in Pakistan

1949

1952

UN Convention for the repression of the trade in human beings and the exploitation of prostitutionAbolition of slavery in Qatar

2000

2003

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits slavery, forced labour, and traffi c in human beingsBanning of slavery in Niger

1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery

2004 UN and UNESCO: International Year to commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition

1957 ILO Convention on the abolition of forced labour

2008 Banning of forced labour in Nepal

1962

1963

1970

Abolition of slavery in Yemen and Saudi ArabiaAbolition of slavery in the United Arab EmiratesAbolition 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 fi rst of these concerns the substantial modifi cations 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 signifi cant 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 infl uence 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 MOVEMENTSDuring 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 diffi cult 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 PREVENTIONThe 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 infl uence 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 offi cial circuits. Furthermore, the migratory fl ows 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 REVOLTSIn 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 fi rst 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 confi rmation 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 fi ght 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 fi eld 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 fi gure 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 AMERICAAfter 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 fi nd 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 fi rst 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 defi nition, 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 fl eeing 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 fl eeing 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 profi t.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 “fi ndings” 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 stratifi ed 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 fi t to rule or fi t 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 crucifi ed 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 defi ant 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 diffi culty 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 fi eld 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 signifi cance 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 signifi cance 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 ARTSWhether in the form of fi ction or nonfi ction, Afro descendants have made important contributions in the Americas. Oral tradition, in the form of fi ction, 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 fi eld 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. LANGUAGESDerivates 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 fi eld studies that identify a number of African words in Puerto Rican Spanish. Also, some 500 Yoruba words were identifi ed 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. RELIGIONIn the fi eld 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 TECHNOLOGYThere 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 diffi cult 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 THEORIESRacism 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 LEGACIESAt 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 SERVITUDEIt has always been diffi cult to defi ne 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 diffi cult 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 diffi cult 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 defi ned 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 defi ne 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 SLAVERYOver 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 traffi cking) 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 fi rst is the Convention relating to slavery adopted by the League of Nations in 1926. The text defi nes 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 defi nition, 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 TODAYThe 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 defi nitive 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 benefi ting 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 traffi cking 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 diffi cult 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 fi gures 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 traffi ckers 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 CONTINUITYThere 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 confi ned to skin colour. The exploitation of child labour continues to fl ourish. 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 signifi cant aspect of slavery. At present, as in the past, human traffi cking is fi rst and foremost a trade. It brings into play enormous fi nancial 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.

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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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Contributors to the drafting of this booklet:

> Quince DUNCAN

> Michel HECTOR

> Paul LOVEJOY

> Rex NETTLEFORD

> Joël QUIRK

> David RICHARDSON

> Nelly SCHMIDT

Published in 2010 by the United Nations Educational, Scientifi c 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 DialogueUNESCO, 1, rue Miollis, 75732 Paris Cedex 15- France

Tel: (33) 1 45 68 49 45 www.unesco.org/culture/slaveroute

mailto:[email protected]



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slave routes - a global vision

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