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Mail & Guardian

Slavery

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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
APARTHEID

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…

  • Anthony Ohemeng-Boamah
3 min read
Reverend Jesse Jackson.
BLACK PRESIDENT OF AMERICA

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

  • Sello Shai-Morule
3 min read
The word Azania is used as a symbolic rejection of apartheid and white supremacy. Photo: Oupa Nkosi/M&G
AZANIA

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

  • Kenneth Mokgatlhe
4 min read
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US President Donald Trump in 2019. Things have deteriorated since then.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU

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…

  • Nadira Omarjee
5 min read
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.
BLACK LIVES MATTER GLOBAL NETWORK

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)

  • Adekeye Adebajo
8 min read
Inherited traditional food: Maize meal (above) is a staple in Southern Africa. Photo by: Marc Hoberman/Hoberman Collection/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
COLONIAL

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

  • Vashna Jagarnath
6 min read
Retold wrong: An auction of enslaved people in America in the early 19th century. Image: Rischgitz/Getty Images
1984

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

AI has set time ticking for humanity

  • Lerato Tshabalala
5 min read
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.
AFRICA

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

  • Howard W French
8 min read
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.
19TH CENTURY

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

  • Rafael Winkler
7 min read
AFRICA

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

  • Anakwa Dwamena
19 min read
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.
APARTHEID

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

  • Tembeka Ngcukaitobi
11 min read
Cycles of history: An Indian family in Natal circa 1888. The indentured labour Indian people were subjected to at the time was a form of slavery, which, together with colonialism, greatly influenced the construction of apartheid. (The Collections Library of the South African parliament)
1994 ELECTIONS

An outsider’s perspective of South Africa’s revolutionary democracy

As Freedom Day approaches, an American reflects on how our history has become his too

  • David Reiersgord
8 min read
12 YEARS A SLAVE

The heavy price of pushing masculinity

In the frantic pursuit of patriarchal ideas of manhood, boys often lose their ability to love — this paves the way for cruelty and violence

  • Andile Zulu
8 min read
The protests that have taken place in the United States confront the racialised edifice that built the modern world
APARTHEID

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

  • Anthony Bogues
16 min read
‘Making Grace Amazing’, by composer Neo Muyanga, uses sound, writing and moving image to peer into the complex history of this hymn
AMAZING GRACE

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

  • Nkgopoleng Moloi
2 min read