SOULFUL by Fatima A Gele

Brief summary The Wretched Africans: A Study of Rabai and Freretown Slave Settlements. This book is about the 19th century slave trade in Eastern and Central Africa. No one in the history of humankind has suffered the indignity, abuse and pain of slavery than the African. Over many centuries, millions of Africans were uprooted from their quaint villages in the interior of the "Dark Continent" and taken into slavery. They were exported to the Americas, Asia, Arabia and a dozen other countries around the globe, to work in plantations, in the pearl industry, and as soldiers and domestic workers. Boys were castrated and made eunuchs and girls were sexually abused and forced into harems. Unfortunately, the African slave narrative - written mostly by Western historians and missionaries - has been contemptibly distorted to portray Europeans as the gallant saviors, the notorious slave traders as swaggering heroes, and the African captives as wretched victims of a horrible but regrettably inevitable human phenomenon of the time. The truth has been loftily garbled or masked and the role of liberated Africans vastly under-represented. The Wretched Africans peels of what is beneath the Arab slave trade, unravels the racism and abuse meted against Africans by European explorers and missionaries, and lays bare the heroism and resilience of the African captives. It memorializes Africans who died in caravan trails, at sea and those who found freedom in slave settlements around the world. It is a must read for historians, researchers, students and the general public wanting to understand the truth about what happened to an estimated eleven million people taken captive from the east coast of Africa to the new world and beyond.