Joel Quirk & Darshan Vigneswaran - Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage

"When we think about slavery in Africa we commonly think in terms of the distant past, with the most familiar images tending to be maritime slave trading in places such as the Gold Coast, Biafra, Angola, and Zanzibar, together with the horrors of the Middle Passage to the Americas. Over the last decade, the world has woken up to the fact that slavery and human bondage remain very much alive, both in Africa and elsewhere. We now have widespread evidence of human trafficking, wartime enslavement and other forms of bondage throughout Africa. Why have these heinous practices reappeared in an era of independence and autonomy? Was slavery ever truly abolished in Africa? How have the memories and legacies of slavery and its abolition shaped contemporary practices and problems? The essays in this volume draw upon an extensive body of new archival research and extended fieldwork in order to develop a conversation between experts on the history of slavery and abolition and social scientists, adv