s of the horrors of the trade, changing attitudes towards enslaved people and inspiring others to join the abolition campaign.
Equiano died in March 1797. The Slave Trade in Britain was not to end until nearly a decade later. It would be forty years before slavery itself was abolished in the British Colonies.
Slavery is not a relic from the past. News stories surface consistently of people being sold into slavery by family members or vigilantes. The latest report of modern day slavery comes from the Guardian, who is reporting that African women from Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Kenya and Ethiopia are all saying that they were duped into being part of a modern day slavery ring after being promised lucrative nursing and hotel jobs in other countries.
One of the countries most of these women wound up is Kuwait, where almost 90 percent of households employee at least one foreign maid. The ratio of one domestic worker to every two Kuwaiti citizens is the highest ratio of domestic workers to citizens in the Middle East. The women report that they paid recruitment agents around $1,500 to secure jobs hat they were told were in nursing or in the hotel industry. Upon their arrival to the new country, the women learned that the work was actually as a domestic worker and that they would be expected to workup to 22 hours a day.
One woman, who worked as a nurse in Sierra Leone, reports, “[The agents] took us to their offices and people would come to look at us. If they said ‘I want this person,’ they took you to their house.” Another woman reports being treated like a slave, being forced to work “24 hours [with] no day off,” never being allowed to leave the house and also being prohibited from using a mobile phone.
Kuwait’s kafala sponsorship system makes it extremely difficult for women to escape enslavement as domestic workers once it has begun because the system prevents domestic workers for being able to leave or change jobs without the permission of their employer. Human rights group Human Rights Watch reports that women’s grievances 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.
Read More (Click On image)
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.
Read More (Click On Image)
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.
Read More (Click On Image)
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 a