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For more than four centuries, millions of Africans were forcibly captured, commodified, transported and exploited within a global system that underpinned the rise of modern economies. Photo: Rjruiziii

Applause for UN decision to finally name slavery for what it was

The resolution also reaffirms that crimes against humanity are not subject to statutes of limitation. This principle, echoed across legal and moral traditions, reflects a simple…

Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Born out of bondage, Jesse Jackson dies a master of social justice

He fought tooth and nail so that the transatlantic slave trade should not repeat itself anywhere, where our people faced brutal conditions and many lost their lives

The word Azania is used as a symbolic rejection of apartheid and white supremacy. Photo: Oupa Nkosi/M&G

Azania has no link to South Africa; it’s to do with slavery in East Africa

The word Azania is used in this country by political parties and others as a symbolic rejection of apartheid and white supremacy

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US President Donald Trump in 2019. Things have deteriorated since then.

Narcissist – the fallen angel

Making America Great Again is the personification of narcissistic censure to maintain dominance. We need to build solidarity and safety in the face of geno/ecocides, hate and…

Slaves cut cane in the Caribbean. The recently published book, The Black Atlantic’s Triple Burden: Slavery, Colonialism and Reparations explores slavery around the world.

Global Africa’s quest for reparations for crimes against humanity

This excerpt is from the recently published book, The Black Atlantic’s Triple Burden: Slavery, Colonialism and Reparations (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2024)

Inherited traditional food: Maize meal (above) is a staple in Southern Africa. Photo by: Marc Hoberman/Hoberman Collection/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Food, power and identity: A colonial and culinary heritage

Specific foods and recipes are associated with specific countries and also traditions, but as people have moved so have these foods

Retold wrong: An auction of enslaved people in America in the early 19th century. Image: Rischgitz/Getty Images

Friday is a feeling | Call me old-fashioned but human beings are still valuable

AI has set time ticking for humanity

An image depicting cane cutters in Jamaica after formal slavery was ended, mid-19th century. More than half of the slaves in the region were female.

Chasing slavery’s ghosts: The Drax family sugar cane legacy

The Barbados government wants reparation payments from the successors of the plantation’s founderJames Drax, led by Richard Drax, a wealthy British MP

This late 19th century coloured lithograph tells many stories about the relationship between the protagonists, and the time, in which attitudes toward slavery changed for many.

The ‘master’ and the slave: an analysis

Professor Rafael Winkler unravels several philosophies of the age that lie behind an anti-slavery 19th century lithograph

Excavating the role of Africans in the creation of the modern world

Europe would have been a marginal player in world history without the continent’s natural resources and centuries of cheap African labour

Cattle were the main symbol of wealth among Africans: they had multiple uses, as food, labour or in trade. They were also symbolic, connecting families and villages in cultural rites and maintaining the links between the living and the dead.

Land, slavery and cattle matter: To move forward, we need to look back

In a three-part series on South Africa’s land question, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi takes a look at the colonial conquests that drove us here

The protests that have taken place in the United States confront the racialised edifice that built the modern world

Black Lives Matter – turning point at a historic moment

The protests that have taken place in the United States confront the racialised edifice that built the modern world

‘Making Grace Amazing’, by composer Neo Muyanga, uses sound, writing and moving image to peer into the complex history of this hymn

Review: ‘Making Grace Amazing’ — songs of resistance

Neo Muyanga’s ‘Making Grace Amazing’ is one of the online offerings at this year’s National Arts Festival in Makhanda

Frank B. Wilderson III  standing in front of Vista University campus in Soweto, where he was a lecturer. This image is taken from an article written by Wilderson and published by Tribute magazine in 1994. The article exposed links between Vista University and the Broederbond. (Supplied)

Part I: ‘Afropessimism’ and the rituals of anti-black violence

Frank B Wilderson discusses ‘Afropessimism’, his memoir that analyses structural violence

LOUISVILLE, KY – MAY 29: A vandalized statue of Louis XVI stands in downtown as protests dwindle on May 29, 2020 in Louisville, Kentucky. Protests have erupted after recent police-related incidents resulting in the deaths of African-Americans Breonna Taylor in Louisville and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.   Brett Carlsen/Getty Images/AFP

The statue of Louis XVI should remain forever handless

A statue of the French king in Louisville, Kentucky was damaged during the protests against police killings. It should not be repaired

As we grieve George Floyd, we mourn and grieve our children’s innocence as once again we have to explain how this country’s racism has taken yet another black person’s life. (Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
Video

‘Soon he’ll be seen as threatening, not cute’: What it’s like to raise my black son in America

There is no separating George Floyd’s killing from the struggles black people have faced ever since the first slave ships landed on these shores

Life/death/life: Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro includes members of the Vuyani Dance Company and is choreographed by Gregory Maqoma, for whom the repetition in Boléro invokes a sense of a procession . (Delwyn Verasamy & John Hogg)

A requiem for the world’s dead

Gregory Maqoma revives a Zakes Mda character, mixing Ravel’s Boléro with isicathamiya to mourn, to hope, and to celebrate life

Enslaved inhabitants of Kery in Sudan bought by the Turkish. Drawing by Karl Girardet via AFP (1855)

Author of research linking slavery and intelligence resigns

The research concluded that fewer slaves were taken from African countries with a higher average IQ

Rival education powerhouses such as Britain, Australia and Canada are the biggest beneficiaries, a survey by New Oriental China’s biggest private education provider said. (Getty)

Cambridge University investigates its links to slavery

The two-year project will seek ‘appropriate ways to publicly acknowledge past links to slavery and to address its impact’

CNN’s documentary ‘Troubled Waters: Inside the child slavery trade’ is part of its Freedom Project. (Screenshot via YouTube)

How CNN reported on ‘child slaves’ who were not really enslaved

Despite what a recent CNN documentary claims, there is no pervasive child slavery problem in Ghana’s Lake Volta region