ABSTRACT
Into black African societies which already had slavery of one sort or another there intruded, over the centuries, foreign slave-traders who greatly changed the meaning of the word ‘slave’ for Africans. The abduction of a large part of Africa’s population had such a great effect on the continent that, even though it is now history, something about that large-scale crime needs to be recalled. About 20 million people of African descent live in the West Indies and on the Caribbean mainland, including 5 million in Haiti, the main stronghold of African culture in the New World after Brazil. On 23 March 1807, after a century in which it had played the leading role in the Atlantic slave-trade, Great Britain outlawed slave-trading by an Act of Parliament. The story of the abolition movement and its ultimate success in the ‘Act for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade’ is a heartening one, for in it moral principle triumphs over self-interest.
