The colorblind casting whiplash from Wolf Hall 2015 to 2025 wore off quickly when I considered the court of Henry VIII enacted entirely by men, as the bard liked it!
The facts about black enslavement of other blacks were never unknown; they have just been unpublicized. A key book is Ron Segal's Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, which came out in 2002 with Farrar Straus Giroux. It's a scholarly work, probably less accessible than Plaut's book, which I am keen to read. The author, Segal, is also a liberal former S. African. The Sokoto caliphate is also not unknown. In my own book, written for young adult readers (Five Thousand Years of Slavery, Tundra/PRH), my coauthor and I tell young adult readers about the Sokoto caliphate and how it likely held the same number of slaves as the US did in the mid19th century. It involved Afro-Islamic enslavement of black Christian and pagan African slaves. And, as today in Nigeria, the perpetrators were Fulani raiders. By the way, during the American Civil War, the Muhammad Ali regime in Egypt imported an increased number of black plantation slaves from the Sudan (Nubia) to pick cotton, to make up for the decrease in cotton imports from the US. I would recommend my book, which is available digitally, to schools that want to broaden students' understanding of the universality of slavery. There is also a section on contemporary chattel slavery in Mauritania. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s key essay on black complicity in the slave trade (as your interviewer noted, students were never taught that the slaves that were traded for the transatlantic trade were captured by black slavers up-river) was attacked, but accurate. My point is that the facts have always been out there, and that students should learn them. At the risk of being shamelessly self-promoting, here is a link to my book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/he/Five-Thousand-Years-Slavery-Marjorie/dp/0887769144
Just don't forget that not only blacks were enslaved. All races practiced slavery, largely within their race, but not always.
The colorblind casting whiplash from Wolf Hall 2015 to 2025 wore off quickly when I considered the court of Henry VIII enacted entirely by men, as the bard liked it!
The facts about black enslavement of other blacks were never unknown; they have just been unpublicized. A key book is Ron Segal's Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, which came out in 2002 with Farrar Straus Giroux. It's a scholarly work, probably less accessible than Plaut's book, which I am keen to read. The author, Segal, is also a liberal former S. African. The Sokoto caliphate is also not unknown. In my own book, written for young adult readers (Five Thousand Years of Slavery, Tundra/PRH), my coauthor and I tell young adult readers about the Sokoto caliphate and how it likely held the same number of slaves as the US did in the mid19th century. It involved Afro-Islamic enslavement of black Christian and pagan African slaves. And, as today in Nigeria, the perpetrators were Fulani raiders. By the way, during the American Civil War, the Muhammad Ali regime in Egypt imported an increased number of black plantation slaves from the Sudan (Nubia) to pick cotton, to make up for the decrease in cotton imports from the US. I would recommend my book, which is available digitally, to schools that want to broaden students' understanding of the universality of slavery. There is also a section on contemporary chattel slavery in Mauritania. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s key essay on black complicity in the slave trade (as your interviewer noted, students were never taught that the slaves that were traded for the transatlantic trade were captured by black slavers up-river) was attacked, but accurate. My point is that the facts have always been out there, and that students should learn them. At the risk of being shamelessly self-promoting, here is a link to my book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/he/Five-Thousand-Years-Slavery-Marjorie/dp/0887769144
The colonial debt casts long shadow on the dynamics of dialogue between cultures. You feel it, also in Africa.
https://nomadicmind.substack.com/p/becoming-racist