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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