AFRICAN HISTORY: SLAVE TRADE.

AFRICAN HISTORY: SLAVE TRADE.

As I looked at this picture about the fate of African slaves on their journey to America, I recalled when I visited a place called Fort Jesus in the Indian Ocean coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya a few years ago.

The castle-like building overlooks the cities old port on the Indian Ocean. It is also the place where East African slaves, after being selected and purchased at the Mombasa main market, were brought to the fort as they awaited to be shipped abroad.

This building and the old town were fought for by the British, the Portuguese and Oman whom each wanted to control the strategic spot.

Observing the accommodation areas for the slaves, I could literally feel their pain and anguish. Theirs were caves that had been fitted with huge, already-made metal doors shipped directly from England. The sign "East Indian Company" and the year of manufacture engraved on them and still visible today. 

I stood their in total silence looking at the wet rugged floor that the naked slaves slept on. The heavy painful shackles that were attached to their hands, necks and feet still lay there. As well as the chains that detained them from moving a metre away from the rough humid wall. All rusty but still there. I could suddenly feel them alive in this place. As if I was standing amongst them. I began to realize that had I lived in those times and in that area, I probably would have faced the same predicament. 

I suddenly felt one tear rolling down my face. I looked around. I was the only black tourist. I wondered what the whites were thinking.

Some looked uncomfortable. Others seemed quite detached from the pain that screamed from these walls. I thought to myself maybe amongst them are people who could do this all over again if they had the chance? I wondered why aren't Africans visiting such places so as to awaken ourselves to a painful reality unilaterally determined by others as our fate. What they made to become our history. And the bitter existence of a black African in the global village.

The picture here is probably the other story of the slaves once they had almost reached their far off destination.

Honoring a people dehumanized and forced to cross the seas as if wild creatures, an underwater sculpture remembering the "African Holocaust" that saw slaves thrown overboard from ships mid-ocean.

This is located off the coast of Grenada. The compelling artwork captures their sad fate, and troubling trauma as they met this tragic end.

 African men and women who were ripped from their continent and history. Sent overseas in a despicably inhuman trade that was planned and executed by people purporting to be superior humans, when actually they were simply lowly European immigrants.