evances include wages not being paid, taking house servants passports to prevent them from returning home, and abuse on a physical, sexual, and psychological level. The grievances number over 10,000.
Millions of African Americans will soon be able to trace their families through the era of slavery, some to the countries from which their ancestors were snatched, thanks to a new and free online service that is digitizing a huge cache of federal records for the first time.
Handwritten records collecting information on newly freed slaves that were compiled just after the civil war will be available for easy searches through a new website, it was announced on Friday.
The records belong to the Freedmen’s Bureau, an administrative body created by Congress in 1865 to assist slaves in 15 states and the District of Columbia transition into free citizenship.
Before that time, slaves were legally regarded as property in the US and their names were not officially documented. They often appeared only as dash marks – even on their owners’ records.
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An estimated 200,000 Africans were brought to Mexico under slavery, yet Afro-Mexicans remain a marginalized and often forgotten part of Mexico's identity.
The black community there told her they were descendants of Africans shipwrecked off the Pacific coast in 1900.
Afro-Mexicans are also not accounted for in the national census, which does not track race. The World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples provides a sweeping estimate for the Afro-Mexican population: between 474,000 and 4.7 million.
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Former Nigeria President Olusegun Obasanjo has supported an open letter by ex-Jamaica Prime Minister P.J. Patterson denouncing British Prime Minister David Cameron’s failure to apologize for the United Kingdom’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
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Four million Africans were brought to Brazil as slaves but only Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua wrote down his story – in English as a free man in Canada.
Waking after a night’s heavy drinking at the court of a strange king, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua found his companions gone and his hands tied.
It was the start of a nightmarish journey that saw the low-ranking Muslim civil servant from west Africa sold into slavery and shipped to Brazil in the middle of the 19th century.
Years later, a free man living in Canada, he recounted the horrors of his experiences in a dictated memoir – the only autobiographical account of an African-born slave in Brazil.
“I imagine there can be but one place more horrible in all creation than the hold of a slave ship, and that place is where slaveholders and their myrmidons are the most likely to find themselves some day,” he wrote.
Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country in the Americas – for every one European who immigrated to the country, eight Africans were imported as slaves – but until now, no memoir by a Brazilian slave has ever been published in the country.
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