African Slavery: The Untold Story

In this Conflicted Conversation, Thomas speaks to former BBC journalist Martin Plaut about his new book Unbroken Chains: A 5,000-Year History of African Enslavement, which tells the whole story of African slavery, a story far older and more global than the one that focuses only on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Martin explains:

• How Africa’s slavery story begins in the Nile Valley around 2900 BC
• Why the trans-Saharan slave routes remain less examined than Atlantic slavery
• What Islam did — and didn’t — change about slavery in practice
• Indian Ocean slavery
• Oman’s slave market in Zanzibar and its caravans that penetrated deep into central Africa
• Indigenous African slavery in Ethiopia and the Sokoto Caliphate
• The role of racial hierarchies and ‘slave blood’ stigma within societies
• Barbary corsairs and European so-called ‘white slavery’
• Contemporary chattel slavery in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Sudan, and Libya
• Why major institutions still prefer commemorating slavery in the past to confronting it in the present

Follow Martin on X: https://x.com/martinplaut

And his personal website: https://martinplaut.com/

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

This episode was produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzy Andrews.

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