The British slave trade abolition bill was given Royal Assent on March 25, 1807. This of course was a remarkable achievement but as we all know, the British effort did not halt the abominable traffic in African bodies.  Indeed, tens of thousands of Africans would be extracted from the villages and towns and hauled across the Atlantic in the years following the termination of the Britishportion of the trade.

By the way, it is not really correct to talk about the African slave trade, or the Negro slave trade. Such talk gives the impression that there was a single trade in Africans and this is at odds with the record which shows that there were three African slave trades:(a) there was the Trans-Atlantic slave trade which brought millions of Africans ( principally from West Central Africa, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and the Gold Coast ) to the so-called New World; b) there was the Indian Ocean slave trade which brought millions of Africans to slave markets in Turkey, Russia, China and India; India still has an African population (the Sedis) and
the same is true of Pakistan, home to the Makranis; and © there was the Trans-Saharan (“Muslim”)slave trade which brought millions of Africans ( “Zanj”) to North Africa and the Middle East from as early as the seventh century; a rebellion of African slaves (“Zanj Rebellion”) rocked the country now called Iraq from 869
to 883:the fighting Zanj left their "plantations", the salt mines of Basra- and were on their way to taking Baghdad when they were overwhelmed by superior fire-power!

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Join us as we explore various aspects of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, an enterprise which ran from the wee days of the sixteenth century until well into the second half of the nineteenth.

Our series will begin on Sunday, March 11 with David Omowale's "The Experience of the Slave Trade and Slavery: Slave Narratives and the Oral History of Grenada, Carriacou, and Petite Martinique". Omowale is a Grenadian writer living in Africa.

Here is a taste of Brother Omo's historical scholarship:

"Ottobah Cugoano was a victim of the slavetrade. He ended up in Grenada. In his treatise, "Thoughts and Sentiments of the Evils of Slavery", he describes those involved in the trade as 'robbers of men, the kidnappers, ensnarers and slaveholders who take away the common rights and privileges of others to support and enrich themseles' and as 'those who make no scruple to deal with human spieces, as with beasts of the earth”......

Sa key tan parlay lut, sa key ba tan de lut!!!!!

© 2007.  Caldwell Taylor