by Samuel Cotton

Prologue

African Americans have contended for decades with a rage born of remembrance--a resentment fomented by poignant images of black Africans captured, bound, and sent into the horrors of slavery. Some have been driven to travel to the continent of Africa, and stand on the shores of West Africa to view the actual places where the degradation of a race began. At these places, the grandchildren of ancient slaves--survivors of a holocaust--wrestle with a terrible mixture of emotions. The passions produced by t he realization that the forts before them housed their African ancestors in their last days of freedom before a long voyage delivered them into the hands of cruel masters. The white hot anger that rises slowly in African Americans as they recall these events and the epithets that dance in the heads of these observers of the past, sometimes escapes their lips as curses and bitter mutterings. Occasionally, African Americans simply fulminate. These bitter expressions of resentment and grief have only be en cooled and soothed by a belief that African Americans hold. The comforting assurance that the buying and selling of black African slaves ended in the distant past. Such a belief is a myth.

It has become clear that the enslavement of black Africans did not stop with the demise of the Atlantic Slave Trade. That on this very day and hour, as you read this, black Africans are bought and sold in two North African countries. In the Islamic R epublic of Mauritania, black Africans continue to be enslaved by their Arab-Berber masters. Although slavery was declared abolished three times since Mauritania's independence in 1960, it persists. Slaves are given as wedding gifts, traded for camels, g uns or trucks, and inherited. The children of slaves belong to the master and slaves who displease their masters or attempt escapes are tortured in the most brutal manner imaginable.

In Sudan, Africa's largest country, the Islamic Republic of the Sudan, as a result of an Islamic-vs.-Christian civil war, black women and children (mostly Christian) are captured in raids on their villages and sold as chattel slaves, sometimes, according to the UN in "modern-day slave markets."

The Mauritanian Embassy and the Sudanese Mission were contacted several times for comment—they did not return the calls.

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