Today, Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology for the role the Holy See played in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries. In the apology, which came as part of his first encyclical (that is, a papal letter sent to the Catholic church), he called the Vatican’s involvement a “wound in Christian memory.”

The Catholic Church played a crucial role in legitimizing the enslavement of Africans. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued Dum Diversas, a papal bull that granted King Afonso V of Portugal the right to subjugate all:

“Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property [...] and to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude”.

In 1455, the same pope issued a new bull – Romanus Pontifex – which even more clearly specified the Portuguese king’s right to invade and take over territories south of Cape Bojador in present-day Western Sahara, and to enslave their non-Christian inhabitants. In Born in Blackness, American journalist Howard W. French writes:

“These papal bulls did more than grant the Portuguese exclusive rights. They signaled to the rest of Christian Europe that the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans was not only accepted but encouraged.”

Previous popes, such as John Paul II during a visit to Cameroon in 1985, have apologized for Christian involvement, but this is the first time a pope has explicitly apologized for the role the papacy itself played.

Further reading:

Books:

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W. French (2021)

Articles:

Pope apologizes to Africans for slavery” by E.J. Dionne Jr. for The New York Times (August 14, 1985)

”Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See’s own role in legitimizing slavery” by Nicole Winfield and Paolo Santalucia for Associated Press (May 25, 2026)

“The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I were sound by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.

Their complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, (which was very different from any I had ever heard) united to confirm me in this belief.”

A little later in the text, the testimony continues:

“When I looked round the ship too and saw a large furnace or copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted.

When I recovered a little, I found some black people about me, who I believed were some of those who brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay; they talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair.”

The author continues:

“Soon after this, the blacks who brought me on board went off and left me abandoned to despair. I now saw myself deprived of all chance of returning to my native country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore.”

But the account does not end there:

“I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything.

I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had never experienced anything of this kind before.”

These words were written by Olaudah Equiano and are among the earliest and most renowned testimonies left by enslaved Africans. They serve as a chilling testament to the horrors endured by the victims.

They offer a glimpse into the brutal violence they faced and the relentless fear that gripped their hearts. Imagine the torment of being torn from your homeland, sold like chattel, with no understanding of why or where you were being taken. Remember his name – we’ll revisit his story later.

The previous part of my series on the transatlantic slave trade dealt with Portugal’s mapping of Africa’s western coast and the beginning of the traffic in human beings. Initially, they employed the brutal process of outright abductions. But over time, their strategy evolved into a form of diplomacy: buying human beings by offering valuables, forging alliances, and making grandiose promises.

While exploring Africa, the Portuguese colonized small islands such as São Tomé and Príncipe, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands. Here, they established plantations where enslaved Africans were forced to work, and some of these plantations, particularly those cultivating sugar, began to generate vast fortunes.

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But in 1492, sailing under the Spanish flag, Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the Caribbean, and with it, the world Europeans would soon begin to call America. The Spaniards were soon followed by the Portuguese, the French, and the British.

The new territories Europeans came upon and conquered created enormous commercial opportunities. Instead of the small islands of the Atlantic or off the African coast, they had found entire new continents to subjugate.

Sugarcane took center stage once again. It was a crop that produced an almost addictive end product, something we modern humans continue to crave. Everyone wanted sugar, but the challenge lay in its cultivation. It was an incredibly demanding crop to grow, and the colonizers soon realized it was virtually impossible to entice free laborers to work on the sugar plantations.

So, just like on the islands off the African coast, the solution became slave labor. Besides, enslaved people could be used to cultivate other crops and to mine the countless minerals and metals that lay hidden beneath the earth.

The Destruction of Indigenous Worlds

Initially, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were the targets of European enslavement. The Spanish introduced the encomienda system, wherein the crown granted select colonizers the authority to extract labor and taxes from the indigenous populations of a specific area. In return, the colonizer pledged to ”protect” the inhabitants and ”civilize” them by imparting Christian teachings.

The system was officially justified as a regulated arrangement of protection, tribute, labor, and Christian instruction. In practice, it became a form of slavery, as many colonizers, once given responsibility for a group of Indigenous people, quickly began subjecting them to grueling labor and meting out brutal punishments for any disobedience.

However, as the 16th century dawned, despite the ongoing enslavement of the native inhabitants, Europeans began to favor importing enslaved people from West and Central Africa.

One of the primary reasons was the decimation of the Native American population. The violence unleashed by the colonizers and the introduction of foreign diseases ravaged the indigenous peoples, leaving death and destruction in their wake.

Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, and other Old World diseases began spreading rapidly after Europeans landed, with catastrophic results. Many millions of indigenous people perished, and entire communities were obliterated. Eventually, there were not enough natives left to enslave. The demand for slaves had surpassed the dwindling native population.

The Church and the Legalization of Conquest

The Catholic Church also played a role. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued Dum Diversas, a papal bull that granted King Afonso V of Portugal the right to subjugate all:

“Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property [...] and to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude”.

In 1455, the same pope issued a new bull – Romanus Pontifex – which even more clearly specified the Portuguese king’s right to invade and take over territories south of Cape Bojador in present-day Western Sahara, and to enslave their non-Christian inhabitants. In Born in Blackness, American journalist Howard W. French writes:

“These papal bulls did more than grant the Portuguese exclusive rights. They signaled to the rest of Christian Europe that the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans was not only accepted but encouraged.”

Why Black Africans Became the Main Targets

Individuals also influenced the shift toward the increased enslavement of Africans. One of them was Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spaniard who set foot in the New World only around ten years after Columbus’s landing.

In 1502, de las Casas arrived on Hispaniola. Like many other Spanish colonizers in the Caribbean, he partook in the rampant abuse of the local population during the conquest of the land. He became an encomendero, responsible for a group of indigenous people. A few years later, he was also ordained a priest.

One of the campaigns he participated in was the Spanish conquest of present-day Cuba. He had heard others condemn the treatment of the natives. Still, the atrocities unfolding before his eyes in Cuba shattered his convictions.

In one of his many writings, quoted in Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolomé de las Casas, 1484-1566, he noted:

“One time, the Indians came out to greet us with food and gifts, came ten leagues from their large village. Then, when we got there, they gave us fish in abundance, bread, food, to the limit of their larder. All of a sudden the devil got into the Christians. Right before my eyes, they put to the sword without provocation or cause more than three thousand souls who sat in front of us, men, women, children. I saw there cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see.”

His account continues:

“There was an official on the island who received an allotment of three hundred Indians. At the end of three months’ time, he had worked to death in the mines two hundred and seventy of them. Thirty survived, a mere tenth. They gave him another three hundred and more, and he killed them, more and he killed them, until he died and the devil took his soul. In three or four months, during my stay there, seven thousand children died of hunger because their parents had been hauled off to work the mines. I saw other things that were equally horrific.”

In the 1510s, Bartolomé de las Casas began advocating for the rights of the Americas’ original inhabitants. He returned home and pleaded passionately before the Spanish crown to end the encomienda system. But one of his proposed solutions for ending the suffering of the indigenous people was to replace them with enslaved Africans.

Through his consequential writings and relentless advocacy, Bartolomé de las Casas wielded significant influence, championing legal changes over five decades that would mitigate the harsh treatment of the indigenous inhabitants. Yet, as he approached his final years, he admitted that the enslavement of Africans was just as cruel and unjust. By this point, however, the machinery of the slave trade had become all too lucrative, an enterprise too profitable to stop.

Historians disagree over the extent of de las Casas’ role in popularizing the enslavement of Africans. After all, the transatlantic slave trade had already begun, so he couldn’t be blamed for that. But it’s fair to say that his early writings were hardly in the Africans’ favor.

Another obvious reason European colonizers began enslaving increasing numbers of Africans was that West and Central Africa were the most convenient and practical sources. This was partly because wars between African kingdoms in these regions created a supply of people to buy, and partly because of simple geography. It was, for example, far more practical for Portuguese human traffickers in Brazil to import enslaved people from present-day Angola – a voyage straight across the ocean – than to try to buy people from, say, the Middle East or Southeast Asia.

In addition, the prolonged contact between Africa, Europe, and Asia – commonly referred to as the “Old World” – had granted Africans a certain resistance to the diseases brought by Europeans. Many West and Central Africans also had greater prior exposure, and in some cases partial inherited protection, against certain tropical diseases, especially malaria.

Yet another reason it became more common to enslave Africans was that Indigenous populations had local family ties and existing loyalties. They had intimate knowledge of the land, which made it easier for them to flee and organize rebellions.

Slave traders deemed it more efficient to uproot individuals from their familiar surroundings and keep them captive in distant lands. Even if enslaved Africans managed to escape from plantations in America, the Atlantic marked an almost insurmountable barrier to returning home.

Europe Joins the Trade

The Church continued to play a central role in the new emerging world order. In 1494, Spain and Portugal concluded a new agreement, the so-called Treaty of Tordesillas, which built on the Treaty of Alcáçovas, which I wrote about in part one.

In the new agreement, the two countries divided the territories they claimed between them. A line was drawn west of the Cape Verde Islands: the Portuguese had claims east of the line, while the Spaniards were granted rights to discoveries west of it. In 1506, the treaty was ratified by Pope Julius II.

For Portugal and Spain, this arrangement seemed like a splendid solution. However, other European nations found it far from satisfactory. Besides, the church’s reform and split into Catholic and Protestant branches in the early 16th century only compounded matters. The emerging Protestant states shrugged off the Pope’s decrees and refused to sit by idly while Spain and Portugal monopolized all discoveries. Even in Catholic France, King Francis I questioned the pope’s authority to divide up the world.

Consequently, the 16th and 17th centuries witnessed a surge of newcomers to the transatlantic slave trade – not just powerhouses like England and France but smaller nations such as the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden.

The mechanisms of the transatlantic slave trade are reflected in its alternative name: the triangular trade. European ships laden with a myriad of goods, including weapons, gunpowder, wine, metals, and clothing, embarked on voyages to West and Central African ports, where they exchanged these commodities for enslaved men, women, and children.

In the ships’ claustrophobic cargo holds, they were kept under monstrous conditions during the long voyage across the Atlantic.

When the ships reached ports in North and South America, the Africans were sold into slavery.

Once the ships were emptied, they were filled with the lucrative cargo of the new world – sugar, tobacco, and rum – before returning home to Europe.

From Capture to the Coast

The suffering of the enslaved began early. Many of the victims were prisoners of war and had already experienced one of the worst things human beings can endure: war. Others had been kidnapped, convicted criminals, social outcasts, or otherwise unwanted, and had therefore already undergone potentially traumatic experiences.

Many captives were taken far inland and forced to march toward European coastal forts. These journeys could stretch for hundreds of miles, cross difficult terrain, and take months to complete. Captives were often chained together and subjected to violence, hunger, and sexual abuse along the way.

Upon reaching the coast, the survivors were sold and branded before being locked into the forts’ dungeons or holding pits, crammed together into dark, suffocating spaces, devoid of light and ventilation, and under merciless tropical heat. Hundreds – sometimes up to a thousand people – could be confined together. Sometimes trapped for months, they waited for the slave ships to appear on the distant horizon.

The Middle Passage

Once aboard the ships, the enslaved were packed tightly together below deck and chained to one another. To maximize profit, each enslaved person was allotted as little space as possible. The exact dimensions varied from ship to ship, but they were generally so small that one had to crouch or lie down to fit.

In his book Africa: A Biography of the Continent, British author John Reader sheds light on the specifics. In 1713, for instance, the Royal Africa Company, a British participant in the slave trade, dictated that each enslaved person would be allowed:

“Five foot in length, eleven inches in breadth, and twenty-three inches in height.”

As Reader correctly notes, most coffins are bigger.

There are countless testimonies describing how barbaric the Atlantic crossing was. One of the most famous comes from Olaudah Equiano, the man whose words opened this article.

According to Equiano’s own account, he was only a child when, in the mid-1700s, he and his sister were kidnapped in what is now Nigeria. The siblings were separated, marched to the coast, and sold into slavery.

Olaudah Equiano is also known as Gustavus Vassa, the slave name given to him by his new owner, though it is not known why that particular name was chosen, given its obvious resemblance to the sixteenth-century Swedish king Gustav Vasa.

What makes Equiano especially remarkable is that, after years in slavery, he had the rare fortune of ending up with an owner who allowed him to purchase his freedom.

He seized the opportunity in 1766. He eventually settled in England, where in 1789 he published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.

It was a testimony of monumental consequence and became a cornerstone of the emerging abolitionist movement. In the book, he describes the Atlantic crossing:

“The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential.

The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.

This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.”

In the book, he also writes about how some enslaved people would rather throw themselves overboard to certain death than stay on the ships.

The fact that large numbers of bodies were cast from the slave ships — some from people who jumped in suicide, others from people who died or were killed for various reasons and were, so to speak, buried at sea — meant that the ships were often followed by sharks feasting on the corpses.

According to other testimonies, the stench of a slave ship could be detected from far away.

Yellow fever, tuberculosis, gastrointestinal disease, intestinal parasites, and dysentery thrived in the ships’ cramped spaces, and the food and water given to the enslaved were so meager that they could barely survive. During unforeseen events such as storms or ships losing their way, entire groups of enslaved people could be thrown overboard so that supplies would last for the crew.

Alexander Falconbridge was a well-known British surgeon who served aboard slave ships on four voyages during the 1780s and who later became a prominent abolitionist. In 1788, he published An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, in which he described what he had witnessed:

“Upon the negroes refusing to take sustenance, I have seen coals of fire, glowing hot, put on a shovel, and placed so near their lips, as to scorch and burn them. And this has been accompanied with threats, of forcing them to swallow the coals, if they any longer persisted in refusing to eat.

These means have generally had the desired effect. I have also been credibly informed, that a certain captain in the slave trade, poured melted lead on such of the negroes as obstinately refused their food.”

He also writes about what the crew subjected the enslaved women to:

“The officers are permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure, and sometimes are guilty of such brutal excesses, as disgrace human nature.”

Later in the text, Falconbridge writes about the consequences of the lack of fresh air in the holds where the enslaved were confined. He explains that some ships were equipped with portholes: openings along the sides that allowed fresh air to flow down to the captives. But he also wrote that storms or rough seas often forced the openings to close. He describes such a scene from one of his travels:

“While they were in this situation, my profession requiring it, I frequently went down among them, till at length their apartments became so extremely hot, as to be only sufferable for a very short time.

But the excessive heat was not the only thing that rendered their situation intolerable. The deck, that is, the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination, to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting.”

Given these testimonies, it is no surprise that mortality rates were high. A common estimate is that between 10 and 20 percent of the enslaved died during the Atlantic crossing.

Many people have seen the illustrations of slave ships showing how tightly the enslaved were packed together. But something that is often overlooked is that they were not “just” forced to live like this during the weeks it took to cross the Atlantic. Often, they could remain confined below deck for months while the ships lingered just off the African coast, waiting to be loaded with additional slaves.

To maximize profit, the ships had to be filled to capacity – traffickers did not want to sail with half-empty vessels – and so the ships might anchor and wait, or slowly move between different slave ports along the African coast, before finally setting sail.

A Life in Slavery

When the ships reached one of America’s ports, the enslaved were washed and prepared for sale again. They often had to endure another agonizing march inland because the sale didn’t always take place near the coast. For those who survived the entire ordeal from Africa to the New World, their reward was a lifetime of servitude.

Once sold, the roles they were forced into were as diverse as they were taxing. They could be forced to work on plantations and in mines, be forced to work as shepherds, fishermen, carpenters, cooks, maids, lumberjacks, and seamen – they had every type of job imaginable.

The threat of violence was constant. Working too slowly or carelessly, attempting to learn to read, practicing one’s original religion, associating with the wrong person, trying to escape – all could be punished with the most horrific methods.

Sexual violence against the enslaved was also frequent, from their capture in Africa to the Atlantic crossing, to their new lives in the Americas.

Slavery and the Engine of Capitalism

For the Western colonial powers in the Americas, slavery was extraordinarily profitable. They gained access to a massive labor force that could be compelled to work exceptionally hard without pay. This labor force also produced infrastructure and goods for trade and export.

In this way, the new states quite literally rose on the shoulders and backs of the enslaved, while in Europe, wealth was built on the profits generated by their labor and suffering.

Among the African parties involved, there were different reasons for selling people to Europeans. For some, it could be a “practical” way of getting rid of convicted criminals or neighboring populations they had historically viewed as enemies. For others, it was an act of desperation to avoid being enslaved themselves. In many cases, it was driven by classic motives such as greed or the desire to expand power and territory.

The endless international demand for Black slaves intensified existing conflicts between African kingdoms and sparked new ones. Some African kingdoms involved in the slave trade declared war on weaker neighbors for the chance to sell their inhabitants, and the firearms Europeans traded in exchange for people became especially destabilizing.

Guns became yet another incentive for African kingdoms to join the slave trade. The slave trade continually generated new conflicts, and those conflicts in turn created even more refugees and prisoners of war who could be sold into slavery.

When discussing the Africans who willingly participated in the trade, one must also mention all those who opposed it. Common forms of resistance included African societies building defensive fortifications and establishing warning systems. In some cases, entire villages were relocated to more inaccessible inland regions. In places such as present-day Congo and Angola, full-scale wars broke out between African and European powers over the issue of slavery.

The enslaved themselves also resisted, of course, by running away, refusing to work, fighting back, or committing suicide, and this resistance could occur at any stage: from the moment they were captured in Africa to after they had been sold into slavery in the Americas.

The Machinery of Racism

The idea of finding the “origin” of racism has long fascinated both historians and anthropologists. Is racism something innate in human beings, a consequence of us being programmed to fear or distrust the unfamiliar? Or is racism something we learn? The question is complicated and depends, not least, on how one defines racism, prejudice, discrimination, and so on.

But one can say with considerable certainty that anti-Black racism and transatlantic slavery are deeply interconnected – the two reinforced and shaped one another. The fact that Black people were enslaved caused them, over time, to be viewed as inferior beings. And the fact that they were viewed as inferior beings made it more legitimate to enslave them.

Black people were regarded as godless heathens and uncivilized barbarians, and in the eyes of Europeans, they therefore became natural targets. Europeans may have held racist ideas about Black people even earlier, but it was during the era of transatlantic slavery that these ideas became entrenched and institutionalized.

A Lucrative Venture

The growing demand for the goods of the New World required European colonizers to seize more land to maintain sufficiently high production levels, which in turn demanded an ever larger labor force and created a near-insatiable appetite for new slaves.

The triangle formed by these transports became a wheel that kept turning in the name of capitalism. This is one of the most distinctive features of the transatlantic slave trade. As noted in part one, slavery was a part of everyday life in many parts of the world at the time, including Africa, but this was a new kind of slave trade – one deeply rooted in the emerging capitalist system’s relentless pursuit of growth and increased profits.

The young states on the other side of the Atlantic became outright slave societies, where slave labor formed a central and foundational part of their economies and social systems.

Some historians argue that the Americas – neither North nor South – could not have been fully colonized without slave labor, or at least that the process would have taken much longer.

Or as historian James Walvin writes in his book Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires.

“Of all the people (Europeans and Africans) who landed in the Americas before 1820, the Atlantic slave ships transported 80 percent. African slaves were the major pioneers of great expanses of the Americas.

The misery and suffering on the slave vessels, first widely exposed in the late eighteenth century, have haunted the public imagination ever since. Yet, despite the slave ships’ fearsome death rate, and despite the damage they inflicted on the survivors, the Atlantic slave trade laid the foundations for an astonishing commercial success.

The survivors of the Atlantic crossing, in the words of David Brion Davis, ‘became indispensable in creating the prosperous New World that by the mid-nineteenth century began attracting millions of voluntary European immigrants’. African slaves were the foundations on which later societies were built.”

Exactly how large a role slavery played in the rise of the new nations is still hotly debated.

The numbers are difficult to establish with certainty, but a common estimate is that 12.5 million Africans were enslaved between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of the transatlantic trade. Up to two million of them died during the Atlantic crossing, while millions more were killed when they were captured in Africa or marched toward the Europeans’ coastal forts.

Beyond the U.S.

Of those 12.5 million people, fewer than 400,000 were imported into the United States, which is notable because slavery in the American South has, for many, become the defining image of the entire period.

In reality, Brazil was by far the primary destination for enslaved Africans, with nearly five million imported slaves, mainly from present-day Angola and Congo. The Caribbean ranked second, with present-day Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and Barbados among its major destinations.

Not One Slavery, but Many

Although slave imports to the United States accounted for less than four percent of the total transatlantic trade, American slavery distinguished itself in several ways. Unlike the islands of the Caribbean, arable land seemed endless, and sugar did not dominate the economy. The existence of more varied and, by comparison with sugar production, less physically demanding forms of labor created space for different kinds of social relations among the enslaved.

These were some of the factors that caused the enslaved population in the United States to reproduce at a higher rate than in many other countries. Since children born to enslaved women also became slaves, owners could multiply their investment, meaning they had no incentive to discourage population growth.

Natural population growth was also reinforced by sexual coercion, forced relationships, and slave owners’ direct interest in ensuring that more children were born into slavery.

Over time, slavery in the American South developed into a strange and deeply unsettling intimacy. Slave owners claimed they were doing the enslaved a favor by “saving” them from barbaric Africa and giving them a “tough but fair” existence in the West.

Black people were viewed as undeveloped children in need of guidance from a strict patriarchal authority, hence the use of the term “boy” for Black men. Slave labor itself was partly portrayed as repayment for having been lifted out of Africa and welcomed into the Christian fold.

In some circles, this cultural feature has been used to portray American slavery as more “benign” than other forms of slavery, which is bizarre considering that this infantilization was rooted in the idea of Black Africans as an inferior race.

Whether slave owners genuinely believed they were doing enslaved people a favor, or whether they understood deep down that it was merely an excuse, is naturally difficult to determine. But a common counterargument is that they were attempting to disguise the selfish exploitation of other human beings as something noble and self-sacrificing – a Christian act.

This tradition did, however, mean that enslaved people in the American South were more often treated as long-term investments, unlike in places such as the Caribbean, where they were more commonly viewed as disposable labor or expendable goods. By the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, there were four million slaves in the United States.

The United States may have accounted for only a small share of total transatlantic imports, but it developed its own domestic slave trade. States considered to have a “surplus” of slaves sent enslaved people to states that needed more labor – something that regularly tore families apart.

With the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s, it became easier to separate cotton fibers from seeds, and cotton cultivation became vastly more profitable. This led to an enormous expansion of American slavery, since it was enslaved people who were expected to pick the cotton.

Even after the United States had long ceased to depend on the transatlantic importation of enslaved people, it could instead rely on its own domestic slave market. As cotton exports grew at a staggering pace, the scale of slavery expanded alongside them, continuing right up until the outbreak of the American Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century.

In the acclaimed and controversial book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, the American historian Edward E. Baptist writes:

“From 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased fivefold, and all of this expansion produced a powerful nation. White enslavers could force enslaved African American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free laborers.

Their methods quickly transformed the South into the dominant force on the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most traded commodity at the time because it was the key raw material of the first century of the Industrial Revolution. The profits from cotton monopolies drove the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization.”

Race, Mixture, and the One-Drop Rule

Another distinguishing feature was the rigid racial order that developed in the United States and came to shape society. Although sexual relations “across racial lines” occurred – often through coercion – they were regarded as morally unacceptable and regulated by law. Laws banning interracial marriage were not declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1967.

The distinctions between Black and white became so rigid that “one-drop rules” were developed to preserve racial hierarchies and prevent “mixing.” Different American states had different definitions, but all essentially held that even people with only a small amount of Black African ancestry were to be classified as Black. In some states, a person was considered Black if they had at least one-sixteenth “Black blood”; in others, one-thirty-second was enough. Some states used formulations such as “any traceable amount.”

Without such a rigid system, it is not unlikely that the Black population of the United States would, to a greater extent, have been absorbed into the white majority. Instead, Black Americans today make up just over 14 percent of the population – more than 40 million people, roughly one hundred times the number originally imported.

In the Portuguese and Spanish colonies – places with large enslaved Black populations – there were not the same rigid racial distinctions.

As a result, sexual relationships and unions “across racial lines” were more common, which has contributed to the fact that modern countries such as Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba have large mixed-race populations.

In the 18th century, casta paintings became popular in New Spain, illustrating multiple possible ethnicities and mixes. They included mestizo, the offspring of a Spaniard and a native, mulato, the offspring of a Spaniard and an African, and zambo, the offspring of an African and a native.

As in most other places in the world, however, Black people were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy, while those who were mixed in various ways had a more advantageous position, while whites, of course, were at the top. The seeds of colorism were planted early.

Another example can be found in a completely different part of the world. In places such as Iraq, Iran, and India, there are today Black minorities whose origins can partly be traced to the slave trades across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Many can also trace their ancestry to African travelers, scholars, and pilgrims who settled in those regions long ago.

But the fact that these minorities are not even larger or more visible may also be connected to a more fluid understanding of race. During parts of the Muslim world’s thousand-year-long slave trade involving sub-Saharan Africans, this outlook may have meant that the large number of imported Black Africans have long since been absorbed by the local majority population.

Slavery’s Long Shadow

As these examples show, broad generalizations are of limited usefulness, since the regional variations of slavery – their rules, customs, and structures – could differ enormously. But slavery left extraordinarily deep marks, in everything from economics to public health. Many of the problems we see in the Western Hemisphere today, such as racism and the unequal distribution of wealth between Black and white populations, can also be traced back to the slave trade.

These are only some of the many reasons why this period is so important to study and understand.

In part three of my series on the transatlantic slave trade, I will examine what finally brought the traffic in human beings to an end after more than 400 years during the nineteenth century.

What is usually emphasized is the arrival of the Enlightenment, with its ideals of reason and liberty. But once again, economic factors played at least as large a role.

Further reading:

Books:

An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa by Alexander Falconbridge (1788)

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African by Olaudah Equiano (1789)

Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams (1944)

Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill (1976)

Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study by Orlando Patterson (1982)

The African Slave Trade by Basil Davidson (1988)

Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolome de las Casas by Bartolomé de las Casas and Francis Patrick Sullivan (1995)

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader (1997)

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 by John Thornton (1998)

Pawnship, Slavery And Colonialism In Africa by Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy (editors) (2003)

Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies by Sylviane Diouf (2003)

A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Century by Akosua Adoma Perbi (2004)

The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 by Richard J. Follet (2005)

The Atlantic Slave Trade by Herbert S. Klein (2010)

Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa by Paul E. Lovejoy (2012)

A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present by Richard J. Reid (2012)

The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor by Martin Meredith (2014)

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis (2014)

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist (2014)

What is Slavery? by Brenda E. Stevenson (2015)

A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution by Toby Green (2019)

Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires by James Walvin (2019)

Born in Blackness by Howard W. French (2021)

Scholarly articles:

“The Role of Las Casas in the Emergence of Negro Slavery in the New World” by Robert L. Brady in Revista de Historia de América (Nr. 61/62, 1966)

”What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods” by Stanley B. Alpern in History in Africa (vol. 22, 1995)

”The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas” by Michael Tadman in The American Historical Review (vol. 103, nr 5, 2000)

”Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the ’First’ Sixteenth Century, Part II: From Regional Crisis to Commodity Frontier, 1506–1530” by Jason W. Moore in Review (vol. 33, nr 1, 2010)

”‘Voyage Iron’: An Atlantic Slave Trade Currency, its European Origins, and West African Impact” by Chris Evans and Göran Rydén in Past & Present (vol. 239, nr 1, 2018)

In January 1482, a Portuguese fleet arrived off the coast of what is now Ghana. On board were hundreds of soldiers, several cannons, masons, and building materials ranging from small nails to large structural frames. The fleet dropped anchor in a calm bay where the green-blue waters were relatively still, and the waves were small. When the crew came ashore, they were met by a broad sandy beach lined with tall swaying palm trees.

Beside the beach stood a village divided in two by a small river. The Portuguese settled on an elevated area at the mouth of the bay, a location that gave them a view both out toward the sea and inland. There, they raised a flag that fluttered in the warm breeze. Diogo de Azambuja, the captain and leader of the expedition, donned his finest clothes and took his place on a makeshift throne under the shade of a tree, awaiting the arrival of their hosts.

Soon, the Portuguese were greeted by a local procession. An orchestra led the parade, their drums and trumpets producing a roaring sound. A group of nobles followed them, their young servants carrying delicate fabrics for the aristocrats to sit on. A contingent of soldiers armed with spears, shields, and bows followed.

Finally, the man Azambuja had been waiting for: Kwamena Ansa, a local ruler, a so-called omanhene. His body was adorned with gold jewelry, and even his hair and beard were braided with gold.

Azambuja and Ansa shared greetings and gifts before beginning negotiations. Azambuja’s primary request was permission to build a permanent fortress. If the Portuguese were allowed to do so, he promised lucrative trading opportunities. Ansa would even be given the chance to convert to Catholicism, something that would make him a brother in the eyes of the Portuguese king.

Ansa was at first dismissive. He had encountered Portuguese traders before and was unimpressed.

“The Christians who have come here until now have been very few, dirty and base,” he told Azambuja.

Perhaps that’s why Azambuja had dressed so elegantly. The mission was too important to fail because of a poor first impression. What the Portuguese were now attempting was bold and unprecedented: to establish a permanent base this far south of the Sahara.

Despite his initial hesitation, Ansa was eventually persuaded by the Portuguese promises. The following day, they laid the first stone of what would become the first permanent European fort in tropical sub-Saharan Africa.

The Portuguese named both the area and the fort El Mina – “The Mine.” It was gold that had drawn them there. But it would be trade in another kind of “commodity” that would have devastating consequences and help lay the foundations of the modern Atlantic world.

Gold Fever

For over a millennium, the Silk Road was a key artery of global trade, connecting China to Europe via Central Asia, India, and the Middle East. A persistent theory holds that the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453 interrupted this trade, prompting Europeans to seek a sea route to China and India and thereby sparking what Europeans later called the Age of Discovery.

Theories that clearly establish a cause-and-effect relationship between two famous events in world history often become popular. But they also risk being overly simplistic. In this case, the theory is deeply misleading because it ignores Africa’s major role in early European expansion. Portuguese exploration along the African coast had begun decades before the fall of Constantinople.

A major turning point for Europe’s voyages of discovery was in 1415, when Portugal, under the leadership of Prince Henry, targeted the trading city of Ceuta. Located in the northernmost parts of present-day Morocco, the town is today a Spanish territory.

Before the conquest, Ceuta served as a terminal for the immensely lucrative trans-Saharan gold trade from West Africa. In the mid-1300s, the Mali Empire played a decisive role in ensuring that large and regular shipments of gold dust reached Europe. But by the early 1400s, as Mali entered a period of decline, those shipments became less frequent.

This was one of the factors behind the coinage shortage that struck Europe during the fifteenth century. Europe’s domestic gold production was low, and the devastation caused by the Black Death in the previous century had negatively affected silver mining.

With the plague over and Europe recovering, the precious metals needed to mint the coins they had become accustomed to were suddenly lacking. In some places, the shortage became so severe that barter and alternative forms of payment once again became more common.

In his book A Financial History of Western Europe, American economic historian Charles P. Kindleberger writes that in Germany, it became so common to use pepper as a currency that the country’s bankers became known as “peppermen.” Kindleberger also argues that the shortage of coinage, or precious metals more broadly, was one reason Europeans began increasingly to strive to cross seas they had previously failed to navigate.

The Portuguese attack on Ceuta happened swiftly on an August day in 1415. A large fleet carried the Portuguese army across the Mediterranean, and onboard one of the ships was Prince Henry himself, then only 21 years old. He was eager not only to gain a foothold in Africa and seize the valuable trade but also to win the favor of the Church by conquering a city from the Muslims, with whom Christendom was in constant conflict.

The conquest of Ceuta took only thirteen hours, and afterward the Portuguese were convinced that by seizing the fortress, they had found the key to the rest of Africa.

But Portugal’s dreams of reaping riches from Ceuta quickly crumbled. The city, now just a Christian outpost in an otherwise Muslim North Africa, was cut off from the rest of the region.

The Muslim traders simply rerouted their caravans. Instead of the goods traveling to Ceuta, they were redirected further west to the port city of Tangier. Rather than becoming a golden goose for the Portuguese, Ceuta became a financial black hole since the city demanded constant fortification and a steady supply of troops to guard its walls.

The Portuguese eventually realized this setback and instead set their sights on the unexplored waters to the west. In the ensuing decades, they claimed and colonized islands such as the Azores and Madeira, starting to expand their maritime empire.

The Perilous Sea Route to Africa

The concept of exploring the western coast of Africa is ancient. Around 500 BCE, a man known as Hanno the Navigator set out on a daring seafaring expedition. Hailing from the ancient kingdom of Carthage, located in modern-day Tunisia, Hanno was a man of stature, possibly an aristocrat or a military officer.

Our knowledge of his voyage comes from a single document he left behind, translated into Greek from the original language. The text paints a picture of Hanno’s journey down the West African coast, his establishment of settlements, and his potential encounters with gorillas.

The extent of Hanno’s journey is a matter of debate. Some believe he ventured as far as present-day Senegal or even Cameroon. Others argue he only reached the shores of Morocco. The sources are open to interpretation, leaving us with no clear answer.

But if Hanno reached Senegal or Cameroon, he was centuries ahead of his time. In the 15th century CE, when the Portuguese turned their gaze towards Africa, voyages on the open seas were fraught with peril. Furious currents, violent storms, and treacherous coastlines could spell doom for even the most veteran sailors. Departing was a gamble, with no guarantee of a safe return.

For European sailors, Cape Bojador represented a major psychological and navigational barrier. It’s a headland in what is today Western Sahara, where heavy fog, powerful currents, and fierce winds made the area notoriously difficult to navigate.

Over time, the cape became surrounded by myth. Sailors claimed that the seas farther south boiled from the heat, that the sun could set ships ablaze, and that monstrous sea creatures stalked beneath the waves. Ships that tried to round the cape and continue south never returned. Arab sailors were also wary of the area, naming it roughly Abū Khaṭar, or “the father of danger.”

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Prince Henry, later known as Henry the Navigator, never became famous for sailing himself, but for sponsoring and organizing voyages that dramatically improved Portuguese navigation and shipbuilding. During this period, the caravel, a small, easily maneuvered ship ideal for coastal exploration, came into frequent use.

The Portuguese had clear financial motives for their voyages. They sought to open up trade and find their own sources of gold. But there was also a religious motive. In a time when Christian and Muslim kingdoms were in constant conflict, the Portuguese believed that beyond North Africa, further south on the African continent, there were people who were not Muslims and could therefore be potential converts to Christianity.

They also sought the mythical figure Prester John, who, according to medieval European legends, was a king who ruled a prominent Christian kingdom surrounded by Muslims and pagans. Prester John’s kingdom was believed to be located somewhere in Africa, perhaps in Ethiopia. He was considered an essential potential ally in the eternal struggle against the Muslims.

Year after year, Portuguese expeditions proceeded further south. In 1433, Portuguese navigator Gil Eanes attempted to pass Cape Bojador, but fear overcame him, and he turned back.

The following year, under Prince Henry’s orders, Eanes tried again. This time, he not only managed to pass Cape Bojador but also returned safely. He didn’t find any gold, but he brought back something valuable – the knowledge that neither terrible sea monsters nor enormous whirlpools existed in the area.

With fresh inspiration, the expeditions continued. In 1441, the Portuguese reached Ras Nouadhibou in present-day Western Sahara and Mauritania.

Initially, there was small-scale trade with the local Imazighen, the indigenous people of North Africa. They bartered fabrics, clothing, animal skins, wheat, and small amounts of gold dust. But at the same time, spontaneous slave raids took place, revealing the immense potential of the slave trade.

Experimenting with Slavery

Southern Europeans weren’t new to the tradition of enslaving newly encountered groups under the banner of Christianity. In the 14th century, the Spanish and Portuguese launched sea raids against the Canary Islands, often kidnapping the indigenous population and selling them in European slave markets. By the 15th century, the Spanish had brutally colonized the islands, leading to an even more significant number of people being enslaved.

Gomes Eanes de Zurara, a Portuguese royal librarian and court chronicler, penned one of the earliest written accounts of Portuguese slave raids in Africa in his 1453 work, The Chronicle of Discovery and Conquest of Guinea.

The book recounts the chilling tale of merchant Lançarote de Freitas, who led a fleet of six caravels to the Gulf of Arguin in present-day Mauritania in 1444. Their mission wasn’t trade but the express purpose of enslaving people.

They attacked small coastal communities of impoverished fishermen, kidnapping men, women, and children. After six weeks of confinement in the cramped, fetid holds of the ships, the fleet reached Lagos in southern Portugal. The so-called ”catch” consisted of 235 people, exhausted and terrified. De Zurara’s text paints a haunting picture:

“Some held their heads low, their faces bathed in tears as they looked at each other; some groaned very piteously, looking towards the heavens fixedly and crying out aloud, as if they were calling on the father of the universe to help them.”

A large crowd, keen to witness the spectacle, gathered to meet the crew and captives. Among those present was Prince Henry himself, who observed the scene from horseback. He must have been pleased, for 46 of the “best slaves” had been reserved for him. To distribute the remaining captives, they were divided into different groups:

“This made it necessary to separate sons from their fathers and wives from their husbands and brother from brother. No account was taken of friendship or relationship, but each one ending up where chance placed him.”

He continues:

“As soon as the children who had been assigned to one group saw the parents in another, they jumped up and ran towards them; mothers clasped their other children in their arms and lay face down on the ground, accepting wounds with contempt for the suffering of their flesh rather than let their children be torn from them.”

De Zurara’s account reveals that the enslaved had diverse racial backgrounds: he describes them as white, Black, and mixed-race. This underlines that skin color had not yet begun to play the decisive role it later would in the transatlantic slave trade. In the first half of the 15th century, you were enslaved not because you were Black but because you were a non-Christian, a heathen.

The desire to convert pagans to Christianity was the primary justification for the raids, alongside the apparent economic gain. Prince Henry believed the cruelties the enslaved endured in this life would be offset by their redemption as Christians in the afterlife.

Even though de Zurara seemed to testify to the diversity of the captives, his account also reveals an early example of associating skin color with attributes. It’s clear he valued the Black captives the least, and he consistently describes them as less intelligent, more uncivilized, and physically inferior.

His document can therefore be seen as a very early example of linking skin color to character. This fusion would later become one of the central features of the transatlantic slave trade: the belief that Black people were naturally inferior and therefore especially – or uniquely – suited to enslavement.

As the Portuguese began incorporating enslavement into their Atlantic expansion, the voyages continued, and in 1444, they reached the Senegal River.

However, while they ventured further south, the slave raids became more dangerous. Rumors of the raids spread, allowing local populations to evade them. Moreover, these populations were well-organized and resilient. Several Portuguese units hoping to enslave West Africans were chased away by local villagers and warriors armed with throwing spears and poisoned arrows.

Nuno Tristão, the sea captain who had conducted earlier slave raids along the northwest African coast, met this fate himself. In the mid-1440s, he and over 20 men landed in what is now Senegal, just south of the country’s current capital, Dakar. They planned to kidnap and sell people into slavery, but were ambushed. Several local soldiers in quick war canoes surrounded them. Nuno Tristão and almost all of his men were killed on the spot.

Other similarly disastrous landings prompted Prince Henry to order an end to the West African slave raids in 1448. It became clear that a different tactic was needed, one that relied on diplomacy and trade rather than violence.

At this time, much of what is today Senegal was part of the Jolof, or Wolof, Empire. It stretched roughly from the Senegal River in the north to the Gambia River in the south, rendering it particularly well-suited for trade. It had previously been the westernmost province of the Mali Empire, but during the second half of the fourteenth century, as Mali was shaken by a series of succession conflicts, the Wolof people broke away and established their own kingdom.

Both “empire” and “kingdom” are somewhat misleading terms, however, because it did not function as a unified state but rather as a confederation of several kingdoms. Nevertheless, it became one of the earliest West African states to agree to a peaceful trading relationship when the Portuguese exchanged their swords for goods. The trade included gold and ivory – and eventually enslaved people as well.

Slavery as Human History

Slavery is mentioned in some of humanity’s oldest written sources and has been part of our history for thousands of years, from the cradles of civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt to ancient Rome and Greece, from the Maya civilization of Central America to medieval Japan. Up until just 100–150 years ago, slavery was a common feature of societies around the world. It is the age we live in now that is unusual in its near-universal condemnation of slavery. Unfortunately, it still exists in several parts of the world today.

Although most people have a specific image of what slavery is, there are many different forms and definitions, which can create confusion. Modern broad definitions include forced laborers who work under threats of violence, extreme poverty, or imprisonment, even if they are not legally considered someone else’s property.

Another form involves people forced to work to repay debts, or individuals dependent on starvation wages to survive. Serfdom refers to systems in which workers are tied to the land where they live, forced to pay taxes, and rarely allowed to move or marry freely, while sexual slavery is yet another form – likely the most widespread in the Western world today.

Viewed through a narrower historical lens, a slave is a person usually enslaved through some form of violence, subjected to another human being, deprived of autonomy, treated as property, bought and sold, forced to perform labor or services, and denied control over their own sexuality or reproduction.

During the fifteenth century, when Portugal began exploring Africa, slavery remained common in both Europe and the Middle East. In the many recurring wars between Christian and Muslim kingdoms, both sides enslaved one another. By the sixteenth century, prisoners of war often became galley slaves – people chained to the oars of large ships and forced to row under threat of violence.

And from the seventeenth century onward, the North African coast west of Egypt became known as the infamous Barbary Coast. Muslim pirates based there sailed the seas, kidnapping Europeans. Most victims became prisoners ransomed back to their families, while others were enslaved and put to work.

Like the rest of the world, sub-Saharan Africa has a long history of slavery, practiced in many different ways. As a vast continent defined by enormous diversity in peoples, cultures, languages, religions, and traditions, it makes little sense to speak of one single African form of slavery.

Generally speaking, however, African systems differed from the later transatlantic model. In some societies, enslaved people could marry, own property, and eventually become members of a family. In such societies, enslaved people possessed a degree of mobility that later enslaved people in places such as the United States did not have, where they were treated like livestock. In the United States, enslaved people had virtually no possibility of social advancement, and their children – born and unborn – were condemned to the same fate.

That’s not to say that there weren’t societies in Africa where the lives of the enslaved were also particularly hard: where they were subjected to backbreaking work, not allowed to mingle with free inhabitants, could lose their lives as victims in a funeral ritual, or retained lower social status even after no longer being considered a slave.

Of course, there were also plenty of societies that rejected slavery altogether.

Another obvious difference from the transatlantic trade was that indigenous African systems of slavery were not based on race or skin color, since both victims and perpetrators were what we today would call Black. This has sometimes contributed to an image of Africa as especially uncivilized, as though Africans “sold their own people” and were therefore somehow worse than Europeans, who at least had the decency not to inflict such horrors on “their own.” But this image is deeply misleading.

Perhaps the most common way to become enslaved in Africa was to be on the losing side of a war. And just as the joint identity as Europeans has never stopped the English, French, Swedes, or Germans from going to war with each other, so too the relatively modern identity as Africans has not prevented African societies from fighting wars of conquest against each other.

Other, less common paths into slavery included punishment for crimes or temporarily selling oneself into slavery as a way of repaying debts. Africans involved in the trade of enslaved people generally did not see themselves as selling “their own people” or their “African brothers.” They saw themselves as selling enemies, foreigners, criminals, or unwanted people.

Overall, African systems of slavery were often more closely tied to status, power, and influence than to money and production. What changed with the European presence in Africa was the scale of slavery. It was under European flags that the African slave trade transformed from a relatively limited phenomenon into a vast machine, an entire industry, whose consequences are still felt today.

While there were highly organized hierarchical societies that practiced slavery before Europeans arrived – such as the previously mentioned Mali Empire – these were the exceptions. Many of the West and Central African states most closely associated with large-scale slave trading, such as Dahomey and Asante, rose or expanded after the Atlantic trade had already begun, and they tapped into it to procure firearms and luxury goods to strengthen their grip on power.

Before that, it was more common for slavery to play a smaller role in most West and Central African societies. Especially compared to many of the new colonies Europeans formed on the other side of the Atlantic, where the whole economy revolved around slavery. These colonies became true slave societies – societies where slavery wasn’t only present, but central to the economy and social order.

Pointing out some of the differences between the transatlantic slave trade and indigenous African slavery should not be misunderstood as suggesting that the latter was somehow benign. Slavery, in all its forms, is by definition reprehensible.

Portugal in the Lead

In the mid-15th century, the Portuguese were still primarily after gold, and the potential of trade with West African kingdoms was so promising that the Portuguese crown struck a deal with the renowned Portuguese merchant Fernão Gomes. In return for a monopoly on all trade south of the Cape Verde Islands, Gomes agreed to pay an annual fee, sell all the ivory he acquired to the Portuguese crown at a favorable price, and commit his fleet to explore a further 480 to 640 kilometers of the African coastline each year.

This agreement triggered a series of so-called discoveries. In present-day Liberia, trade in malagueta pepper, also known as grains of paradise, flourished, earning the region the name Pepper Coast.

Further east, the Portuguese found an abundant supply of ivory in the forests that stretched to the shores, leading to the region being named the Ivory Coast.

And in 1471, when the Portuguese landed in what is now Ghana, they finally found what they had been seeking for almost six decades: gold. The abundance of gold was evident from the jewelry worn by the locals. The entire region would later become known as the Gold Coast.

The Portuguese traded clothing and various types of metals for gold. Manillas, horseshoe-shaped bracelets made of bronze, brass, or copper, were produced in Europe and shipped to the West African coast, where they served as payment for the goods the Portuguese purchased.

West and Central African societies had a long tradition of working with iron. The African societies with which the Portuguese came into contact had access to both iron tools and weapons. But as innovations in the European iron industry increased production rates, it became more attractive for African kingdoms to import iron from Europe.

The manillas were not a new phenomenon. Previously, they had been imported from North Africa. Other forms of currency used in the region included cloth and cowrie shells, which Muslim traders brought with them from the Indian Ocean.

The Competition Intensifies

Portugal had long been at the forefront of African exploration, but other European countries were catching up. Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish ships now sailed along the Ghanaian coast, each anxious to stake its claim in the gold trade.

In 1478, the rivalry between Portugal and the Spanish Kingdom of Castile resulted in a naval battle off the coast of Ghana, which Portugal won convincingly. This led to peace negotiations, mediated by the Pope, resulting in the Treaty of Alcáçovas.

Portugal agreed to relinquish its claim to the Castilian throne and recognize Spanish control over the Canary Islands. In return, Portugal was granted the right to all lands discovered, or to be discovered, south of the Canary Islands, effectively claiming all of Africa south of the Sahara.

Over the next two decades, the Portuguese gold trade in West Africa continued to amass immense wealth. American journalist Howard W. French, in his acclaimed book Born in Blackness, argues that this new wealth had unexpected consequences:

“Lisbon’s new monopoly over West Africa’s tremendous supplies of gold then left the Spanish with little choice but to venture out far beyond the Pillars of Hercules and push new exploration efforts into the westward extremities of the Atlantic Ocean.”

The “Pillars of Hercules” refers to the ancient name for the headlands that guard the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar. Howard W. French suggests that Portugal’s African exploits accelerated Spain’s oceanic exploration. And the allure of gold played a big part in driving Christopher Columbus, under the Spanish flag, to inadvertently stumble upon America in the fall of 1492.

The fort of El Mina, or Elmina, was the strategic foothold the Portuguese had long sought on the African continent. For centuries, traders had procured gold from this region, transporting it north via West African empires like Mali, across the Sahara, and finally to North Africa and beyond.

But now, a larger portion of the gold began to flow south toward the Portuguese fort on the coast. From Elmina, the Portuguese could regularly send gold cargoes back to their homeland, transforming Portugal from a poor and insignificant corner of Europe into a burgeoning colonial superpower.

As gold continued to invigorate the Portuguese economy, their African exploration persisted, now with fewer monetary constraints. In 1483, they encountered the Kingdom of Kongo, a strong Central African state, and two years later, the Kingdom of Benin in the rainforests of present-day Nigeria.

Upon landing in several of these locations, they erected padrãos, wooden or stone pillars often topped with a cross and inscribed with details of their discoveries.

In 1488, the Portuguese finally rounded the southernmost tip of Africa. They didn’t linger; instead, they continued up the East African coast and, a decade later, through Vasco Da Gama, opened a sea route to India for the Portuguese.

While gold shipments continued to Portugal, the Portuguese steadily realized the profitability of the slave trade. It would be some time before Elmina would become a slave fort, but along the West and Central African coast, many other areas were identified where the slave trade began its exponential growth.

Sugar and Blood

One of the critical factors in understanding how the slave trade could become so extensive and lucrative was the cultivation of sugarcane. This plant, native to Southeast Asia, had slowly spread westward via traders and was now being introduced to even newer regions and continents during the European voyages of discovery.

The Madeira archipelago off the coast of Morocco became one of Portugal’s first colonies in the 1420s. Here, they introduced sugar cane, and a few decades later, production was in full swing, increasingly powered by African slaves. For a brief period at the start of the 16th century, Madeira was one of the world’s leading sugar producers.

However, by this time, Europeans had reached the Americas, opening vast commercial opportunities. Instead of small islands in the Atlantic or off the coast of Africa, they had now found entire continents to conquer, with seemingly limitless land to cultivate and incalculable quantities of metals to extract.

But to make this doable and as quickly and profitably as possible, a colossal workforce of a rarely seen kind was required. The slave trade was now set to enter a new phase defined by immeasurable wealth, violence, and suffering.

In the next part of my series about the transatlantic slave trade, I’ll focus more on what life was like for those enslaved. I will also, among many other things, outline how the trade grew to such enormous proportions, compare the differences among the slave societies of the Americas, and examine how Europeans built the foundations of these nations on the backs of enslaved people.

Further reading:

Books:

The Chronicle of Discovery and Conquest of Guinea by Gomes Eanes de Zurara (1453)

Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolomé de las Casas by Bartolomé de las Casas and Francis Patrick Sullivan (1995)

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 by John Thornton (1998)

Prince Henry ”the Navigator”: A Life by Peter Russell (2000)

Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa by Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy (editors) (2003)

A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Century by Akosua Adoma Perbi (2004)

The Atlantic Slave Trade by Herbert S. Klein (2010)

Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa by Paul E. Lovejoy (2012)

A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present by Richard J. Reid (2012)

The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor by Martin Meredith (2014)

What is Slavery? by Brenda E. Stevenson (2015)

A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution by Toby Green (2019)

Born in Blackness by Howard W. French (2021)

Scholarly articles:

”Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History” by J.D. Fage in The Journal of African History (vol. 10, nr 3, 1969)

”Slavery in Africa – Historical and Anthropological Perspectives” by Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers (1979)

”What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods” by Stanley B. Alpern in History in Africa (vol. 22, 1995)

”The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas” by Michael Tadman in The American Historical Review (vol. 103, nr 5, 2000)

”Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the ’First’ Sixteenth Century, Part II: From Regional Crisis to Commodity Frontier, 1506–1530” by Jason W. Moore in Review (vol. 33, nr 1, 2010)

”‘Voyage Iron’: An Atlantic Slave Trade Currency, its European Origins, and West African Impact” by Chris Evans and Göran Rydén in Past & Present (vol. 239, nr 1, 2018)

In 1808, Spain was occupied by Napoleon’s French troops, an event whose consequences extended far beyond Europe. In the colony of New Spain, which included what is now Mexico, ideas of greater self-rule had circulated for a long time. But when the Spanish crown was weakened by the French offensive, parts of the colony shifted from demands for reform to open rebellion.

Two years later, the Mexican War of Independence began under the leadership of the Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo. The uprising was brutally suppressed by colonial authorities, and Hidalgo was captured and executed the following year. But the struggle did not end with him. Each time the Spanish believed they had crushed the revolt, new leaders emerged.

One of them was Vicente Guerrero. He was born in Tixtla and is believed to have had both African and Indigenous ancestry. Before joining the rebellion, he made a living as an arriero, a transporter of goods using mules, a profession that gave him deep knowledge of the region’s geography. Guerrero distinguished himself early in the war and would eventually become one of the insurgency movement’s most central figures.

Slavery had existed in New Spain since the beginning of the colonial period and continued to play a role in certain sectors, but by the early nineteenth century, it was less widespread than in many other parts of the Americas.

Although those who remained enslaved were subjected to brutality and oppression, slavery in New Spain was not as rigidly institutionalized as in the United States. This made so-called “mixed marriages” more common and allowed some enslaved people to purchase their freedom. People of African descent, both free and enslaved, formed an important part of the population.

Colonial society was structured by a complex caste system that categorized individuals by ancestry. In the eighteenth century, so-called casta paintings became popular: artworks depicting an idealized system of racial mixtures, often organized into 16 categories.

These included, for example, mestizo (Spanish and Indigenous ancestry), mulato (Spanish and African ancestry), and zambo (African and Indigenous ancestry). As in many other parts of the world, people of African descent were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy, while those of European background occupied the top.

During the war, Guerrero was initially open to compromises that would grant the colony greater autonomy within the Spanish Empire. But developments in Spain altered his position. When Spain adopted a new constitution in 1812, it formally granted citizenship to large segments of the empire’s free population, yet in practice, many people of African descent were excluded from full political rights. For Guerrero, this was a decisive signal: true freedom required full independence.

By 1821, the war had dragged on for over a decade, exhausting both sides. At a critical moment, Guerrero succeeded in bringing over the royalist general Agustín de Iturbide – leader of the Spanish crown’s forces – to the independence cause. Together, they agreed on a shared vision for a new Mexico.

With most of the population on the rebels’ side and Spanish forces demoralized after prolonged fighting, Spain ultimately lost its grip on the colony. In September of that year, Mexico declared its independence.

In the summer of 1822, Iturbide was crowned emperor of the newly formed Mexican Empire. But tensions between Iturbide and the political elite – largely centered on the balance of power between him and Congress – quickly became apparent. After a period of conflict and political instability, he was forced to abdicate in 1823. A provisional government took over, and shortly thereafter, Mexico was declared a republic, with General Guadalupe Victoria as its first president.

Guerrero’s status as a war hero and champion of independence made him a natural political leader, but in the presidential election of 1828, he was formally defeated by General Manuel Gómez Pedraza.

The result was contested and led to an uprising that forced Pedraza into exile. This paved the way for Guerrero to assume the presidency on April 1, 1829. He thus became, as far as historians have been able to determine, the first head of state in the Americas with roots in both the Indigenous peoples of the continent and the African diaspora – something that provoked resistance among segments of the conservative elite.

As president, Guerrero positioned himself as a defender of the country’s poor and marginalized. In September 1829, he made a historic decision: he abolished slavery in Mexico.

The reform was revolutionary, but it also intensified existing conflicts – particularly in Texas, then still part of Mexico, where many incoming American settlers were slaveholders and opposed the policies of the Mexican state.

The abolition of slavery was one of several factors contributing to rising tensions in the region. These tensions culminated a few years later in the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836, when the territory broke away from Mexico, and in 1845, it was annexed by the United States.

Guerrero left a mark, but his time in power was short. His progressive reforms, combined with the way he had come to power, increased the threats against him. Just three months after the abolition of slavery, his conservative vice president, Anastasio Bustamante, launched a rebellion.

Guerrero was drawn into a chaotic guerrilla war. His forces won a number of key battles, but he ultimately fell victim to betrayal. In January 1831, the Italian sea captain Francisco Picaluga, from the city-state of Genoa in present-day Italy, welcomed Guerrero aboard his ship. But instead of the promised dinner, Guerrero was captured and handed over to his enemies.

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Unlike other deposed leaders, Guerrero was offered neither exile nor the opportunity to abdicate. He was executed in February 1831. Some historians have argued that his class background and mixed heritage played a role, and that his execution may have been intended as a warning to discourage those from “lower” backgrounds from aspiring to power.

Today, Vicente Guerrero is regarded as a Mexican national hero. The state of Guerrero bears his name, and his contributions to independence and the struggle for equality have secured him a central place in the country’s history.

Mexico’s independence transformed its political status, yet recognition of who fully belonged to the nation came much later. It was not until 1992 that the country was officially defined as a multicultural nation rooted in Indigenous, European, and African traditions.

When the national statistics agency began including questions about Afro-descendants in 2015, it marked the first time many Mexicans were given the opportunity to identify as Afro-Mexican. In the 2020 census, the category was fully implemented, and when the results were published the following year, around 2.5 million people identified as Afro-Mexican.

Further reading:

Books:

The Mexican Republic: The First Decade, 1823–1832 by Stanley Green (1987)

La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History by Thomas Benjamin (2000)

The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s First Black Indian President by Theodore Vincent (2001)

Scholarly articles:

”The Contributions of Mexico’s First Black Indian President, Vicente Guerrero” by Theodore G. Vincent in The Journal of Negro History (vol. 86, nr 2, 2001)

Articles:

”Mexico ’discovers’ 1.4 million black Mexicans — they just had to ask” by Rafa Fernandez De Castro for Fusion (December 15, 2015)

”We exist. We’re here’: Afro-Mexicans make the census after long struggle for recognition” by David Agren for The Guardian (March 19, 2020)

But who was Lumumba? Why was he killed? And what did his death set in motion?

This is the story of Congo’s derailed liberation.

Patrice Lumumba was born in 1925 in Kasai Province, then part of the Belgian Congo. Like most Congolese under colonial rule, he received only a few years of formal schooling; the Belgian colonial state placed strict limits on African education. Yet even as a young man, he was regarded as intelligent and ambitious. Largely through his own efforts, he continued his studies and learned to speak fluent French.

He spent his early adult years working as a beer salesman and postal clerk before serving a one-year prison sentence for embezzlement in the mid-1950s. In 1958, he joined forces with other young Congolese men to found the Mouvement National Congolais, or MNC. Through his writing and his extraordinary gift for oratory, Lumumba – tall, lean, handsome, charismatic – soon emerged as one of the most influential voices in the struggle for independence.

Demands for freedom had been voiced before, but in the 1950s, the anti-colonial spirit sweeping the world gave fresh force to resistance in the Congo. In January 1959, protests flared up in Léopoldville, today’s Kinshasa, and their intensity stunned the Belgians, who were forced to promise a vague reform package.

It marked a moment of intense political mobilization. By the beginning of 1960, more than a hundred political groupings had been formed in the Belgian Congo. Almost all were rooted in ethnic affiliation – understandably so, in a deeply heterogeneous society whose peoples had been enclosed within artificial colonial borders. Lumumba’s party was different. It spoke in the language of national unity. It appealed not to one region or ethnic bloc, but to all Congolese.

As unrest spread, the Belgians realized they were losing their grip. In some provinces, people had already stopped paying taxes and no longer recognized the authority of the colonial administration, only that of their local political movements.

In January 1960, Belgium invited the leaders of thirteen of these new Congolese parties to a historic conference in Brussels. Lumumba, who had once again been jailed only days earlier – this time on charges of incitement – was released and allowed to attend. His influence was simply too great to ignore. It was the first time Belgium had formally involved Congolese leaders in political decision-making.

The Belgians hoped to persuade the Congolese to accept a gradual road to independence. Instead, they were met by a united front demanding independence as early as June of that same year.

Belgium gave in. Elections were scheduled for May, and the colonial authorities hoped to preserve their influence by backing moderate, Belgium-friendly parties.

But Lumumba had a rare ability to electrify crowds, and the MNC emerged as the largest party in the elections, though without an outright majority. A political compromise followed: Joseph Kasavubu of the Abako party became president, and Lumumba became prime minister. The new state took the name the Republic of the Congo.

A Tumultuous Independence Day

Belgian and Congolese dignitaries gathered on June 30 for the independence ceremony, a day that marked the formal end of colonial rule and seventy-five years of oppression, segregation, economic plunder, and mass killing. King Baudouin of Belgium was among those present.

In his speech, Baudouin congratulated Congo on achieving freedom thanks to Belgian “civilization.” Dressed in a gleaming white uniform adorned with medals, he described Congolese independence as the culmination of the work begun by his ancestor, Leopold II, in the late nineteenth century – the same Leopold II responsible for the deaths of up to ten million Congolese. Baudouin even praised Leopold as a genius and warned the Congolese not to dismantle the systems Belgium had put in place until they were sure they could govern better themselves.

Lumumba had not been scheduled to speak. But as he listened, he decided to break protocol.

At the end of the ceremony, he rose and delivered one of the most famous speeches in African history. Calm but unsparing, he confronted the king’s version of events head-on, laying out the realities of colonial rule: systematic racism, ruthless exploitation, and the degrading, inhuman treatment of the Congolese people.

His speech brought the Congolese audience to their feet in applause. It also enraged the Belgians and badly damaged his relations with the former colonial power. In the Belgian press, he was cast as a dangerous fanatic.

The Challenges Pile Up

Congo was in a diplomatic crisis. But at least it was free.

The trouble was that freedom arrived atop a landscape that colonialism had systematically hollowed out. Congo had almost no trained doctors, almost no secondary-school teachers, and scarcely any university-educated citizens. In 1960, there were only thirty Congolese university graduates in a country nearly as large as Western Europe. The principal sphere in which Congolese had been allowed to advance was the Church, and by independence, roughly five hundred Congolese priests had been trained.

Belgium had also engineered something close to an economic coup. After the January 1960 conference that set the date for independence, a second meeting was held to settle crucial economic questions. But it took place in April and May, when Congolese leaders were absorbed in election campaigning. Their interests were therefore represented by less qualified delegates.

On one side sat newly graduated Congolese university students. On the other side sat seasoned Belgian politicians, who used the negotiations to secure control over key economic assets. Companies in which the Belgian state had previously held shares were privatized, while the accumulated debts of the colonial order were transferred to the new Congolese state.

Congo’s new leadership, unsurprisingly, had little experience governing a nation. Many politicians saw, at last, the chance to enjoy the privileges which had long been reserved for European colonizers. The first measure passed by parliament was an increase in legislators’ annual pay from one hundred thousand francs to half a million. Lumumba, acutely aware of what such a move would signal, was one of the few to oppose it.

The Congo Crisis

Another serious problem was the lack of highly trained Congolese personnel. Many top positions remained in the hands of white Europeans. The Force Publique, the old colonial army, was no exception. Twenty thousand men strong, it was still commanded by the Belgian general Émile Janssens. Congo was independent, but its Black army was still led by a white officer.

On July 4, less than a week after independence, soldiers in Léopoldville refused to obey orders and demanded higher pay. The next day, Janssens summoned them to the army headquarters and announced that Congo’s independence would change nothing for them: there would be no promotions, and they would remain under white command. Then he took a piece of chalk and wrote on a blackboard: before independence = after independence.

The reaction was instant. That same night, Congolese soldiers mutinied.

Lumumba accused Belgium of provoking the unrest and dismissed Janssens. In an effort to calm the soldiers, he renamed the army the Armée Nationale Congolaise, promoted all Congolese soldiers, and replaced European officers with Congolese ones.

But the revolt did not end there. Many Congolese – not only within the army – had expected independence to bring swift and visible improvements to everyday life. Instead, change came slowly. The sight of politicians showing off swollen wallets and new cars deepened popular anger.

Soon, that anger turned against European civilians as well. The army splintered into rival factions, some loyal only to themselves, others to particular parties or ethnic interests. Looting, murder, and rape spread as thousands of whites fled the country.

On July 10, Belgium sent in troops, officially to protect its nationals. But they also moved to seize strategic positions across the country, which Lumumba viewed as an act of war.

The following day, the crisis deepened further. Moïse Tshombe, the leader of Katanga – a province whose copper mines generated roughly a third of Congo’s revenue – declared it an independent state. Behind him stood Belgian military advisers and mining companies, above all Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, the world’s third-largest copper producer. The company stopped paying taxes to Congo, urged Belgium to recognize Katanga, and helped finance Tshombe’s project.

Less than two weeks after independence, Congo was already on the brink of collapse. How Lumumba responded to this crisis would determine not only the country’s future, but his own fate.

He turned to the United Nations. Under Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN saw the Congo crisis as an opportunity to demonstrate what peacekeeping could be. Within days, UN troops were flown in.

Lumumba insisted that the UN must also expel the Belgian troops that had dug in across the country. On July 14, 1960, the Security Council passed a resolution calling for Belgium’s withdrawal.

But Lumumba wanted more. Perhaps without completely grasping how narrow the UN mandate was, he asked the organization to help Congo retake Katanga. The UN refused, arguing that it had no right to intervene in Congo’s internal political affairs. Lumumba, enraged, accused it of serving Belgian interests. The United States likewise refused to intervene militarily.

At the same time, Kasai – Congo’s richest diamond-producing province – declared independence on August 9, 1960. Desperate, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union, which responded by sending military vehicles.

With great difficulty, the Congolese army managed to crush the revolt in Kasai. But the cost was catastrophic. Some 250,000 people were displaced, and international reports that Congolese troops had massacred civilians inflicted devastating damage on the government’s standing.

Worse still, Lumumba’s appeal to Moscow formally dragged Congo into the Cold War. He had already alienated Belgium; now he also alarmed the United States, the United Nations, and members of his own government, many of whom favored a more cautious strategy.

In Washington and other Western capitals, fear grew that a communist state might emerge in the heart of Africa. That summer, CIA director Allen Dulles reportedly warned that Lumumba was another Fidel Castro, “or worse”.

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On the evening of September 5, 1960, President Joseph Kasavubu came on the radio and, awkwardly reading from a prepared text, announced that Lumumba had been dismissed with immediate effect. The massacres in Kasai – described in much of the Western press as genocide – combined with accusations of communism, had created the perfect opening to remove the increasingly volatile prime minister.

A few hours later, Lumumba himself was on the air, declaring that it was he who had dismissed the president.

The political situation descended into total confusion.

In the West, Lumumba was increasingly viewed as unstable and erratic. In parallel, the CIA and Belgium began developing plans for his “permanent elimination”.

Then Joseph-Désiré Mobutu intervened. He announced that he had temporarily “neutralized” the rival camps of Kasavubu and Lumumba.

Mobutu had served in the Force Publique, worked as a journalist, joined the MNC early, and acted as Lumumba’s personal assistant and one of his closest aides. During the summer mutiny, he had been promoted to colonel and made army chief of staff. What Lumumba either did not know or chose not to believe were the rumors that Mobutu had already been recruited as an informant for American and Belgian intelligence.

Mobutu now effectively seized power. The coup was enabled by CIA support, including weapons and money to secure the army’s loyalty. An interim government was installed, staffed by Congolese who had only just left university. Kasavubu remained president, while the Soviet advisers Lumumba had invited were expelled.

Lumumba himself was placed under house arrest. UN soldiers kept his enemies from entering the house, while Mobutu’s troops made sure he could not leave it. Even so, Lumumba continued insisting that he was still the lawful prime minister.

By now, Congo had broken into four political zones: Kasavubu’s and Mobutu’s government in the west, backed by the western powers; Lumumba’s supporters in the east, backed by the Soviet Union; and the two economically crucial secessionist states of Katanga and South Kasai in the south, both supported by Belgian business interests.

American efforts to neutralize Lumumba continued. In October, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb arrived in Congo. He had recently been involved in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and had earlier led the infamous MK-Ultra program, which pursued behavior modification – mind control – through illegal experimentation. In his luggage was a lethal poison meant to be slipped into Lumumba’s toothpaste or food.

The following month, a man with the codename QJ/WIN arrived in Congo. Recruited in Europe to carry out the killing, he was described as ruthless and hardened.

Yet this particular plot collapsed. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Congo, objected to the method. He saw no practical way to get close enough to Lumumba and believed the agency already had other means of removing him. The poison was discarded in the Congo River.

The covert assassination plan may have been abandoned, but the political offensive continued. At UN headquarters in New York, diplomats had spent weeks debating which Congolese delegation should be seated: Lumumba’s or Kasavubu’s. On November 24, after pressure from the United States, the General Assembly voted to recognize Kasavubu’s delegation.

For Lumumba, this was the end of any realistic hope that the UN might restore him to power.

A Daring Escape

One rainy evening in November, he escaped house arrest by hiding in one of the cars that drove household staff home after their shift.

His goal was Stanleyville in the east, where his support was strongest. From there, he hoped to establish a rival government and reclaim power. But instead of rushing straight there, his convoy, which included his family and closest allies, drove through towns and villages where jubilant crowds greeted them. It was a fatal delay.

Shortly before midnight on December 1, the group reached the Sankuru River. There was no bridge, so they had to cross in a small boat. Lumumba made it across with the first group, while his wife and youngest son remained behind. Once on the far bank, he climbed back into the boat to return for them.

By then, Mobutu’s soldiers had caught up. They were waiting on the riverbank.

Lumumba was arrested, beaten, and taken to the prison at Thysville, just south of Léopoldville, while UN troops present, under orders not to intervene, stood and watched. Journalists on the scene saw Congolese soldiers kick and humiliate him in front of an impassive Mobutu.

The images badly damaged the UN’s standing. How could an organization with a major peacekeeping presence in the country, one that had managed to protect Belgian civilians, now stand by while the lawful prime minister was beaten before the world?

Even in prison, Lumumba remained dangerous to his enemies. Antoine Gizenga, one of his allies, moved ahead with plans to establish a rival government in Stanleyville. For many Congolese, Lumumba had become the embodiment of freedom itself, and support for his cause continued to grow.

Meanwhile, he endured appalling conditions in Thysville: a damp cell, no shoes, no change of clothes, and unhealthy food. Yet he still retained influence among the soldiers there. In January 1961, some of them mutinied, forcing Kasavubu and Mobutu to intervene in person. Order was restored only after promises of more pay.

A Fatal Decision

The episode terrified American and Belgian officials, who feared that Lumumba might yet regain power. Kasavubu and Mobutu wanted him gone, but worried that a trial or execution carried out openly by their own regime would turn public opinion against them. So they decided to transfer him to Katanga.

Maurice Mpolo, the former minister of sport and youth, and Joseph Okito, the former vice president of the Senate – both long-term Lumumba allies – were sent with him.

The flight to Élisabethville, Katanga’s capital, lasted six hours. Throughout the journey, the prisoners were beaten by the soldiers escorting them. At one point, the pilots locked the cockpit door, trying to shut out the sounds of the assault and to protect themselves from the men carrying it out.

Upon arrival, Lumumba, Mpolo, and Okito were taken to an empty house near the airport. The beating continued: fists, kicks, rifle butts. They were dragged into a bathroom and subjected to outright torture. Some of Katanga’s ministers took part, as did Moïse Tshombe himself.

Later that night, after dark, the three men were driven to a remote clearing in the forest. Military headlights illuminated graves that had already been dug. One by one, they were lined up against a tree and shot. Lumumba was only 35 years old.

Those involved fled the scene in haste.

For more than forty years, Belgium maintained that it had played no part in Lumumba’s murder. But in 1999, Belgian historian and journalist Ludo De Witte published De moord op Patrice Lumumba, bringing forward new evidence. Belgian advisers, he showed, had helped formulate the plan to send Lumumba to Katanga. Belgian officers had been present during the beatings and the torture, and had exercised command over the firing squad.

Covered Tracks

Local people heard the shots and discovered the graves, so poorly filled in that an arm protruded from the earth. The next day, Belgians returned and had the bodies exhumed. Wrapped in cloth, the corpses were loaded onto a vehicle, driven elsewhere, and reburied in deeper pits.

But those responsible remained nervous. A few days later, they dug the bodies up again. This time, they were dismembered with a hacksaw and dissolved in barrels of sulfuric acid. Bones and teeth were crushed and scattered. Lumumba’s supporters were not to be left with a grave.

No official statement was issued until February 10, around three weeks after the executions. The first version claimed that Lumumba, Mpolo, and Okito had escaped. Rewards were offered.

Three days later, Katanga’s interior minister announced that the bodies of the “escapees” had been discovered, supposedly after local villagers found and killed them. He refused to say exactly what had happened or where the bodies were buried, but he did display death certificates signed by a Belgian doctor.

Across the world – in London, New York, Moscow, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Dakar, New Delhi – protests erupted. In Belgrade, thirty thousand young Yugoslavs gathered outside the Belgian embassy, which was eventually stormed and vandalized. In Léopoldville, Lumumba’s widow, Pauline, led a demonstration outside UN headquarters, demanding the return of his body for burial. That demand could, for obvious reasons, not be met.

After Lumumba’s murder, Congo’s struggle for power went on, bloodier and more chaotic with each passing year. In 1965, Mobutu staged yet another coup – this time with no intention of sharing power.

Read more about his catastrophic thirty-year reign and how it ties to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo here.

A Late Apology

Despite Western attempts to portray Lumumba as a deranged extremist who had brought destruction upon himself, history has transformed him into something else: a martyr and a global symbol of anti-imperialism, independence, and Pan-Africanism.

Not long after the publication of De Witte’s book, Belgium launched an official inquiry. Its conclusions, published in 2002, stopped short of acknowledging direct Belgian responsibility for Lumumba’s murder, but did admit that Belgium bore a “moral responsibility” for having failed to prevent it. Foreign Minister Louis Michel formally apologized for Belgium’s role.

On June 30, 2020, ahead of the sixtieth anniversary of Congolese independence and amid the Black Lives Matter protests of that summer, King Philippe of Belgium expressed his “deepest regrets” for the “past injuries” and “painful episodes” Belgium had inflicted during the colonial era.

It was the first time a Belgian monarch had acknowledged any form of culpability, although critics quickly pointed out that regret is not the same as apology. Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost – the book that helped reignite global attention to Belgium’s crimes in Africa – has been among those arguing that Belgium should pay reparations to Congo.

Then, in the summer of 2022, Belgium returned a gold tooth that had belonged to Lumumba. His family received it in a small ceremony in Brussels. It was the only known physical remnant of the murdered prime minister.

For years, the tooth had been kept as a macabre trophy by Gerard Soete, a Belgian police commissioner who had taken part in the destruction of Lumumba’s body. In 2016, the Belgian state seized it after Soete’s daughter displayed it in a newspaper interview.

At the ceremony, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo formally apologized for Belgium’s role in Lumumba’s murder:

“For the transfer of Patrice Emery Lumumba to Katanga, the Congolese authorities at the time received assistance from Belgian diplomats, officials, and military personnel.

The parliamentary inquiry commission, therefore, concluded that the Belgian government showed a clear lack of concern for Patrice Lumumba’s physical integrity and, after his assassination, deliberately spread falsehoods about the circumstances of his death.

Several ministers of the Belgian government at the time, therefore, bear a moral responsibility for the circumstances that led to this murder. This is a painful and unpleasant truth. But it must be told.

Belgian ministers, diplomats, officials, or soldiers may not have intended to have Patrice Lumumba assassinated – no evidence has been found to support that. But they should have understood that his transfer to Katanga would put his life in danger.

They should have warned. They should have refused any cooperation in the transfer of Patrice Lumumba to the place where he was executed. They chose not to see. They chose not to act. A man was murdered for his political convictions, his words, his ideals.

As a democrat, I find this indefensible.

As a liberal, I find it unacceptable.

And as a human being, I find it abhorrent.

I also wish to pay a heartfelt tribute to the two other men executed at the same time as Patrice Emery Lumumba: Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito.

This moral responsibility of the Belgian government has been acknowledged, and I reaffirm it today, on this official day of farewell by Belgium to Patrice Emery Lumumba.”

De Croo also condemned Belgian colonialism in broader terms:

“Like slavery, the colonial model was, in itself, a pernicious system. It was indeed a model – a system – and it shamefully tarnishes the history of our country.

We must acknowledge this plainly and without evasion if we want to build a sincere and honest relationship with the countries we once occupied: the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi.

The Belgian government unequivocally condemns colonization as a system of governance and ideology – in the Congo, in Burundi, in Rwanda, and elsewhere.

This system led to serious violations of human rights, many forms of discrimination, and a fundamentally warped view of Africans among some Belgians.

That outlook has left traces that remain visible to this day and finds expression in acts of racism that still occur far too often in Belgian society.

I condemn this racism in the strongest possible terms. It is long past time to put an end to it once and for all.”

At the time of writing, it remains unclear if and when Étienne Davignon’s trial will begin. At 93, he is the only surviving person implicated in Lumumba’s murder.

Further reading:

Books:

The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis by David Gibbs (1991)

The Rise and Fall of Patrice Lumumba: Conflict in the Congo by Thomas R. Kanza (1994)

Peace Enforcement: The United Nations Experience in Congo, Somalia, and Bosnia by Jane Boulden (2001)

The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo De Witte (2001)

The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja (2002)

The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005)

Strategic Intelligence: Understanding the Hidden Side of Government by Loch K. Johnson (2006)

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (2007)

The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality by Thomas Turner (2007)

Lumumba: Africa’s Lost Leader by Leo Zeilig (2008)

Congo: The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck (2010)

Belgium and the Congo, 1885–1980 by Guy Vanthemsche (2012)

The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor by Martin Meredith (2014)

Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba by Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick (2015)

Katanga 1960–63: Mercenaries, Spies and the African Nation that Waged War on the World by Christopher Othen (2015)

Articles:

”The C.I.A. and Lumumba” by Madeleine G. Kalb for The New York Times (August 2, 1981)

Belgium must apologize for colonialism, face its racism” by Raf Casert for Associated Press (February 11, 2019)

”Belgian King Expresses ’Deepest Regrets’ For DR Congo Colonial Abuses” by BBC (June 30, 2020)

”The Widow Who Led A Bare-Chested Protest Against An Assassination” by Eromo Egbejule for OZY (July 5, 2020)

“Belgium returns Patrice Lumumba’s tooth to family 61 years after his murder” byv Jason Burke for The Guardian (June 20, 2022)

“Patrice Lumumba: Why Belgium is returning a Congolese hero’s golden tooth” by Damian Zane for BBC News (June 20, 2022)

“Belgium prime minister officially apologizes for the death of Patrice Lumumba” by Jean-Pierre Stroobants for Le Monde (June 21, 2022)

“Belgian court sends ex-diplomat, 93, to trial over 1961 murder of Congo leader” by Jennifer Rankin for The Guardian (March 17, 2026)

‘”Africa Will Write Its Own History.’ Who Was Patrice Lumumba?” by Matthew Mpoke Bigg for The New York Times (March 19, 2026)

Most people know the story of Rosa Parks, who in December 1955 refused to surrender her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her quiet act of defiance ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the defining actions of the modern American civil rights movement.

But nine months earlier, on March 2, 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin took a similar stand. Born in 1939, Colvin grew up poor and attended one of Montgomery’s segregated Black schools.

One afternoon, Colvin and three classmates boarded a city bus home. The first ten rows were reserved for white passengers, even though most riders were Black. The girls sat in the white section anyway. As the bus filled and a white woman was left standing, the driver ordered the young Black girls to give up their seats. Colvin’s friends complied. Colvin did not. Politically aware and unflinching, she stayed where she was.

Police arrested her for violating segregation laws, but she refused to accept the charge. Instead, she insisted on her constitutional right to sit wherever she chose. Colvin was not the first person to challenge bus segregation in this way, but she stood out for her determination to push the matter further, despite her age. She reached out to Fred Gray, one of only two Black attorneys practicing in Montgomery at the time.

The 1950s were a period when Black Americans were routinely subjected to violence: from the police, from the Ku Klux Klan, and from ordinary white citizens. For many activists, minimizing risk was therefore a matter of survival.

It was also before Malcolm X had emerged as a nationally prominent political figure, and long before the Black Panthers were founded. Within the civil rights movement, the prevailing belief was that Black Americans stood the best chance of achieving legal progress if they appeared respectable, articulate, and committed to nonviolence.

Activists held fast to this belief even as reality repeatedly contradicted it: police wielded batons, unleashed water cannons and dogs, while segregationists answered with ropes, torches, and bombs.

For these reasons, leaders of the local civil rights movement chose to remain silent about Colvin’s case for a long time. She was young, unemployed, and from a working-class background. She also soon became pregnant by a man she was not married to. Movement leaders feared that white media would easily discredit her, portraying her as morally suspect and undermining the broader struggle.

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Instead, Rosa Parks – 42 years old and a respected member of the NAACP – was positioned as the public face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Colorism likely played a role as well. Colvin was dark-skinned, Parks was light-skinned, and under prevailing racial assumptions, Parks was seen as less threatening and more sympathetic.

Parks was indispensable in mobilizing mass support for the movement. But in legal terms, Colvin’s impact was even greater. She was one of four plaintiffs – alongside Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith – in the landmark Browder v. Gayle case. In 1956, a federal court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional, a decision later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Due to the upheaval, Colvin afterwards moved to New York, where she worked for most of her adult life as a nursing assistant.

Today, news broke that Claudette Colvin has died, aged 86. She was one of the civil rights movement’s quieter giants – a reminder that behind its most celebrated icons stand countless others whose contributions were decisive, whose courage mattered, and whose names history too often leaves behind.

An equally vital lesson for today’s resistance movements.

In the days following the United States’ illegal military intervention in Venezuela, a barrage of statements poured out of Washington.

“The Cuban government should be concerned,” warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“The world is governed by strength, force, and power,” declared Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

“We need Greenland,” President Donald Trump repeated, almost casually.

The men in the White House appeared pleased with themselves, almost giddy – clearly intoxicated by the question of what else they might be able to force through at gunpoint.

But one of the more revealing statements slipped through in the form of a tweet. On X, @TrumpWarRoom, an account linked to the administration, posted a cartoon of a gigantic Trump towering over the Americas – from Canada in the north to Argentina in the south. In one hand, he grips a baton inscribed with the words “The Donroe Doctrine.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth then reshared the post.

The reference was anything but subtle. The cartoon is a nod to Louis Dalrymple’s classic early-20th-century illustration, circulated in satirical magazines such as Puck and Judge. In Dalrymple’s version, it is Uncle Sam who dominates the hemisphere, legs outstretched, holding a baton labeled “The Monroe Doctrine.”

That doctrine – issued in 1823 by President James Monroe – originally framed European involvement in the Americas as unacceptable. What began as an ostensibly anti-colonial position soon hardened into something else entirely: a declaration of American supremacy over the Western Hemisphere.

Anyone who believes the intervention in Venezuela represents a new geopolitical direction must either be naïve or profoundly ignorant of U.S. history in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. This is not a departure; it is a return. A return to a time when Washington openly regarded the region as its backyard, where leaders could be overthrown or installed at will, tribute extracted, and the rules dictated without apology.

What is new is how little the Trump administration feels compelled to disguise its intentions. Gone is the familiar rhetoric of democracy promotion or anti-communist crusades.

To be sure, preventing increased Chinese influence in South America is still muttered in the background, largely out of habit. And the attempt to rebrand the kidnapping of Venezuela’s controversial president, Nicolás Maduro, as a “law enforcement operation” – a legally legitimate police action – convinces no one. Vladimir Putin, who insists on calling the war in Ukraine a “special military operation,” would surely admire the terminology.

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Instead, Trump has been unusually blunt about what this is really about: oil. He’s interested in natural resource extraction, not free elections, civil liberties, or a free press. If democratic values were truly the concern, Trump could hardly defend his intimate ties to oil-rich Gulf monarchs or his warm relationships with autocrats such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Viktor Orbán.

In recent days, Trump has gone further still, announcing that Venezuelan oil will now be delivered directly to the United States, with the proceeds controlled by him. In an interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters, Vice President JD Vance doubled down on the message.

The takeover of Venezuela, he argued, benefits ordinary Americans because it gives the United States “control over Venezuela’s incredible natural resources,” ensuring that “Americans will always have access to high-quality, cheap energy.”

Trump’s posture recalls that of the British industrialist Cecil Rhodes, who was depicted like Trump and Uncle Sam in a strikingly similar cartoon as early as 1892.

But where Trump looms over the Americas, Rhodes stretched across Africa. The illustration – published in the satirical magazine Punch – showed Rhodes bestriding the continent, envisioning a continuous railway and telegraph line linking Britain’s African possessions from Egypt to South Africa. It was the visual manifesto of his ambition to bring “civilization” to a continent he and his contemporaries regarded as populated by “savages.”

But more than anything, Rhodes was motivated by raw extraction. In the 1870s, he threw himself into South Africa’s gold and diamond rushes. Through a series of dubious deals and ruthless consolidation, his company, De Beers, came to dominate the global diamond industry.

Like Trump, Rhodes was a businessman who then leveraged his wealth into political power, eventually ruling over entire territories: first the British Cape Colony, and later the colony he founded himself: Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe.

The illustration known as The Rhodes Colossus appeared at a moment when Britain no longer felt the need to justify or apologize for its empire. Imperial dominance was a fact, and there was no rival strong enough to challenge it meaningfully.

The Trump administration’s casual circulation of the Donroe Doctrine image signals something similar. The United States, it seems, has largely abandoned its previous charade. Less and less time is spent constructing moral justifications. More and more openly, the administration asserts that as the world’s most powerful nation, it has the right to seize the Panama Canal, demand minerals from Ukraine, annex Greenland, and, in short, trample the rest of us.

One of the lessons of the 21st century is that the label “terrorist” functions as a master key. Once applied, it unlocks every conceivable method of repression: mass surveillance, arbitrary detention, imprisonment without trial, even torture. All of it is rendered legitimate in the name of combating terrorism.

That Nicolás Maduro would ultimately meet this fate was therefore entirely predictable. The groundwork had been laid – from branding Venezuela a sanctuary for “narco-terrorists” to issuing executive orders that redefined fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. These steps formed a three-stage rocket: first, the destruction of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, then the hijacking of oil tankers, and finally the removal of Maduro himself.

A straight line runs from the Rhodesian Colossus to the Monroe Doctrine to the Donroe Doctrine: three images from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, each illustrating the same principle: the right of the strong to rule and plunder as they please.

Despite what Trump’s defenders insist – that his threats are merely rhetorical, that he is playing some unfathomably sophisticated game – it is long past time to take him at his word. His administration truly sees itself as a global overlord. The rest of the Americas, and by extension, the rest of the world, is simply something beneath its feet.

I’ve been covering developments in Sudan since 2019 and have, in recent years, been writing repeatedly about the devastating war now tearing the country apart. For example, see here for a thorough background or here for the latest on the fall of the city of el-Fasher. I’ve also written about the cynical whataboutism that pits Sudan’s suffering against Gaza’s.

Since the war erupted in the spring of 2023, one recurring theme in my reporting has been the role of the United Arab Emirates, a key architect of Sudan’s agony. The emirate has flooded the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) with money and weapons, many of which are imported from elsewhere. A militia that has made war crimes and genocide its hallmark. In the UAE, it has secured gold, fertile land, and an expanding regional influence.

With the RSF now controlling most of western Sudan and effectively splitting the country in two, it’s clearer than ever that this war will not end as long as the UAE remains its financial and logistical backbone. The international community must confront this fact and pressure the emirate to end its support.

That won’t be easy. The UAE is deeply entrenched in global finance, logistics, and trade. But governments must at least try. So far, though, the efforts have been minimal.

Take Sweden, for instance, the country where I live. Sweden maintains extensive and growing trade ties with the UAE, which has recently become the single largest importer of Swedish arms. This gives Sweden, and ideally the EU as a whole, some leverage – leverage that could be used to push the emirate toward ending its sponsorship of mass suffering.

Instead, we get statements like the one made by Swedish Minister for Foreign Trade and International Development Cooperation Benjamin Dousa in Aftonbladet on November 4, 2025. When asked how Sweden justifies trading with a country sponsoring human suffering on an incomprehensible level, he replied:

“When the US looks inward and raises tariffs, we need to find other markets to export our goods and services to. It’s about Swedish jobs and tax revenue for healthcare, education, and social care. The United Arab Emirates is the largest export market for Sweden in the Middle East, with over 250 Swedish companies operating there. Trade and exchange also create a platform for dialogue. The alternative to trade is isolation, making it difficult to achieve constructive dialogue and political agreements. Now we can use this platform and our good relations to address, for example, the situation in Sudan.”

As if boycotts, isolation, or diplomatic pressure were untested tools. As if the only way to influence a foreign regime were to keep selling it weapons. As if Swedish jobs and welfare depended on enabling war crimes.

The following day, November 5, Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard posted the following video on her Instagram:

1. Stenergard asked herself why people weren’t taking to the streets to support the people of Sudan – a strange question coming from a government that has spent two years labeling pro-Palestine demonstrators as loudmouths, savages, and “terror sympathizers,” while moving to restrict the right to protest.

2. Again: a concrete, immediate step Sweden and the EU could take to help end the war would be to halt, or at least curtail, arms sales to the United Arab Emirates. But Stenergard rejects that idea too. In an interview on the public radio show Studio Ett, she argued:

“If you are going to insist on that reasoning, then we would stop all forms of trade to all countries that do not think exactly as we think. That would leave us quite isolated.”

It’s a breathtaking display of double standards. Unfortunately, Sweden shares this with many other governments around the world. They condemn the horrors unfolding in Sudan, yet when presented with a tangible way to try and stop them, their hands are suddenly tied.

Over the past week, horrific images have emerged from Sudan, specifically from the western city of el-Fasher, which has just fallen to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Mass executions, kidnappings, and rapes have followed. According to the WHO, soldiers even stormed a maternity hospital and shot dead around 460 patients.

But for those who have been following Sudan’s ongoing disintegration, the scenes in el-Fasher will come as no surprise. Before finally falling, el-Fasher had endured an 18-month siege. Earlier this year, satellite images showed RSF digging a miles-long earthen barrier around the city, designed both to trap civilians inside and block food, medicine, and aid from getting in.

El-Fasher was already a more or less isolated city. Aside from a handful of treacherous desert paths, it is linked to the rest of Sudan by just one paved road – a road long held by the RSF. Desperate voices have therefore warned that RSF intends to turn the city into a “kill zone”. However, as is often the case with Sudan, their pleas for help went unanswered, and we are now witnessing the consequences of this indifference.

That el-Fasher’s fall was anticipated does not make it unavoidable. For years, aid groups, activists, and intelligence sources, inside Sudan and abroad, have sounded the alarm about the United Arab Emirates’ decisive role in bankrolling the RSF. Through Chad and Libya, vast shipments of weapons, military equipment, and advanced Chinese-made drones have been funneled to the militia in exchange for gold, fertile land, and other resources.

This covert intervention in Sudan is the clearest expression of the UAE’s expanding ambitions in Africa. From the Red Sea to West Africa, the Emirates has rapidly built a sprawling network of ports, logistics hubs, mines, and mineral concessions. This web has extraordinary influence over African nations, whose leaders trade away long-term sovereignty for personal enrichment and short-term fiscal relief.

It is a form of power projection that is not based on annexing territory but on taking control of the raw materials and trade routes that economically weaker states depend on.

Sudan fits perfectly into this strategy. Its gold has helped cement Dubai’s position as one of the world’s premier gold markets. Its farmland strengthens the UAE’s future food security. And its position along the Red Sea, one of the most vital maritime corridors on the planet, offers immense strategic leverage.

If it also succeeds in replacing Egypt as the most influential nation in the region, much will be gained. Egypt is still a sponsor of the Sudanese regular army (SAF), the RSF’s sworn enemy. Every stretch of land the RSF seizes weakens Cairo’s hand and expands Abu Dhabi’s. The unraveling of Sudan and the support of genocidal RSF forces make it tragically clear just how far the Emirates is willing to go to reshape the region to its advantage.

Yet despite its central role in one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes, the UAE – a luxury tourist haven, a major arms importer, and a celebrated Western ally – has faced no meaningful consequences. Western reluctance to pressure Abu Dhabi to end its support has, in a way, allowed the RSF’s unrelenting advance. It was recently revealed that British, Canadian, and other Western-made weapons have surfaced in the RSF’s hands. Arms that have reached the militia via the Emirates.

With the capture of el-Fasher, the last government-held provincial capital in the vast Darfur region, Sudan is now effectively split in two. The RSF controls the west, while the national army, the SAF, controls the east. Neither force has managed a decisive victory, and what lies ahead is a brutal stalemate in which ethnic cleansing, starvation, and economic collapse are allowed to grind on unchecked.

Since the war erupted in spring 2023, likely hundreds of thousands have been killed. Today, at least 25 million Sudanese need emergency aid, and 14 million have been displaced.

That the atrocities in el-Fasher have finally jolted Western politicians is welcome but painfully overdue. Sudanese voices have been pleading for help for years. Expressions of “deep concern” mean little when the weapons are already on the ground and the killing continues in real time.

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Yet it is not too late to shape the outcome of this war. The RSF has established a parallel government in western Sudan and clearly intends to retain the land it has conquered. But Sudan is enormous, and the RSF will struggle to establish a de facto state without ongoing support from the United Arab Emirates.

It is therefore high time for the rest of the world to reassess its relationship with the emirate. Restrict arms flows. Treat the gold traded in Dubai’s markets as a conflict mineral. Demand complete transparency about the UAE’s links to the RSF. Apply sustained diplomatic pressure, not polite hesitation.

But for that to happen, the fascination with the emirate’s excesses, or “unlimited cash” as Donald Trump recently put it, must be broken. The UAE is not merely a playground of beaches, chrome-glass towers, and unbridled shopping.

It is a country whose unscrupulous leaders are prepared to finance unimaginable levels of human suffering in their pursuit of a neocolonial African empire. Only when we face that reality of the emirate’s shameful involvement – and act on it – can Sudan have a chance to wake from its nightmare.

Further reading:

Books:

The Secret War in the Sudan: 1955–1972 by Edgar O’Ballance (1976)

War and Slavery in Sudan by Jok Madut Jok (2001

The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars: Peace Or Truce by Douglas H. Johnson (2003)

Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence by Jok Madut Jok (2007)

The State of Africa by Martin Meredith (2011)

South Sudan: From Revolution to Independence by Matthew LeRiche and Matthew Arnold (2012)

Breaking Sudan: The Search for Peace by Jok Madut Jok (2017)

Articles:

“The UAE’s Neo-Venetian Empire” by Brad Pearce on The Wayward Rabbler (June 22, 2025)

“UK military equipment used by militia accused of genocide found in Sudan, UN told” by Mark Townsend for The Guardian (28 October, 2025)

“Video evidence of atrocities emerges as Sudan’s RSF seizes el-Fasher” by al-Jazeera (October 28, 2025)

“Sudanese RSF militia killed 460 people at el-Fasher hospital, says WHO” by Lucy Fleming and Richard Kagoe for BBC (October 29, 2025)

”‘They killed civilians in their beds’: chaos and brutality reign after fall of El Fasher” by Zeinab Mohammed Salih for The Guardian (October 30, 2025)

“Survivors fleeing Sudan’s el-Fasher recount terror, bodies in streets” by al-Jazeera (October 30, 2025)

Other:

From Land to Logistics: UAE’s Growing Power in the Global Food System by GRAIN (July 3, 2024)

“Minerals (also) for Defence: Unlocking the Emirati Mining Rush” by Eleonora Ardemagni for Italian Institute for International Political Studies (July 23, 2024)

“Civilians Around Sudan’s El Fasher Face New Attacks” by Laetitia Bader for Human Rights Watch (April 11, 2025)

“Sudan at War: Internal Divisions, Regional Rivalries, and International Inertia” by Lucia Ragazzi and Sara de Simone for Italian Institute for International Political Studies (April 30, 2025)

In my previous article, I wrote about Sweden’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and the country’s enduring reluctance to confront the darker chapters of its past. A colonial amnesia that, until recently, and to some extent still today, shapes the way Sweden sees itself.

But this selective forgetting is far from a new invention. It has deep roots. In Swedish newspapers, travelogues, and books from the era, criticism of slavery was indeed common – yet it was most often directed at others. The horrors of American or French slavery were quite frequently condemned with moral outrage, while reports about what was happening on the Swedish colony of Saint Barthélemy were fewer and far more restrained.

The Swedish King Gustav III took the lead in obscuring the Swedish slave trade. This is made clear in The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808), written by the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.

Clarkson described a dilemma faced by anti-slavery campaigners in Britain: even if they succeeded in outlawing the slave trade at home, other nations might continue it. Sweden was one of the countries they feared would fill the gap.

To prevent that, Clarkson’s committee enlisted the Swedish naturalist and abolitionist Anders Sparrman to deliver a collection of British books on slavery to King Gustav III, hoping to persuade him to forbid Swedish participation in the trade.

According to Clarkson, the king responded that he had merely inherited Saint Barthélemy from France and that the island had already been populated by enslaved Africans. He claimed to be aware of their suffering but insisted that, to his knowledge, no Swedes were involved in the trade. He promised to do everything in his power to ensure that remained the case.

But Gustav III’s assurances were outright lies. Several years earlier, he and his royal council had granted a charter establishing the Swedish West India Company, explicitly permitting participation in the slave trade.

What’s more, the royal family was the company’s largest shareholder, and Gustav III himself was personally involved in managing the colony’s affairs.

Further reading:

The History of the Rise, Progress And Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade by the British Parliament by Thomas Clarkson (1808)

Den svenska kolonin S:t Barthélemy och Västindiska kompaniet fram till 1796 by Ingegerd Hildebrand (1951)

Ön som Sverige sålde by Bengt Sjögren (1966)

Det kungliga svenska slaveriet by Göran Skytte (1985)

Svarta Saint-Barthélemy: Människoöden i en svensk koloni 1785-1847 by Fredrik Thomasson (2022)

Until quite recently, both in Sweden and abroad, a comforting belief has persisted: that Sweden remained untouched by the crimes of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. It fit neatly into the romanticized image of Sweden as a moral beacon in a brutal world.

But in recent years, that myth has begun to unravel. The date October 9 has gained recognition as a day to remember the abolition of Swedish slavery – the day in 1847 when the last enslaved people on the Swedish colony of St. Barthélemy were finally freed.

New Sweden

Slavery was abolished in Sweden as early as 1335, but that didn’t prevent the kingdom from engaging in the slave trade elsewhere. One of its first colonial ventures was New Sweden, established in the 1630s in what is now Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

At least one enslaved African lived in the colony: Anthony Swart, who arrived aboard the ship Fågel Grip. The vessel had previously traveled through the Caribbean, where Swart was likely purchased. Swart is remembered today as the first named enslaved African in Delaware’s history.

Economic troubles soon weakened the colony, and by the 1650s, Sweden lost it to the Netherlands. But that did not end Swedish ambitions overseas.

Cabo Corso

In 1645, the Walloon-Swedish merchant and industrial magnate Louis De Geer had the idea of establishing an African colony. His eyes were set on the Gold Coast – modern-day Ghana – an area extremely rich in gold. He sought Queen Christina’s approval to establish the venture under the Swedish flag.

When the crown hesitated, De Geer took matters into his own hands. The following year, he dispatched a merchant ship to the coast of what is now Nigeria, where the crew purchased ivory and over two hundred enslaved Africans. The boat then crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, selling the survivors for sugar and tobacco – luxury goods in seventeenth-century Sweden.

When the ship returned to Gothenburg in 1647, the profits proved the trade’s potential. Among the cargo were four enslaved Africans, presented as gifts to the powerful Axel Oxenstierna, Lord High Chancellor of Sweden.

The success caught the crown’s attention. In 1649, after two more profitable voyages, De Geer finally received royal permission to form a trading company.

That same year, the Swedish Africa Company was founded. In 1650, it established the colony of Cabo Corso – today Cape Coast, Ghana – and soon seized a Dutch trading post, rebuilding it into a fortress called Karlsborg, in honor of Queen Christina’s successor, Charles X Gustav. Sweden was now ready to officially enter the transatlantic slave trade.

However, larger European powers fiercely guarded their colonial interests. After losing New Sweden, the Swedes no longer had a foothold in the Americas. Without their own plantations, they lacked a steady market for the enslaved people shipped from Africa and thus could not profit from the full “triangular trade.”

That triangular trade – ships leaving Europe loaded with weapons, textiles, and metals, exchanging them in Africa for enslaved people, transporting those people to the Americas, and returning to Europe with sugar, tobacco, rum, and cotton – was the engine of colonial wealth. But Sweden’s missing link in the triangle made it challenging to compete.

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The Africa Company improvised. It began trading with the Portuguese colony on the island of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the coast of Gabon, whose sugar plantations needed enslaved labor. In the 1650s, enslaved people from Karlsborg were shipped there in exchange for sugar and other goods.

By 1657, the Company had signed a contract to deliver 500–600 enslaved people to the Dutch colony of Curaçao.

The lure of wealth led to fierce competition along Africa’s west coast. European powers fought for control of the many slave forts lining the beaches – including Karlsborg, which repeatedly changed hands between the Danes, Dutch, and English. Sweden managed to hold it for only thirteen years before being forced out in 1663.

Blood Metals

Even after losing its African foothold, Sweden continued to profit indirectly from the slave trade. By the 18th century, Sweden had become Europe’s leading exporter of “voyage iron” – iron bars standardized in size, weight, and marking.

Ironworking had deep roots in West and Central Africa, where metal tools and weapons had been produced locally for a long time. However, new industrial techniques in Europe significantly increased output, making imported iron cheaper and more abundant. As a result, ”voyage iron” became a key currency in the buying and selling of enslaved people

Other forms of Swedish iron were equally sought after. It had many uses, including the crafting of rifle barrels and the shackles that bound enslaved people during transport.

Saint-Barthélemy

The failure of Sweden’s first colonial venture, Cabo Corso, did little to discourage further ambitions. Just over a century later, Sweden tried again – this time in the Caribbean, on the small island of Saint-Barthélemy.

Originally colonized by France in 1648, the island was ceded to Sweden in 1784 in exchange for free trading rights in Gothenburg. Although picturesque, Saint-Barthélemy had little to offer in terms of natural resources or fertile land, making large-scale plantations impossible. Instead, the Swedes decided to transform it into a free port – a neutral trading hub poised to profit from the turbulence of the post–American Revolutionary era, when new naval conflicts seemed imminent.

When Sweden took over, the island’s population numbered between 700 and 800 people – roughly a third were enslaved Africans, the rest free whites, primarily French.

The slave trade was quickly woven into the island’s new economy. The 1790 tariff explicitly made the import of enslaved Africans duty-free.

Exporting enslaved people, however, was taxed – though Swedish ships paid only half the duty, an incentive meant to bolster Sweden’s role in the trade. Through a charter from King Gustav III, the Swedish West India Company received exclusive Swedish rights to conduct all commerce on the island.

When the first Swedes – initially merchants, then civil servants, and a small contingent of soldiers – arrived, they began constructing a new port town on the western part of the island. Both free whites and enslaved people were recruited to work on its construction. The settlement was named Gustavia, after Sweden’s king.

The island’s free port status soon attracted traders and fortune seekers, especially after the French Revolutionary Wars broke out in 1792. As Europe descended into a decade of war, Saint-Barthélemy’s neutrality became a magnet for commerce. By 1800, Gustavia had grown to around five thousand inhabitants, making it one of the most populous cities in the Swedish Empire.

Sweden’s rule did not improve conditions for the enslaved. In 1787, the Code Noir was introduced, dividing the population into whites, enslaved people, and “free colored people” – a term for Black individuals who had been freed or were born to free mothers. They were allowed to own property but denied the right to participate in politics. Today, the group is generally referred to as free Blacks, as the original label assumes whiteness as the norm.

The Swedish version of the Code Noir, approved by the Supreme Court in Stockholm, was essentially a copy of the French model. It set out rules for punishment, curfews, and movement, as well as social restrictions. Enslaved people continued to be imported from Africa and other Caribbean islands.

Since enslaved people legally owned nothing, punishments such as fines or imprisonment were not applied. Instead, corporal punishment was the norm. The most common was whipping with the so-called “negro whip”: victims were tied face-down between four poles and beaten across the back.

If the victim was a pregnant woman, a hole was dug in the ground to accommodate her belly – a gesture meant to “protect” the unborn child. Other punishments included branding, neck irons, and even execution.

It was also common for white men on the island to keep Black concubines. The mixed-race children born from these relationships were enslaved unless their fathers formally freed them. Freedom for free Blacks remained precarious – they could be re-enslaved for offenses such as sheltering fugitives.

The Code Noir also forbade them from carrying weapons, practicing medicine, or even holding weddings or social gatherings without permission from the Swedish military commander. They were “free,” especially compared to the enslaved, but they still faced intense discrimination.

Decline of the Swedish Colony

For a brief period, Saint-Barthélemy flourished. However, the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Anglo-American War of 1815 brought about significant changes. In times of peace, a neutral trading port was far less profitable.

Over the following decades, hurricanes and fever epidemics devastated the island, killing hundreds and destroying buildings. What had once been envisioned as a source of wealth for Sweden became a financial burden.

Meanwhile, the abolition movement was gaining strength across Europe. Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 – though not slavery itself – yet on Saint-Barthélemy, human trafficking continued.

Sweden even sought to expand its presence in the Caribbean. In 1813, it briefly acquired the island of Guadeloupe, a major producer of sugar. But diplomatic negotiations following the Napoleonic Wars forced Sweden to return it just a year later.

After decades of British pressure, Sweden finally agreed to abolish slavery in 1845. Before doing so, however, the state had to compensate slave owners. It took two years to raise the necessary funds, and on October 9, 1847, all enslaved people on Saint-Barthélemy were freed. Many are believed to have left the island soon afterward.

Not everyone in Sweden supported the decision. In a speech to the House of Nobility, Count Johan August Anckarsvärd complained:

“The Estates have granted hundreds of thousands of riksdaler for the redemption of black slaves on Barthélemy, but they have never felt sorry for the fate of their white, tax-paying brothers here at home.”

The remark was quoted in Aftonbladet on December 7, 1847.

The End of Sweden’s Colonial Era

In the following years, the island declined. Poverty deepened, public buildings decayed, and residents emigrated in large numbers. By the 1870s, Saint-Barthélemy had become a drain on Sweden’s treasury.

In 1877, publicist Hugo Nisbeth visited the colony on behalf of the Swedish Ministry of Finance. He reported on widespread misrule, noting that governors had lived “as noble gentlemen” while neglecting the population. His findings, published in the Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning, urged reforms to prevent the island from becoming a “dying colony” and instead transform it into a “rich and glorious paradise.”

But it was too late. That same year, Sweden reached an agreement with France – Saint-Barthélemy’s original colonial ruler – to return the island. A referendum sealed the deal: out of more than 2,000 residents, only around 350 voted, and just one person wished to remain under Swedish rule. On March 16, 1878, the handover was completed, marking the end of Sweden’s colonial era.

Remembering a Forgotten History

Sweden never became a major player in the transatlantic slave trade – its share of the total trade was minuscule. Yet the ambition was real. As historian Fredrik Thomasson notes in the acclaimed Svarta Saint-Barthélemy: Människoöden i en svensk koloni 1785-1847:

“What saved Sweden from participating in the worst crimes of slavery was its failure to participate in the, of hunger for profit, cruelty of plantation agriculture. However, Sweden’s ambition was to participate in the plantation economy, and attempts to obtain additional colonies continued into the nineteenth century. When Sweden was awarded Guadeloupe by Britain in 1813, there was great enthusiasm, and had Guadeloupe remained Swedish, Swedish slavery would have turned out differently.”

Despite growing awareness, Thomasson argues that a double colonial amnesia still prevails – a forgetting of both Sweden’s abuses against Black populations and its failed colonial ambitions.

That is why October 9 remains such an important date: a reminder that Sweden’s past, too, was entangled in the global systems of slavery and colonialism – and a call to make it an official day of remembrance.

Further reading:

Books:

Den svenska kolonin S:t Barthélemy och Västindiska kompaniet fram till 1796 by Ingegerd Hildebrand (1951)

Ön som Sverige sålde by Bengt Sjögren (1966)

Det kungliga svenska slaveriet by Göran Skytte (1985)

Africans in New Sweden: The Untold Story by Abdullah R. Muhammad (2013)

”Den svenska slavhandelns fader” by Mats Granberg for Norrköpings Tidningar (July 17, 2014)

Svarta Saint-Barthélemy: Människoöden i en svensk koloni 1785-1847 by Fredrik Thomasson (2022)

Scholarly articles:

”Foreign Markets for Swedish Iron in the 18th Century” by Karl-Gustaf Hildebrand i Scandinavian Economic History Review (vol. 6, nr 1, 1958)

”32 piskrapp vid quatre piquets. Svensk rättvisa och slavlagar på Saint Barthélemy” by Fredrik Thomasson in Historielärarnas förenings årsskrift (2013)

”’Voyage Iron’: An Atlantic Slave Trade Currency, its European Origins, and West African Impact” by Chris Evans and Göran Rydén in Past & Present (vol. 239, nr 1, 2018)

Articles:

Article without headline on page 2 of Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning (March 8, 1877)

”Det svenska slavjärnet” by Jan Lönn for Dagens Nyheter (November 13, 2007)

”Sveriges slavhistoria avslöjad” by Niklas Zachrisson for svt.se (October 7, 2013)

”När Sverige skulle bli kolonialmakt” by Hans Norman for Populär Historia (March 14, 2001)

”Slavhandeln lyfte Sverige” by Maria Ripenberg for Upsala Nya Tidning (October 6, 2014)

”Sveriges omstridda strategi – i avskaffandet av slavhandeln” bt Martin Schibbye för Blankspot (June 25, 2020)

Other:

Handelskompanier och kompanihandel: Svenska Afrikakompaniet 1649–1663: En studie i feodal handel” by György Nováky (1990)

”Svensk handel med slavar 1784–1847. Varför infördes och avskaffades slaveriet på den svenska kolonin S:t Barthélemy” by Martin Schibbye at University of Stockholm (2007)

”Svenska järn- och stålindustrins historia” by Jernkontoret (November 21, 2018)

JoAnne Deborah Byron was born in New York in 1947 but spent parts of her childhood in the Jim Crow South of segregated North Carolina. As a young woman, she enrolled at a community college in Manhattan, where she was quickly drawn into activist circles. There, she was introduced to socialist ideas and global independence struggles that connected Harlem to global liberation movements.

Byron found the argument persuasive that racism could not be defeated without also dismantling capitalism. Yet she kept her distance from the socialist groups she encountered – she bristled at the arrogance of their mostly older white members, who insisted they alone knew the path to Black freedom.

After finishing community college, Byron entered the City College of New York, where she met fellow student Louis Chesimard, whose revolutionary zeal matched her own.

They married in 1967, but their union was short-lived. JoAnne Chesimard, as she now called herself, spent nearly every waking hour in class, at meetings, or in protests. Her husband, who had imagined a traditional housewife, found himself with a partner whose only kitchen specialty was spaghetti. They divorced after just over a year.

Free from marriage, JoAnne Chesimard moved west to Oakland, California – the birthplace of the Black Panther Party and a hotbed of radical politics. In Oakland, she connected with the Red Guard Party, a group of young Chinese Americans fighting abysmal conditions in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and the Brown Berets, Chicano activists who resisted the Vietnam War, battled police brutality, and stood up for farmworkers’ rights.

Connecting liberation movements across racial boundaries, and even finding common ground with independence movements in Africa, South America, and Asia, was a key agenda item for the American civil rights movement in the late 1960s. For Chesimard, this bridging of struggles felt natural.

From the Black Panthers to the Black Liberation Army

Still, the group that most captured her imagination was the Black Panthers. Their radical politics, bold rhetoric, and striking visual style made a deep impression. She visited their headquarters, got to know members, and did odd jobs, though she initially stopped short of joining.

That changed in the early 1970s, when the government’s efforts to prosecute Black Panther icon Angela Davis made headlines. Chesimard resolved that once back in New York, she would join the Harlem branch of the Panthers. Around this time, she also chose a new name: Assata Shakur. Identifying as an African woman, she felt the name expressed her true self.

As a Panther, her first role was in the group’s health department, where she scheduled dental visits, taught first aid, and raised awareness about sickle cell anemia.

She later joined the famous breakfast program that fed thousands of poor schoolchildren across U.S. cities. Every morning, Panthers gathered in churches and community centers to prepare meals, ensuring that children could arrive at school nourished and ready to learn.

Over time, however, Shakur became increasingly dissatisfied with the Black Panthers’ leadership and direction. She felt that there was no room for constructive criticism and that the organization was characterized by a lack of routines, problems that were exacerbated by the paranoia that had taken root among members as a result of the FBI’s infiltration and divisive tactics. The FBI viewed the Black Panthers as a domestic terrorist organization and, as part of the illegal and then-unknown COINTELPRO program, sought to disrupt and sabotage the group.

On top of that, Shakur was angered by the male chauvinism that kept women in subordinate roles.

In 1971, she broke away and joined the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Its exact size and significance remain debated: police called it an armed urban guerrilla force bent on assassinating officers. They even labeled it a terrorist sect funded through bank robberies. Authorities cast Shakur as the movement’s “soul,” tying her to murders and armed robberies.

Shakur herself rejected that portrayal. She described the BLA not as a formal group but as a loose network of Black revolutionaries committed to self-defense and liberation. To her, the accusations were part of a smear campaign designed to discredit a popular movement born out of oppression.

It’s still not fully established how the Black Liberation Army started. The movement probably gained new members as a result of the FBI’s opposition to the Black Panthers. In its 1975 manifesto, following the BLA’s attempt to centralize its organization, the group stated that anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and anti-sexism were the movement’s watchwords.

New Jersey Turnpike Shootout

On the night of May 2, 1973, Assata Shakur was driving along the New Jersey Turnpike with two other BLA members, Zayd Shakur and Sundiata Acoli, when state troopers pulled them over for speeding. What happened next is disputed.

What’s clear is that a shootout erupted, leaving Zayd Shakur and one officer dead, Assata Shakur and the other officer wounded. Assata fled in the chaos but was caught within half an hour. Acoli evaded capture for 36 hours before being arrested in a massive manhunt.

Gravely injured, Assata was taken to a hospital where she insisted she had not fired a weapon. From her hospital bed, she was interrogated and, according to her testimony, beaten whenever staff left the room – claims the police denied. She was later transferred into custody to await trial.

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Determined to silence one of the Black Liberation Army’s most visible figures, the state hit Assata Shakur with a barrage of charges: bank robberies, kidnappings, even murder. Over the next few years, seven cases went to trial. In six, the prosecutions collapsed through acquittals, lack of evidence, or sheer technicalities.

The seventh trial was different. Although fellow BLA member Sundiata Acoli had already been convicted of killing the state trooper in the 1973 New Jersey shootout, prosecutors argued that Shakur’s very presence made her an accessory to murder, whether or not she had fired a bullet. In February 1977, a nine-week, media-saturated trial began.

Testimony clashed. Shakur insisted she had never touched a weapon, that she had her arms raised when police shot her. A surviving officer swore she had fired first. Shakur’s lawyers called a neurologist and a pathologist, both of whom testified that her injuries indicated that she had had her hands in the air when she was shot.

Yet the odds were stacked: all fifteen jurors were white, and five had close ties to state troopers. On March 25, 1977, the verdict came down: life in prison.'

Serving Time

After the verdict, she was transferred to Rikers Island in New York. By then, Shakur was pregnant. That September, under heavy guard at a Queens hospital, she gave birth to her daughter Kakuya, fathered by Kamau Sadiki (formerly Fred Hilton), himself a co-defendant in another case. Days later, she was sent back to Rikers Island, where she would endure nearly two years in solitary confinement while her mother raised the baby.

Prison transfers followed. In 1978, she was moved to West Virginia’s Alderson Federal Prison Camp, confined in a maximum-security unit she said was shared with members of the “Aryan Sisterhood.” Two months later, she was relocated again, this time to the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey.

The Escape

Her comrades in the Black Liberation Army had not forgotten her. To fund a rescue, BLA members robbed a New Jersey department store. On November 2, 1979, three of them entered the prison with fake IDs, smuggled guns inside, and took two guards hostage. Within minutes, they spirited Shakur out, hijacked a police van, and vanished. They drove the bus to a parking lot where they abandoned the vehicle and the two prison guards, before jumping into two getaway cars.

The FBI unleashed a sweeping manhunt across New York and New Jersey. But the search met resistance: communities often greeted wanted posters with signs declaring, “Assata Shakur is welcome here.”

For years, she lived underground. Then, in 1984, she resurfaced in Cuba, granted political asylum on the grounds that her trial had been unjust. Her presence became public in 1987, when she gave an interview to Newsday and published her influential memoir, Assata: An Autobiography. Her daughter soon joined her on the island.

From exile, Assata Shakur became one of the most influential yet controversial figures in the Black liberation movement. For many, she was the embodiment of radical resistance to racism, police brutality, and state oppression. She was considered the godmother of legendary rapper 2Pac and has long enjoyed iconic status in hip-hop.

But for others, who buy the U.S. authorities’ version of events in the turnpike shooting, she was little more than a police killer.

Despite escaping the law, the authorities never let up. In 2013, she became the first woman to appear on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list. Both the FBI and New Jersey offered $1 million each for information leading to her arrest.

Several attempts were made to extradite her, including by President Donald Trump in 2017. Trump used her extradition as one of the demands for the United States to continue the thawing process that was started under Barack Obama. But Cuba consistently refused.

On September 26, Cuban authorities announced that Assata Shakur had died the previous day, from health problems and advanced age. Her passing is sure to reignite debate over her life and legacy.

With her many decades on the island, Shakur became one of the biggest names to survive the violent repression of Black freedom movements by the American state.

Cuba had been her refuge. It was where she found safety, where she raised her daughter, where she wrote her story. And in the end, it was where she died.

Exiled, but free.

Further reading:

Books:

Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur (1987)

Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Black Panthers and Their Legacy by Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (editors.) (2001)

Articles:

”Evidence of ’Liberation Army’ Said to Rise” by Michael T. Icaufman for New York Times (February 17, 1972)

”Panther, Trooper Slain in Shoot-out” by Joseph F. Sullivan for New York Times (May 3, 1973)

”Group Claims Role in Florida Killings” for New York Times (June 24, 1974)

”Jury in Chesimard Murder Trial Listens to State Police Radio Tapes” by Walter H. Waggoner for New York Times (February 17, 1977)

”Joanne Chesimard Convicted in Killing Of Jersey Trooper” by Walter H. Waggoner for New York Times (March 26, 1977)

”Miss Chesimard Flees Jersey Prison, Helped By 3 Armed ’Visitors’” by Robert Hanley for New York Times (November 3, 1979)

”On the run with Assata Shakur” by Ron Howell for Newsday (October 11, 1987)

”Fugitive Murderer Reported in Cuba” by John. T McQuiston for New York Times (October 12, 1987)

”Assata Shakur was convicted of murder. Is she a terrorist?” by Krissah Thompson for Washington Post (May 8, 2013)

”Trump to Cuba: Return woman convicted in trooper’s murder” by Associated Press (June 16, 2017)

”Cuba Won’t Negotiate Trump’s New Policy” by Aria Bendix for The Atlantic (June 19, 2017)

”Assata Shakur, convicted of killing a police officer, still wanted by FBI 40 years after fleeing to Cuba” by Christina Carrega for ABC News (May 16, 2019)

Other:

Message to the Black Movement: A Political Statement from the Black Underground by The Black Liberation Army Coordinating Committee (1975)

”The Black Liberation Army: Understanding – Monitoring – Controlling” by The Maryland State Police Criminal Intelligence Division (1991)

Today's episode of the Black History Unveiled podcast is about an incredibly impactful moment in world history – one that reshaped not only the African continent but also the Western world. It influenced the development of modern Europe and the formation of Black diasporas across the globe.

Today's episode is about the Berlin Conference: perhaps one of the most famous events in the West tied to Africa – yet also one of the most misunderstood.

Black History Unveiled is found wherever you get your podcasts.

Further reading:

Books:

Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism by Ronald Robinson, John Andrew Gallagher and Alice Denny (1961)

The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912by Thomas Pakenham (1991)

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild (2001)

Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law by Antony Anghie (2005)

The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000­-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor by Martin Meredith (2014)

The Scramble for Africa by Muriel Evelyn Chamberlain (2014)

Scholarly articles:

"Heritage of Strife: The Effects of Colonialist "Divide and Rule" Strategy upon the Colonized Peoples" by Richard Morrock in Science & Society (vol. 37, nr. 2, 1973)

"Reflections on the Berlin West Africa Conference, 1884-1885" by G. N. Uzoigwe in Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria (vol. 12, nr. 3/4, December 1984-June 1985)

"Review: 'Blundering and Plundering': The Scramble for Africa Relived" by A.G. Hopkins in The Journal of African History (vol. 34, nr. 3, 1993)

"Colonial Style and Post-Colonial Ethnic Conflict in Africa" av Robert Blanton, T. David Mason and Brian Athow in Journal of Peace Research (vol. 38, nr. 4, 2001)

"Sweden-Norway at the Berlin Conference 1884–85: History, National Identity-making and Sweden’s Relations with Africa” by David Nilsson in Current African Issues (nr. 53, 2013)

"Between Law and History: The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and the Logic of Free Trade" by Matthew Craven in London Review of International Law (vol. 3, nr. 1, 2015)

Other:

”General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa, 26 February 1885”

Sudan is collapsing before our eyes – and the world looks away. Colonial divisions, unhealed civil wars, and the scramble for the country's riches have created the foundation for today's catastrophe. The result is a nation in free fall, where ordinary people pay the ultimate price.

The land that comprises Sudan has a history stretching back thousands of years. But as a modern state, it is barely older than a lifetime. Independence came in 1956, after nearly sixty years of joint British-Egyptian rule in name, but near-total British control in practice.

A Complicated View on Ethnicity

Sudan has always been diverse: nearly a hundred languages, countless communities, and millennia of migration. Too often, its history has been flattened into a simplistic north–south divide: Arab Muslim northerners versus Black African southerners, who were predominantly Christian or adherents of indigenous religions.

It's difficult not to generalize when discussing ethnicity in Sudan. The area has been inhabited since prehistoric times, and it's here where some of Africa's earliest state formations arose. The influential Kerma emerged as early as 4,500 years ago, followed by the kingdom of Kush, which for a long time rivaled Egypt for power along the northern Nile.

From the 7th century AD, Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula began to move further south from the Egypt they had conquered. They failed to subjugate Sudan militarily, but gradually new trade links emerged. The slave trade became a central part, where people from various Sudanese ethnic groups were taken to Egypt and further into the Muslim world.

Over the following centuries, numerous ethnic groups settled in Sudan, from Bedouins from the east to Nilotic peoples from the south. New communities emerged where language, religion, and identity merged.

In the Middle Ages, Christian Nubian monarchies were gradually toppled by advancing Muslim kingdoms. In the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire invaded via one of its satellite states, Egypt. This made the population even more mixed and created new conflicts over land, power, and religion.

The simplification in portraying Sudan's historical conflict as a battle between Arabs and Africans is based on the fact that the country's different ethnic groups have intermarried "across borders" for centuries and that one's identity depends on more than just skin color. The language one speaks and the religion one subscribes to play equally, if not more, important roles.

Someone who identifies as an Arab can, in principle, have as dark a skin tone as someone who identifies as African. And many simply identify as a mix and embrace both.

But rulers, colonial and postcolonial alike, have consistently amplified the division between "Black" and "Arab", Muslim and non-Muslim, in an attempt to maintain political power.

Colonial Segregation

British rule deepened inequality. Investment poured into the north: irrigation systems, railways, ports, schools, and hospitals. The south was deliberately left underdeveloped. This was part of the so-called indirect rule, a tactic the British used in many parts of Africa. The reasons were many:

There were geographical, economic, and logistical motives. Northern Sudan was closer to the Mediterranean and Britain, and was therefore easier to connect to the already existing, but constantly expanding, trade networks. Cotton production, vital for the British textile industry, also had the greatest potential in the north.

But racial beliefs of the time also contributed. The British considered the northern Muslim "Arabs" to be closer to the white race and therefore better suited to administration and a certain degree of self-government. While the "Africans" in the south were seen as primitive and incapable of managing themselves.

Over the years, this distinction created enormous political, economic, military, and cultural inequality. As a result, Northern Sudan came to dominate when the country became independent. Of the approximately eight hundred jobs that the British left behind in the state apparatus, only six went to civil servants from Southern Sudan.

In August 1955, six months before independence, southern soldiers mutinied at the prospect of being commanded by northern officers. The uprising was crushed, but instability set in. In November 1958, the military took power in the country through a coup led by General Ibrahim Abboud.

His vision was to unify Sudan by spreading Islam in the south. Mosques were built, the day of rest was changed from Sunday to Friday, and southern Sudanese were restricted in their practice of Christianity or indigenous religions.

With these tactics, peace wouldn't last long.

Decades of Civil War

From the late 1950s onwards, Sudan lurched between coups, juntas, and fragile governments in what is known as the First Sudanese Civil War. In 1972, the parties reached an agreement that ended the fighting and marked the beginning of the country's longest period of sustained peace.

It lasted only eleven years. The fundamental disputes had never been resolved, and in 1983, Sudan's Second Civil War broke out. The background was complicated:

• The country's centralized rule marginalized many from political influence, and there was a struggle for control over natural resources – particularly the oil that had been discovered in the south in the late 1970s.

• The south was also upset by what it saw as continued neglect. It had too little influence over the economy and still lacked significant investment in various infrastructure and development projects.

• In 1983, Sudan's then-President Jaafar al-Nimeiry allied himself with the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Turabi's National Islamic Front (NIF), and introduced Sharia law in the country's non-Muslim south. This was seen by many South Sudanese as a major betrayal, as they had been promised cultural and religious autonomy under the previous peace treaty.

The repression spread rapidly: the country's institutions were purged of dissenters, political opponents were imprisoned without trial, and prisoners were tortured.

Colonel John Garang responded by founding the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in 1983, vowing to fight for a democratic, secular Sudan.

The war was brutal: scorched-earth tactics, international aid being withheld, famine wielded as a weapon, and millions forced to flee. However, between 1986 and 1988, progress was made in the negotiations, and a ceasefire and a pause in Sharia law were proposed, among other things.

But hopes for peace were dashed in 1989 when Sudanese soldiers once again took over in a military coup, this time led by Colonel Omar al-Bashir.

Omar al-Bashir's Thirty-Year Rule

Al-Bashir made no secret of his intentions. Shortly after taking power, he appeared at a rally with a Quran in one hand and an AK-47 in the other. He declared to the crowd:

"I vow here before you to purge from our ranks the renegades, the hirelings, enemies of the people and enemies of the armed forces. Anyone who betrays the nation does not deserve the honour of living."

Al-Bashir wanted to create an Islamist dictatorship. He shut down newspapers, banned unions, declared that Sharia law would continue, severely restricted women's rights, and opposed Sudan's non-Arab cultures.

But even Muslims who, for various reasons, opposed the development were punished harshly. In 1992, al-Bashir's scholars issued a fatwa stating that:

"An insurgent who was previously a Muslim is now an apostate, and a non-Muslim is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam; Islam has granted the license to kill both of them."

Unsurprisingly, the civil war continued, with human suffering on an immense scale. Despite the noble words about democracy and religious freedom, the SPLA also committed gross abuses, while the government and its allies even resorted to enslavement in their battles against their southern rivals.

Soon, the resistance movement split into several factions, between rebels who sought a unified secular Sudan and those who aimed for an independent South Sudan. Several of the warring parties kidnapped civilians and recruited child soldiers.

When a peace agreement was finally reached in 2005, up to two million people had died, and many more had fled. As part of the agreement, southern Sudan was to hold a referendum on whether to remain part of the nation or secede.

In January 2011, 98.83 percent of the participants voted in favor of secession, and the new country of South Sudan was formed.

The Darfur War

If the first and second Sudanese civil wars are often simplified as battles between the north and the south, the Darfur conflict can be seen as a struggle between the country's center and its neglected western regions.

In 2003, two rebel groups – the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) – took up arms, citing both systemic discrimination against Darfur's non-Arab population and a deeply unequal distribution of power. The region, vast in size, had long been sidelined by Khartoum, and its people had grown weary of being ignored.

Their calls for influence were met with terror, and as the southern war neared its end, a new war erupted in the west.

President Omar al-Bashir once again reached for the weapon he knew best: ethnic cleansing. Sudan's air force bombed villages, women were subjected to mass rape, and government-sponsored militias known as the Janjaweed were given free rein to murder, loot, and sexually assault the largely non-Arab population.

The toll was staggering. Up to 400,000 people were killed, millions displaced, and the world labeled the atrocities a genocide. For a brief moment in the mid-2000s, Darfur was thrust into the global spotlight – with George Clooney-led campaigns and high-profile fundraising drives. But as so often before, international attention soon drifted elsewhere.

The violence, however, did not.

Under al-Bashir, torture, systematic rape, and even modern slavery remained tools of repression. Peace proved elusive, in part because the rebel movements splintered, just as they had in the south, turning on one another as their agendas diverged.

Two peace agreements were signed – in Abuja in 2006 and in Doha in 2011 – but the fighting has never completely stopped.

Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court indicted al-Bashir between 2008 and 2010 for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. He dodged justice for years, dismissing the charges as Western neo-colonialism and carefully avoiding travel to states that might arrest him.

Yet after three decades in power, what finally toppled al-Bashir was not international justice, but his own collapsing economy.

A Hijacked Sudanese Revolution

In December 2018, soaring living costs ignited protests across many Sudanese cities. What began as calls for economic reform soon evolved into demands for the resignation of Omar al-Bashir. The government answered peaceful demonstrations with violence, and by February 2019, al-Bashir declared a state of emergency in a desperate bid to hold on to power.

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One young woman came to embody the uprising: 22-year-old Alaa Salah. In an image that would travel the world, she stood atop a car, draped in a white robe, one finger pointed skyward. In that moment, during the spring when everything seemed possible, she became the face of Sudan's democratization. The symbol of the young, most of them women, who led the protest movement that would culminate in the Sudanese revolution.

Al-Bashir had long relied on the military to keep him in power, but this time the army turned against him. A wave of demonstrations, capped by a week-long sit-in at military headquarters, led the country's armed forces to oust him. On April 11, 2019, al-Bashir was deposed and placed under house arrest.

However, the revolution's triumph was quickly snatched away. Rather than handing power to civilians, the army took control through the so-called Transitional Military Council (TMC). Protesters remained in the streets.

The TMC was officially led by Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, but many Sudanese believed the real power lay with his deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.

A warlord with blood on his hands from Darfur, Hemedti commanded the Janjaweed militias, notorious for a myriad of war crimes. Rebranded in 2013 as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), his paramilitary operated under al-Bashir's government but, after the revolution, became the muscle of the TMC. It was the RSF that spearheaded the brutal crackdown on demonstrators in June 2019, culminating in the Khartoum massacre.

With mediation by Ethiopia and the African Union, the military and civilian leaders struck a fragile power-sharing deal in July 2019. Shortly after, Abdalla Hamdok was appointed Prime Minister, and the plan was to hold democratic elections in 2022.

But a spiraling economic crisis, worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, exposed bitter disagreements over how power should be divided and how the transition to civilian rule would proceed. By the fall of 2021, al-Burhan and Hemedti scrapped the experiment entirely, seizing power in another coup. Civilian leaders were arrested, Hamdok was placed under house arrest, and Sudan's democratic dream went up in smoke.

Protests erupted once more, but the military crushed them with force. In January 2022, Hamdok formally resigned. The coup drew condemnation from the UN, EU, and African Union, and in its wake, Sudan's economic emergency only deepened.

Al-Burhan remained as Sudan's de facto leader, yet Hemedti's influence was also formidable. His RSF had previously gained control of a significant share of Sudan's gold mines, wealth he funneled to foreign patrons. Shipments went to the United Arab Emirates and Russia's Wagner Group in exchange for weapons and political support. RSF fighters, meanwhile, sold their services as mercenaries in the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen's horrific civil war, cementing Hemedti's role as both warlord and international player.

Sudan's ongoing civil war

Despite years of cooperation, the alliance between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hemedti quickly began to fray. They clashed over how much influence loyalists of former dictator Omar al-Bashir should retain and, crucially, on the timetable for when the RSF would formally become part of the Sudanese regular army (SAF).

In April 2023, after months of rising tensions, RSF soldiers mobilized across the country. SAF troops ordered them to disperse, but they refused. A few days later, everything exploded. Days later, Khartoum was engulfed in explosions and heavy gunfire. The assault came so suddenly that civilians had no chance to seek safety. Within days, the violence spread nationwide.

Sudan had plunged into another civil war.

The speed and cruelty of the conflict were embodied in the fate of Khamis Abakar. Once a commander in the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM), which fought the Janjaweed militias in Darfur during the 2000s, Abakar had been elected governor of West Darfur by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok in 2020 as part of the post-revolution reforms.

In June 2023, RSF shelled several residential areas with artillery, killing scores of civilians. Abakar went on television to denounce the attacks. He named the RSF as perpetrators, warned of genocide, and pleaded for international help. Hours later, RSF fighters abducted him. He was tortured to death, and footage of his mutilated body being dragged behind a car and stoned was circulated online.

Dozens of militias have joined the fighting, but at the national level, the central conflict remains a struggle between al-Burhan's SAF and Hemedti's RSF – a deadly tug of war that is currently tearing the nation apart.

Foreign powers, from Russia and Iran to Egypt and Ethiopia, have made the situation even worse, their involvement primarily driven by the lure of Sudan's vast natural resources.

But none has been more influential than the United Arab Emirates, whose ambitions to dominate the region have grown steadily. For years, the Gulf state has sought control over Africa's gold. Estimates suggest that $35 billion worth of gold is smuggled out of the continent annually, with as much as 85 percent passing through the UAE, which then becomes an intermediary in trade with the rest of the world.

The RSF's seizure of Sudan's gold mines has cemented this relationship. By channeling money to Hemedti's forces, the UAE guarantees itself a steady supply of the mineral. Yet its support is not just financial. Reports indicate that the Emirates have facilitated arms deliveries as well. In September 2024, the New York Times revealed that an Emirati "aid center" had been used to smuggle weapons and operate drones. The country is therefore a direct reason why the war is so protracted, why the RSF can prey on so many.

No end in sight

As always, it is ordinary people who pay the highest price when power-hungry men and expansionist states collide. Sudan's humanitarian crisis is now among the worst in the world.

There is no "winner" in sight. Instead, the country teeters on the edge of partition – the regular army clinging to the east, the RSF tightening its grip on the west. On August 30, 2025, the BBC reported on a chilling new tactic: RSF forces are working to capture el-Fasher, the last government stronghold in western Sudan. Satellite images reveal what they have been constructing since May — a several-mile-long earthen wall encircling the city. The purpose is clear: to trap the one to two million civilians sheltering inside and physically cut off all supplies. The goal appears to be nothing less than turning el-Fasher into a massive kill zone.

Across the country, civilians are being killed with shocking indifference. And sexual violence is rampant. According to the UN and Human Rights Watch, RSF fighters and allied militias are using rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing — forcing Black African women to bear "Arab children." The tactics echo those employed by the Janjaweed militias during the genocide in Darfur two decades ago.

The statistics are staggering. According to the UN, more than ten million people are displaced within Sudan, while four million more have fled to neighboring countries. Over thirty million require humanitarian aid, but barely thirteen million receive it. Some twenty-four million people are suffering from acute hunger.

Whenever I see the iconic photograph of Alaa Salah today, I think of what could have been. Her dream of a democratic Sudan is not yet entirely extinguished, but for it to survive, the international community must act. Countries like the United Arab Emirates, whose meddling has fueled and prolonged this war, must face real pressure. The courageous Sudanese civilians who risk their lives every day to help others desperately need global support.

Yet in recent years, the very institutions meant to uphold human rights – from the UN and the ICC to Amnesty International and Save the Children – have seen their authority eroded, particularly by Western powers. This weakening has often come as punishment for criticizing Israel's genocide in Gaza.

For the people of Sudan, the cost of that erosion may now be monumental.

Further reading:

Books:

The Secret War in the Sudan: 1955–1972 by Edgar O'Ballance (1976)

War and Slavery in Sudan by Jok Madut Jok (2001

The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars: Peace Or Truce by Douglas H. Johnson (2003)

Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence by Jok Madut Jok (2007)

The State of Africa by Martin Meredith (2011)

South Sudan: From Revolution to Independence by Matthew LeRiche & Matthew Arnold (2012)

Breaking Sudan: The Search for Peace by Jok Madut Jok (2017)

Articles:

“Life of Shame of Amputees in The Sudan by Sheila Rule” for The New York Times (June 16, 1986)

”In Sudan, No Clear Difference Between Arab and African” by Somini Sengupta for The New York Times (October 4, 2004)

"Qur'an and AK-47: the 30-year rule of Sudan's Omar al-Bashir" by Jason Burke for The Guardian (April 11, 2019)

"Who are the major international actors involved in Sudan's violence?" by Ali Abbas Ahmadi for The New Arab (April 18, 2023)

”A journey across Sudan's capital Khartoum, a city transformed by war" by Khalid Abdelaziz for Reuters (April 24, 2023)

”Sudanese warring parties dig in as Jeddah talks falter again" by Khalid Abdelaziz and Nafisa Eltahir for Reuters (December 6, 2023)

”FN:s varning: Risk för världens största hungerkris i Sudan" by Emilia Lindell for DN (March 8, 2024),

"After a year of war in Sudan, what is the situation now?" by Areesha Lodhi for al-Jazeera (April 11, 2024)

”One Year of War in Sudan: How Two Rival Generals Wrecked Their Country" by Abdi Latif Dahir and Declan Walsch for The New York Times (May 15, 2024)

”EU expected to impose sanctions on six Sudanese military figures fuelling war" by Jennifer Rankin for The Guardian (June 5, 2024)

"Villagers flee in terror as 150 reportedly killed in Sudan rebel attack" by Mohammed Tawfeeq and Hamdi Alkhshali for CNN (June 6, 2024)

"Barrier being built around besieged Sudan city, satellite images show" by Anne Soy for BBC (August 30, 2025)

"Världens värsta kris – människor tvingas äta djurfoder för att överleva" av Erik Esbjörnsson and Saeed Alnahhal for DN (September 2, 2025)

"Milis isolerar svältande i Sudan – bygger mur runt staden" by Erik Esbjörnsson for DN (September 2, 2025)

Other:

”Civil War in Sudan" by Center for Preventive Action (April 19, 2024).

In this episode of the Black History Unveiled podcast, we delve into a pivotal moment in history, not just for Africa but for Europe and beyond – a moment that has helped shape the modern world.

Our focus today is on the period following the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, a time that evolved into the crushing weight of colonialism. We'll explore how these two devastating eras bled into one another and the long-lasting consequences for the people and regions affected.

Black History Unveiled is found wherever you get your podcasts.

Further reading:

Books:

The History of the Rise, Progress And Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave­Trade by the British Parliament by Thomas Clarkson (1839)

White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550–1812 by Winthrop Jordan (1968)

From Slave Trade to ’Legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth­Century West Africa by Robin Law (editor) (1995)

The Atlantic Slave Trade by Herbert S. Klein (2010)

A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present by Richard J. Reid (2012)

Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa by Paul E. Lovejoy (2012)

Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa by Catherine Higgs (2012)

Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom by Julia O’Connell Davidson (2015)

Scholarly articles:

”A Staple Interpretation of Slavery and Free Labor” by Carville V. Earle in Geographical Review (vol. 68, nr 1, 1978)

“The Hidden Costs of Labour on the Cocoa Plantations of Sao Tomé and Principe, 1875-1914” by Clarence-Smith, William Gervaise in Portuguese Studies (vol. 6, 1990)

”Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade” by Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape in International Organization (vol. 53, nr 4, 1999)

Articles:

”Forskningarne i Mellan-Afrika” in Göteborgs­Posten (June 27, 1878)

"After slavery" by Toby Green in Aeon (March 30, 2021)

Other:

”Slave grown Cocoa – An apology from the William A Cadbury Trustees" by William A Cadbury Charitable Trust (July 3, 2021)

This is the story about a country where corruption was rampant, where a small elite lived well at the expense of the majority, and where international aid was essential for survival.

It is also a story about a person who wanted to change that. The methods were questioned, but the result spoke for itself.

This is the story of Thomas Sankara and his struggle to make Burkina Faso stand on its own two feet. A fight that cost him his life.

October 15, 1987

They sit around the table, as they've done countless times. On the agenda is a discussion of a new revolutionary code of conduct to combat corruption. The cabinet members engage in their usual banter before one of them declares the meeting officially open.

But the order is suddenly disrupted by the commotion outside. A skidding car, frantic voices, and machine gun fire compete for attention. Panic engulfs the room, chaos ensues, and instinctively, the men dive for cover. But then one of them stands up.

Thomas Sankara.

The mastermind behind the revolution. He had fundamentally changed Burkina Faso in just four short years.

Sankara stands up slowly and meets the eyes of the others, one by one. "Stay here," he says. "It's me they want." Then he carefully inches towards the door and opens it. He raises his arms above his head and walks out. Moments later, another round of machine gun fire rings through the building.

As Thomas Sankara lies motionless on the floor, his body pierced by bullets, he's only 37 years old. Under his leadership, Burkina Faso saw tremendous development, making rapid strides toward freeing itself from the shackles of corruption. But his radical and swift changes were not appreciated by everyone. Enemies lurked within his borders and among the powerful forces of the Western world.

Now, one central question remained: Who murdered him? And why?

Long before Thomas Sankara, the Mossi kingdoms ruled the region that makes up today's Burkina Faso. It was a collection of loosely composed states that held sway over the area ever since the 1200s. The Mossi people make up more than half of Burkina Faso's population even today.

However, the Mossi kingdoms' reign was shattered in 1896. Formidable French forces descended upon the land, signaling the beginning of a fierce struggle.

The clash between invaders and resilient locals continued for years. But in 1919, the final blow fell, and France transformed the land into a colony known as French Upper Volta. The name alluded to the upper reaches of the Volta River, which flows through the country.

It's a beautiful region with majestic baobab trees and vast plains of the distinctive red earth. But it is simultaneously a crucible of inhospitable elements, where searing heat, recurring droughts, and scarce water supplies conspire to make life hard for many. The country's northern parts lie in the Sahel zone, where the mighty Sahara desert transitions to sweeping savannah and grass plains. During the most challenging periods, the margins for survival are thin.

The colony was of low priority to the French, who primarily used it as a source for limited cotton production and a steady supply of cheap labor. Forced labor, high taxes, and the use of violence by colonial masters were commonplace. Poor farmers had their grain requisitioned by the state. And the French recruited scores of young men to build infrastructure in what they deemed more important colonies, such as the Ivory Coast.

The independence

But increased demands for self-government followed in the aftermath of World War II. And in the 1950s, France, compelled by the shifting tides of time, took decisions that, step by step, made it possible. In 1960, the country became independent.

Maurice Yaméogo, who had a lengthy background in the colonial administration and had long belonged to an elite class of, if you will, Europeanized Africans, was named the nation's first president.

But his political maneuvers in the run-up to independence effectively turned him into an autocrat. Upper Volta, as the country was now called, thus began its independence as a de facto dictatorship.

Immediately, corruption began to slither into the very fabric of society, with Yaméogo leading the charge. Despite the country's highly strained economy, he embezzled large sums of money. He spent millions on expensive cars and luxury homes. Nepotism became the norm, as coveted positions were gifted to family members, all while he jailed his critics.

In 1965, fresh from his so-called "re-election" with a staggering 99.97 percent of the vote, he married the twenty-two-year-old Miss Ivory Coast contest winner. The opulent ceremony, a monument to excess, soured the people's hearts. The president, still wedded to his first wife, became a symbol of unbridled power and unapologetic hubris.

Raised taxes, suspended benefits, reduced wages for government employees, and reduced veteran pensions – all while Yaméogo spent money on a new presidential palace – helped spark a general strike in early 1966. Unions, students, city dwellers, and the religious elite rose against Yaméogo.

Caught off guard, he responded with a heavy hand. He declared a state of emergency and threatened the strikers with military force. But instead, the very soldiers tasked with enforcing his rule turned against him. Yaméogo suddenly found himself compelled to step down, his reign crumbling beneath him.

A series of coups

In retrospect, we know that Africa has suffered from the many armies that seized power across the continent. But this was a more innocent time. Here, people still believed that the military, with its discipline and structure, was precisely what was needed to overcome the politicians' wallowing in excesses and corruption.

As a result, the population widely supported the military's takeover, and many assumed that, after a transitional period, the army would return power to the people.

For the inhabitants of Upper Volta, however, it soon became apparent that this was only the beginning of a series of revolts that would succeed each other in the coming decades. First, Lieutenant Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana installed himself as president. He served until 1980, when Colonel Saye Zerbo overthrew him in another military coup. Zerbo only managed to rule for barely two years before he, too, was deposed, this time by Major Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo.

The next coup took place in 1983. But this one was different from the others. For now, a man with grandiose visions for Upper Volta came to power.

Thomas Sankara’s rise to power

Thomas Sankara was born in 1949 in the small town of Yako in the northern parts of French Upper Volta. He spent his childhood in Gaoua, near the border with Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where his father was part of the gendarmerie, a militarily organized police force.

As the colonial power employed his father, the family had a relatively privileged position. They lived in a brick house up on a hill above the city, together with the other families of the gendarmerie. The family also stood out by being Catholic in a country where most were Muslim.

School became an eye-opener, where social boundaries blurred, and Sankara mingled with peers from diverse backgrounds. He saw how impoverished some of the students from the lower social classes were and noted how favorably the children of French officials were treated.

As the eldest son of what eventually became eleven children, Sankara's position within the family hierarchy granted him a mantle of responsibility. His parents gave him more space to express his opinions. They asked him to take on a leadership position: they gave him the responsibility of raising and educating his younger siblings, who in turn began to see him almost as an extra parent.

Sankara was a good student, especially in French and mathematics. At seventeen, he entered the newly established military college in Burkina Faso's capital, Ouagadougou.

There, his horizon expanded. In addition to military training, he was educated in several academic subjects. He got to know young minds destined for leadership. But perhaps the most important person was history and geography teacher Adama Touré, who introduced him to concepts such as neo-colonialism, imperialism, communism, and socialism. Sankara's eyes widened.

In 1969, Sankara became among the few students selected to continue his education at the military college in Antsirabe, Madagascar. There, he supplemented his studies with agricultural knowledge, read Karl Marx for the first time, and witnessed the protests against the pro-French regime that shook the country in 1972.

The following year, Sankara's return to his homeland was marked by war. An armed border conflict erupted between Upper Volta and Mali in December 1974, and he found himself immersed in the chaos. Commanding a squad, he successfully participated in one of the few battles in the otherwise uneventful war.

The press hailed him as a war hero, but Sankara shunned such titles. Instead, he was struck by the senselessness of the conflict. How it affected ordinary civilians, people who had most things in common but had ended up on opposite sides of a colonial land border, and now had their lives torn asunder as a result. In the meantime, however, he became close friends with another distinguished soldier, Blaise Compaoré, and gained a reputation as an officer of great promise.

President Sangoulé Lamizana – the man who had seized power in a coup d'état in 1966 – recognized Sankara's potential and entrusted him with a crucial task. In 1976, he appointed Sankara to lead a new military camp in the town of Pô. There, elite troops would be honed and shaped, ready to confront the challenges ahead.

Within the camp's confines, Sankara transformed into a beloved figurehead. He ignited a passion for knowledge among his soldiers, urging them to read more books. He mobilized them to help local villagers with various construction projects. He also played guitar in a jazz band with his trusted companion Compaoré.

Sankara's influence extended further as he took the stage to deliver impassioned lectures on social issues. He even orchestrated outdoor film screenings, set up accounts for the soldiers at a local bank, and taught them how to manage their money. Usually, military leaders ate separately, but Sankara ate together with his soldiers, who slowly but surely began to adore him.

But simultaneously, Sankara became increasingly concerned about the country's many challenges. The population was poor, literacy was low, and corruption was high. Food prices soared while those who had the means embezzled everything they could. Some even pillaged aid shipments meant to combat famine, lining their pockets at the expense of the desperate.

So when Colonel Saye Zerbo seized the reins of power in a military coup in 1980, Sankara greeted the new regime with cautious optimism, hopeful that the promises of progress would materialize. However, a nagging doubt lingered in his mind – a flickering suspicion that the leadership lacked the audacious vision required to usher in true transformation in the country.

Sankara's ascent continued unabated. First propelled to the rank of captain, he then found himself catapulted into the realm of even greater influence as he assumed the role of information minister in September 1981. Reluctantly accepting the position, he was torn between aligning himself with an uncertain regime.

In actuality, he had no choice: to be Minister of Information was not so much a job offer as a military order. As a soldier, he had to follow it. However, Sankara set his conditions: the tenure would only be temporary, and in the meantime, the command of the military camp would pass on to his dear friend, Compaoré.

In the corridors of power, Sankara stood out. On his bicycle, he pedaled to work through the bustling streets, leaving his government car behind. He often ate at one of the cheap lunch counters lining the streets. He even urged the press not to idealize the government in their reports.

But despite the government's promises to the contrary, corruption and repression continued to be part of the new regime. The right to strike was outlawed, student activists were imprisoned, and unions faced opposition.

Disgusted by these abuses of power, Sankara abruptly resigned in April 1982, after a mere six months in office. He announced his decision in a live radio appearance, accusing the government of silencing the people. The regime swiftly retaliated, stripping him of his captain's rank and exiling him to a secluded military camp in the remote western reaches of the nation.

But the days of Saye Zerbo's regime were numbered. In November 1982, the army seized the capital, paving the way for a new military junta led by new President Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo.

Sankara's unwavering popularity had caught the collective eye, and in January 1983, Ouédraogo offered him the prestigious post of Prime Minister. However, their visions clashed, and the relationship quickly strained due to Sankara's demands for a more progressive policy. Armed with fiery speeches that drew fervent young crowds, Sankara unleashed scathing criticisms upon the bureaucracy, middle-class entrepreneurs, and the political elite.

Within the junta, a clear divide emerged between the older guard, nurtured under French tutelage, who clung to remnants of the colonial era, and the younger, more radical generation who saw imperialism and neo-colonialism as the root cause of their nation's woes.

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The Non-Aligned Movement was an organization for states in the so-called Third World. It sought to guard the interests of member states during the Cold War battle between East and West. In March 1983, the organization held a conference in New Delhi, India, and Sankara was one of the speakers. This was his grand debut on the international stage, and he seized the opportunity.

He came out as an opponent of Israel's invasion of Lebanon, criticized US imperialism in South America, and voiced his unwavering support for the oppressed people of apartheid-stricken South Africa.

During the pivotal conference, he had a long conversation with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Before the conference, Sankara had visited Libya, and after it, he quickly visited North Korea.

These encounters fueled the concerns of the Western powers, who fretted that this charismatic young leader could steer Upper Volta towards the path of socialism or perhaps even veer into the realm of unabashed communism.

At home, however, Sankara's conviction and magnetism continued to captivate the hearts of his people. Yet, his revolutionary ideals stoked fear in the heart of President Ouédraogo, who viewed him as a potent threat to the status quo. Unbeknownst to the president, Sankara invited the infamous Libyan dictator, Muammar al-Gaddafi, to visit Upper Volta even though both the United States and France viewed Gaddafi as a villain.

A little over two weeks later, Sankara was arrested and placed under house arrest. Some historians have argued that this was due to pressure from France. The regime believed that capturing Sankara would restore political stability and quell the country's revolutionary elements. But they gravely underestimated the impact of their actions. The decision unleashed a furious storm of anger amongst the people and the country's young officers, igniting wild protests.

On August 4, Captain Blaise Compaoré, Sankara's loyal friend, led troops toward Ouagadougou. They captured the capital with minimal resistance. As the evening approached, people stopped in their tracks as they heard Sankara's voice on the radio.

He announced the removal of the military junta and the creation of the National Revolutionary Council, the country's new ruling party. Sankara, only thirty-three years old, assumed the presidency himself.

The next day, jubilant crowds flooded the streets. August 5 – Upper Volta's Independence Day – was now forever intertwined with the birth of the revolution. It was a deliberate move. Sankara rode through the town, his presence a beacon of hope, periodically stopping to engage with residents whose faces radiated eager anticipation.

As the dust settled and the cheers subsided, Upper Volta stood on the precipice of colossal change.

A new type of revolution

The previous coups d'etats had merely shuffled the deck of power. But Thomas Sankara's revolution had real ambitions to create a new order in the country.

High on the agenda was dismantling the entrenched corruption ensnaring Upper Volta, where a privileged few reveled in opulence while the majority languished in poverty. In the book Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary, American journalist Ernest Harsch quotes a speech Sankara gave two months after the takeover. In it, he described Upper Volta's 23 years of independence as a:

"Paradise for the wealthy minority, for the majority – the people – it is barely a tolerable hell."

Sankara's promises were many and grand. But the challenges were extreme. The World Bank ranked Upper Volta as one of the world's poorest countries, and foreign investment trickled in at a feeble pace. To compound the struggle, the population relied almost exclusively on agriculture, their livelihoods often impacted by droughts, severe floods, and voracious locust swarms.

True to his nature, Sankara's informal leadership style broke the prevailing trend among many contemporary African leaders. He did not allow pictures of himself in public buildings or places; he continued to live in the same simple house as before, his two children went to a government school, and he avoided giving relatives favorable treatment. His wife Mariam continued to work at a shipping company while his mother worked in the market.

On the anniversary of the coup, Sankara changed the country's name from the colonial Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, which in local languages roughly translates to "land of the honorable." As a somewhat of a guitar player, he wrote the new national anthem himself.

Sankara then launched several ambitious projects. He had the government's collection of expensive Mercedes cars sold and bought much cheaper Renault 5 models instead. The money left over from the sale he instead spent on schools and health clinics.

He gave government employees, including himself, modest salaries and banned them from traveling in first class. He had several special bonuses relinquished that once adorned the pockets of politicians and government employees. In Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa, historian Brian J. Peterson writes:

"In contrast with many governments that resorted to austerity measures at this time – usually by cutting health care, education, and other social programs while preserving the privileges of elites – Sankara did quite the opposite, forcing elites to make sacrifices and ensuring that austerity helped the rural poor."

In the wake of the transformative coup that thrust him into power, Sankara ignited a call to action, urging the people to forge so-called "committees for the defense of the revolution." These collectives, CDRs, drew inspiration from the Cuban model, initially serving as defenders of the new order.

Armed with simple tools and basic training, the new government tasked ordinary citizens with watching for potential counter-revolutionaries. But soon, the CDRs evolved into vehicles of mobilization, a way to implement the government's directives. Their ranks consisted of individuals from all walks of life, from the well-educated to the illiterate, and they arrived at their decisions by vote.

The sweeping responsibilities bestowed upon the CDRs knew no bounds: from building and repairing roads to distributing food to those in need. Everywhere, communities banded together, harnessing the strength of their shared purpose, and took charge of developing the nation. They constructed schools, built housing, and dug new irrigation systems.

Among the rural Mossi population, authority had traditionally rested in the hands of elder male village chiefs – sometimes a person, sometimes a council. These leaders were accustomed to holding much power and had considerable self-determination.

But the winds of change swept through all corners of the nation, and the CDRs gradually usurped their roles. They became the tangible embodiment of the government at the grassroots level, both in urban areas and the farthest reaches of the countryside.

Sankara's vision extended beyond the realms of infrastructure. He sought to redefine Burkina Faso's society, breaking the traditional gender roles that had long relegated women to the sidelines. From a young age, Sankara observed the stark disparities between the treatment of men and women, an awareness nurtured by the influence of his mother and six sisters. Even as a nine-year-old, he had stepped forth and shielded his mother from his father's hand.

In a speech given by Sankara on International Women's Day in 1987, reproduced in full in the book Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle, he said:

"While society sees the birth of a boy as a gift from God,' the birth of a girl is greeted as an act of fate, or at best, a gift that can be used to produce food and perpetuate the human race. The little male will be taught how to want and get, to speak up and be served, to desire and take, to decide things on his own."

Then he compared it to how society raises women:

"The future woman, however, is dealt blow after blow by a society that unanimously, as one man – and "as one man" is the appropriate term – drums into her head norms that lead nowhere."

He continued;

"From the age of three, she must meet the requirements of her role in life: to serve and be useful. While her brother of four or five or six will play till he drops from exhaustion or boredom, she, with little ceremony, will enter the process of production. She already has a trade: assistant housewife. It is of course an unpaid position, for isn't it generally said that a housewife "does nothing"? Don't we write "housewife" on the identity cards of women who have no income, meaning they have no job? That they are "not working"? With the help of tradition and obligatory submissiveness, our sisters grow up more and more dependent, more and more dominated, more and more exploited, and with less and less leisure or free time."

Sankara outlawed female circumcision, polygamy, and forced marriage. He introduced a minimum age for marriage and decided on new rulings that made it so that divorce proceedings now had to consider a woman's consent. Widows, long marginalized, were granted inheritance rights.

He banned prostitution, calling it "nothing but a microcosm of a society where exploitation is a general rule". Women who had previously sold their bodies were offered places in rehabilitation centers where they received housing and vocational training, which was also provided to the homeless.

He also mandated that a minimum of 30 percent of government positions be held by women, amplifying their voices in decision-making spheres. Furthermore, his government granted pregnant girls and women the right to stay in school.

In a symbolic demonstration of the burdens women bear within the home, Sankara orchestrated a protest. In Burkina Faso, women traditionally went to the markets daily, bought the food, and carried it home.

But on September 22, 1984, the roles were reversed, and the men were forced into the markets to make them respect the workload and gain firsthand experience of the weight carried by women in their daily lives. It was an act aimed at challenging societal norms and fostering an appreciation for the contribution of women.

Beyond social reforms and improving the country's infrastructure, Sankara also launched an ambitious public health program. Over two weeks, two million residents, particularly vulnerable children, were vaccinated against deadly diseases such as yellow fever, measles, and meningitis.

In a groundbreaking move, Sankara's government recognized the looming threat of the HIV epidemic, becoming one of the first in Africa to confront the crisis head-on. Child mortality rates plummeted through the establishment of numerous health centers, leaving an indelible mark on the nation's well-being.

The local cotton industry also developed – the government expected its employees to wear uniforms made from home-grown cotton. Agricultural reforms made food production surge, laying the foundation for a self-sufficient nation.

Sankara often said variations of this message:

"A soldier without political education is but a criminal in power."

And in the case of Burkina Faso's military, he put that message into practice. At military bases around the country, he assigned soldiers to cultivate crops, tend livestock, maintain cleanliness in towns and villages, and assist in constructing schools.

The significance of this unconventional approach extended beyond the nation's development. According to journalist Ernest Harsch, who has covered Burkina Faso since 1980, Sankara told him that through farming, the soldiers were reminded of how ordinary people worked and toiled. It fostered a sense of camaraderie, bridging the gap between the military and the people.

Sankara is often associated with Marxist-Leninist ideologies, but he maintained that Burkina Faso did not align itself exclusively with any foreign doctrine, whether from the right or the left. In his office, books by Karl Marx adorned the shelves, an image of Che Guevara was emblazoned on a cloth, and a bust of Lenin rested on his desk.

However, he was also a man of faith. In an interview with Newsweek, he ardently expressed that his government's sole aim was to ensure the people's access to adequate food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and education.

People often believe that Sankara outright rejected foreign aid. In truth, Burkina Faso relied on extensive financial support, particularly from France and other nations such as the Netherlands, Japan, Cuba, and China.

But Sankara's perspective on aid was a departure from conventional notions of charity. He viewed it as a loan and rejected proposals that might yield short-term benefits but jeopardize the nation's long-term prospects. He tried to forge a future where Burkina Faso could stand independently.

This conviction led him to question the influence of institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, ultimately rejecting their approaches. He believed that yielding too much control to these entities would undermine the sovereignty of Burkina Faso's economy and, by extension, its revolutionary path.

The wheels of progress were turning relentlessly under Thomas Sankara's leadership: he slashed school fees in half, literacy rates soared, new infrastructure stretched across the land with roads, train tracks, and wells, and he introduced a highly ambitious effort to combat desertification by planting ten million trees.

It was a time of remarkable achievements. But there was a downside.

Sankara's critics mobilize

Amid Thomas Sankara's many victories, critics raised concerns about his methods. They pointed out that his approach veered far away from democracy. For example, no other political parties were allowed, and those the government deemed counter-revolutionary could swiftly be dismissed from their posts.

Unions faced opposition as well. In March of 1984, when the country's teachers staged a strike in protest of two colleagues being fired for expressing criticism, the Minister of Education dismissed a thousand more educators.

Officially, the government didn't censor the press and maintained that journalists could criticize their policies. However, in practice, dissenting voices remained unheard. The media landscape became dominated by state-owned outlets when, in June 1984, masked individuals attacked and destroyed the printing office of L'Observateur – the nation's only independent newspaper.

Sankara also established "revolutionary courts", operating outside the regular judicial system and allowing ordinary citizens to witness the trials of corrupt officials and former government members. They sometimes devolved into theatrical spectacles marred by personal vendettas. Defendants lacked lawyers and the chance to appeal, leading to concerns about fairness. While some sentences aimed at deterrence resulted in mild punishments, others delivered harsh prison terms and hefty fines.

Sankara's whirlwind of reforms garnered praise from many quarters but also stirred up a formidable opposition. His approach of immediate implementation, without trial or transition periods, created powerful enemies who resisted the sweeping changes.

The bans on polygamy and female circumcision faced resistance from various groups, not just men, who saw them as encroachments on essential customs. The urban middle class was incensed when the government reduced their salaries and eliminated their bonuses to benefit the rural population.

Moreover, the traditional practice of granting authority to older male village chiefs clashed with the new government's hierarchies. These chiefs, accustomed to wielding power and influence for centuries, were stripped of their ability to extract labor and levy taxes on the populace.

Discontent also seeped into the state apparatus when, starting in August 1985, Sankara initiated an annual program that required ministers and government employees to redeploy to rural areas for various projects.

Sankara aimed to give them firsthand insight into the challenges faced by the people and to emphasize that government officials were not exempt from the responsibilities of ordinary citizens.

Employing his military discipline, he even surprised officials by conducting impromptu inspections of their workspaces. This method drew disapproval from many. Even minor tardiness by as little as five minutes could result in punishments such as evening or weekend shifts.

The order to end an affair with a mistress issued to Captain Gilbert Diendéré triggered outrage among Sankara's close military colleagues. Sankara believed infidelity was incompatible with the revolution's ideals, a stance that some of his male allies found too idealistic and resented.

By early 1987, Sankara found himself increasingly isolated. While he remained popular among most of the population and drew admiration in certain circles abroad for Burkina Faso's rapid progress, the revolutionary fervor had begun to wane. The atmosphere surrounding Sankara had changed, casting a shadow over his once-unified movement.

In the international arena, Thomas Sankara's anti-imperialist rhetoric had strained his relationship with the United States and France. This tension spilled over into conflicts with neighboring Ivory Coast, Mali, and Togo – countries closely aligned with France. Even Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi, once an ally, had turned his back on Sankara when he refused to allow Libyan-backed rebel troops into the country to prepare a coup in Liberia.

Whispers of a looming revolt within Burkina Faso spread quickly, causing worry among Sankara's closest friends and family. They urged him to strike preemptively, but Sankara chose a different path. He believed shedding blood would only perpetuate an endless cycle of vendettas.

During his speeches in the fall of 1987, Sankara continued his critique of the middle class and political elite, accusing them of exploiting the poor for personal gain. But, he also acknowledged that he might have implemented some changes too hastily, suggesting a "pause" in the revolution to allow society to catch its breath. Whatever he was hoping to achieve, it was already too late.

The assassination of Sankara and its fallout

In the afternoon of October 15, 1987, a vast number of soldiers fell upon the capital, positioning themselves strategically. At the same time, the telecommunications network went silent.

Those closest to Thomas Sankara had pleaded with him to prioritize his safety, but he believed his work couldn't wait. It's difficult to know how conscious Sankara was of his vulnerable position as he sat there in the meeting room with his cabinet.

The details of what unfolded come from Alouna Traoré, the only survivor of the gathering. He has recounted the same version of events since 1987: the eruption of gunfire outside, resembling "heavy rain suddenly coming down on a tin roof"; Sankara, realizing he was the target, calmly leaving the room with his arms raised above his head; how he barely made it out before being fatally shot; the soldiers storming into the room and executing twelve others in cold blood. Traoré was injured in the shooting but survived miraculously.

The attackers had been mobilized by Gilbert Diendéré, the captain Sankara had reprimanded for his extramarital affairs. Blaise Compaoré, Sankara's longtime comrade and close friend, orchestrated the entire takeover. The two had once been so inseparable that people often called them brothers. At one point, Compaoré even lived in Sankara's home, prompting Sankara's wife, Mariam, to joke about them being co-wives.

But now, Compaoré seized control of Burkina Faso. Later that evening, his voice poured out of radios across the country, delivering a speech filled with harsh accusations, painting Sankara as a delusional traitor.

The extent of Sankara's anticipation of Compaoré's betrayal remains debatable. In historian Brian J. Peterson's book, Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa, published in the spring of 2021, various individuals with intimate knowledge of the events provide insights.

Some believe that Sankara had already sensed the inevitability of his demise and did not want to risk dragging Burkina Faso into a potential civil war by attempting to defuse the looming threat. Others argue that Sankara's trusting nature proved to be his downfall.

Under the cover of night, the lifeless bodies were loaded onto a truck, driven to a burial site in one of Ouagadougou's impoverished neighborhoods, and hastily dumped into freshly dug graves. Sankara was only thirty-seven years old, and the revolution had recently celebrated its fourth anniversary.

The news of Sankara's assassination sent shockwaves throughout the nation. While Burkina Faso had grown accustomed to coups, this was the first time a president had been assassinated.

Compaoré vehemently denied any involvement, concocting a narrative in which his troops had discovered a plot orchestrated by Sankara. According to Compaoré, the soldiers attempted to apprehend Sankara, but he allegedly responded with gunfire, forcing them to shoot him in self-defense. All but Compaoré's staunchest allies rejected his version of events immediately.

The question of France's involvement in Sankara's assassination has ignited passionate debates among historians, political commentators, and ordinary people in Burkina Faso and beyond. Some view it as a meticulously planned French operation. In contrast, others see it as the culmination of an internal power struggle.

Brian J. Peterson offers a nuanced perspective, suggesting that while France may not have directly participated militarily, it played a role in creating the conditions for the coup. This included exerting financial pressure, smearing him in the media, and fostering dissent within Sankara's party.

Numerous efforts have been made to pressure France into releasing classified documents that could shed light on its potential responsibility, so far without success.

During his life and even more after his murder, Sankara transcended his role as a national figure and became a global symbol of pan-Africanism, self-sufficiency, anti-imperialism, and anti-corruption. However, within Burkina Faso, he faced vilification. Compaoré attempted to portray himself as the true revolutionary who genuinely cared about the people.

On the international stage, however, Compaoré sought to present himself as a pragmatic and level-headed leader, distancing himself from Sankara's radical ideas. He eagerly embraced collaborations with Western powers and swiftly signed agreements with institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As a result, major Western countries welcomed him as a refreshing and cooperative presence.

Back in Burkina Faso, Compaoré dismantled the revolution's achievements. The new regime, lacking popular support, relied on the upper middle class, traditional village chiefs, and members of the pre-revolutionary political elite – groups that had historically held power in the country and with whom Sankara had alienated himself. Corruption once again infiltrated everyday life.

Blaise Compaoré held the reins of power in Burkina Faso for twenty-seven years until 2014, when his attempts to change the constitution and extend his term ignited intense protests.

During these demonstrations, activists fervently chanted Sankara's name, his face adorned placards and t-shirts, and protesters quoted his words in speeches. Eventually, Compaoré fled the country, seeking refuge in the Ivory Coast. In 2015, a new presidential election took place, resulting in the victory of former Prime Minister Roch Marc Christian Kaboré.

Sankara's widow, family, and supporters had long fought to bring the guilty to justice. With the departure of Compaoré, their opportunity arrived. In 2015, Sankara's body was exhumed, and an autopsy revealed that he had suffered more than twelve gunshot wounds.

Then, in April 2021, a military court in Burkina Faso finally brought charges against Blaise Compaoré and 13 others, accusing them of complicity in the murder. The long-awaited trial commenced in October, albeit without Compaoré, who defiantly boycotted the proceedings, asserting his immunity as a former head of state. Having acquired Ivorian citizenship during his time in exile, his release now hinged on the permission of the Ivorian government.

But then, a familiar pattern occurred, rattling the nation once more.

A new round of military takeovers

It's Sunday, January 23, 2022. Mobile networks abruptly went silent, and gunfire reverberated from various military barracks nationwide. As evening neared, shots rang out near the presidential palace.

The next day, soldiers took over the state radio and television station. Hours later, they broadcast a speech to the nation.

In the broadcast, fourteen soldiers emerged, clad in desert camouflage. Some sported red and blue berets, while others donned helmets and face masks. Automatic weapons rested in the hands of several.

They identified themselves as the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration, declaring that they had ousted the president due to his failure to stop the deteriorating security situation.

Since 2015, jihadist groups in northern Burkina Faso have unleashed deadly attacks, resulting in thousands dead and displacing nearly two million people. Similar groups have emerged in Mali, Chad, and across the Sahel region, taking advantage of the influx of weapons following Gaddafi's fall in Libya in 2011.

During their speech, the soldiers announced the dissolution of parliament and the government. They closed the borders and enforced new curfews.

A week later, the soldiers reintroduced the constitution and appointed Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba as the new president. In March, the junta declared its intention to hold elections after a three-year transitional period.

The trial against Compaoré pressed forward amidst the precarious state of affairs in the country. The verdict was delivered on April 3, 2022 – a life sentence for Compaoré and two cronies. Eight of the remaining eleven defendants received prison terms ranging from three to twenty years, while the remaining three were acquitted.

Curiously, despite the gravity of his sentence, the new president permitted Compaoré to return to Burkina Faso for a conference attended by several former leaders of the country. Lawyers representing the Sankara family called for his arrest, but their pleas were brushed aside.

In a letter read aloud by a spokesperson, Compaoré offered an apology of sorts:

"I ask the Burkinabe people for forgiveness for all the acts I may have committed during my tenure, and especially the family of my brother and friend Thomas Sankara. I take responsibility for, and regret from the bottom of my heart, all the suffering and tragedies experienced by all victims during my terms as leader of the country and ask their families to grant me their forgiveness."

The response to his apology was a mixed bag. Some factions deemed it insufficient, contending that justice remained elusive as long as he walked free. However, this time, the battle against the jihadists took center stage, overshadowing other concerns. Compaoré's freedom was seemingly secured, as the conference was meant to symbolize national unity in the face of rebel insurgency.

But the spiral of violent military takeovers continued. In September 2022, another coup took place in Burkina Faso, which brought a relatively unknown leader to power, the 34-year-old Ibrahim Traoré, with a claimed past in a counterterrorist unit.

The enigmatic and reclusive Ibrahim Traoré has left an outsized mark on Burkina Faso during his brief rule. In January 2023, his leadership delivered a seismic announcement: military cooperation with France would end, and French forces were given four weeks to leave the country. By February, the withdrawal was complete. In France's place, Burkina Faso began forging closer ties with Russia and Turkey.

Yet, at the time of writing, the country's security crisis shows no signs of easing. Violence is escalating, and the humanitarian disaster deepens. Thousands have been killed or displaced, and the insecurity has forced the closure of thousands of schools, leaving more than a million children without access to education.

The junta, which once promised a return to democracy by mid‑2024, has since abandoned that timeline. Citing the deteriorating security situation, leaders declared that no elections would be held until stability could be ensured.

In May 2024, they extended their transitional rule by five more years, pushing any potential return to civilian governance far into the future.

Then, in the summer of 2025, they dissolved the independent electoral commission, transferring oversight of elections to the interior ministry, a move widely viewed as further consolidating power in military hands.

Can Burkina Faso's insurgency be contained? And if so, will the military honor its promise to relinquish power? Or will it succumb to the familiar temptations of juntas throughout history, clinging to authority and suppressing democratic aspirations?

It's still an open and deeply uncertain question.

The legacy of Sankara

Is there such a thing as a good-hearted dictator? Some would say that Thomas Sankara is an example of one. Or, that he's as close as you're gonna get. Others would say that his uncompromising nature showed signs of an authoritarian side, which had already begun to, and in time would've continued to, lead to an abuse of power.

Lord Acton, an English historian, is known for a letter he sent to a bishop in 1887. In the letter, he wrote:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

It's of course impossible to say what would've happened had Sankara not been assassinated, or in which direction he would have developed.

However, one thing is evident: During the 1980s, when many other African leaders seemed to engage in a contest of who could be most corrupt, selfishly enriching themselves at the expense of their nations, Sankara offered an alternative path.

Instead of succumbing to the temptation of personal gain, he instilled national pride, self-confidence, and hope for self-sufficiency.

Further reading:

Books:

Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara (2007)

Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary by Ernest Harsch (2014)

A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara by Amber Murrey, editor (2018)

Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa by Brian J. Peterson (2021)

Articles:

"13 killed in coup in Upper Volta" in New York Times (August 6, 1983)

"Africa's' upright people': Still has no clear answers" by Alan Cowell in The New York Times (January 9, 1985)

"Young Voice in Africa: Sports and Clean Living" by James Brooke in The New York Times (August 23, 1987)

"A friendship dies in a bloody coup" by James Brooke, The New York Times (October 26, 1987)

"Sankara: daring to invent Africa's future" by Sean Jacobs in The Guardian (October 15, 2008)

"Burkina Faso's revolutionary hero Thomas Sankara to be exhumed" by David Smith in The Guardian (March 6, 2015)

"Thomas Sankara: Body of Africa's Che Guevara riddled with bullets, autopsy reveals three decades after death" by Ludovica Iaccino in International Business Times (October 14, 2015)

"Burkina Faso wants France to release Sankara archives'" by BBC (October 13, 2016)

"Thomas Sankara and the Revolutionary Birth of Burkina Faso" by Mamadou Diallo in Viewpoint Magazine (February 1, 2018)

"Thomas Sankara had two faces – Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo" by Aïssatou Diallo in The Africa Report (March 4, 2020)

"Burkinabe ex-President Compaoré charged in Thomas Sankara murder" by Henry Wilkins in Al ­Jazeera (April 13, 2021)

”Burkina Fasos störtade president åtalas för mordet på sin företrädare” by Erik Esbjörnsson in Dagens Nyheter (April 14, 2021)

Scholarly articles:

"Ideology and Praxis in Thomas Sankara's Populist Revolution of August 4, 1983 in Burkina Faso" by Guy Martin in Issue: A Journal of Opinion (vol. 15, 1987)

"Sankara and the Burkinabe Revolution: Charisma and Power, Local and External Dimensions" by Elliott P. Skinner in The Journal of Modern African Studies (vol. 26, nr 3, 1988)

The list could, of course, be made even longer. But when I think of the live-streamed genocide unfolding in Gaza, two historical parallels come to mind first.

The genocide deniers – those who spend more time condemning protestors than Israeli ministers openly declaring their intent to annihilate Gaza, or who show more outrage over slogans than tens of thousands of slaughtered civilians and the even greater number mutilated and maimed – remind me of the spring of 2004. I was 17 at the time and spent a couple of weeks reading Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, his searing account of the genocide in Rwanda.

One of several memorable passages was the part about how the Clinton administration forbade U.S. officials from using the word "genocide" to describe what was happening:

The New York Times reported on it as it transpired. The quote below comes from an article published on June 10, 1994:

"Trying to avoid the rise of moral pressure to stop the mass killing in Rwanda, the Clinton Administration has instructed its spokesmen not to describe the deaths there as genocide, even though some senior officials believe that is exactly what they represent.

That decision has left the Administration at odds with the Secretary General of the United Nations and a cast of distinguished experts who say there is no doubt that the violence, which is said to have killed at least 200,000 people and perhaps as many as 400,000, is part of the deliberate and widespread extermination of an ethnic group.

But American officials say that so stark a label could inflame public calls for action the Administration is unwilling to take. Rather than compare the massacre with, for example, the deaths under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the State Department and the National Security Council have drafted guidance instructing spokesmen to say merely that' acts of genocide may have occurred'."

Naive as I was then, young enough to be convinced that the worst of human history was behind us, I could hardly imagine a world that would allow it to happen again.

And yet, here we are. Once more. And our weak Western governments have only now, in July 2025, begun talking about maybe calling for the EU to review its association agreement with Israel. But of course, only part of it. Tearing it up entirely is out of the question.

Even if we judged the situation only on what has happened since the fall of 2023, which we shouldn't, any halfway competent government would have raised the alarm in the second week of October. By then, it was already clear what Israel intended to do to Gaza. Ministers had been explicit from the start: calling Palestinians "human animals," declaring that the entire population bore collective guilt for October 7, vowing to cut off food, water, and medicine, fantasizing aloud about nuking Gaza, and dreaming of annexing ever larger swaths of Palestinian land.

The time for platitudes is long past. Empty statements about "pushing" Israel to allow aid convoys or "urging" it to follow international law are far from enough. Comprehensive sanctions. Immediate boycott. Total diplomatic and economic isolation. A full-scale international intervention? That's what's needed to stop this nightmare.

Because right now, the remaining population of Gaza is being deliberately starved by Israel. Palestinians who risk venturing to the few and newly established aid distribution centers often become targets, gunned down in what have become near-daily massacres.

Yesterday, over 100 aid organizations sounded the alarm: without immediate action, mass starvation will spread uncontrollably. And yet, in a failure that defies basic humanity, the "political will" to stop it is nowhere to be found.

History has shown us that genocide isn't always committed with weapons. Often, it's the conditions themselves, engineered by the perpetrators, that do the killing.

Take Germany's genocide in Namibia between 1904 and 1908. German colonization had begun in the 1880s, and after years of brutal oppression, the Nama and Herero people rose in resistance.

In June 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, a veteran of the German army, arrived with 6,000 soldiers, more than the total number of German settlers in the colony. His aim? To crush resistance through sheer terror. In Martin Meredith's The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor, one of Von Trotha's statements is quoted:

"I know enough tribes in Africa. They all have the same mentality insofar as they yield only to force. It was and remains my policy to apply this force by absolute terrorism and even cruelty. I shall destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood and money. Only then will it be possible to sow the seeds of something new that will endure."

Battles ensued, and the Herero and Nama managed to secure some victories. But ultimately, they were no match for Germany's modern weapons. After a decisive German victory at the Battle of Waterberg in the summer of 1904, around 50,000 Herero, primarily civilians, were driven into the Kalahari Desert.

The Germans hunted down and executed as many stragglers as possible. But since they wouldn't be able to catch up with everyone and their water rations were running low, von Trotha decided to seal off all known waterholes. German forces patrolled the desert's edge with shoot-to-kill orders for any Herero who returned.

Without supplies, people died quickly. The Herero desperately dug holes in the earth in search of water. Their only protection against freezing nights was desert bushes. Dead bodies and livestock marked their path like a trail of extinction.

But von Trotha wasn't satisfied. In October 1904, he issued the "Vernichtungsbefehl", the extermination order.

"I, the Great General of the German soldiers, address this letter to the Herero people. The Herero are no longer considered German subjects ... The Herero people will have to leave the country. Otherwise I shall force them to do so by means of guns. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women or children. I shall drive them back to their people – otherwise I shall order shots to be fired at them."

Patrols were dispatched to hunt down Herero people remaining in the colony: those who had survived the Battle of Waterberg but failed to flee into the desert, along with the 20,000 to 30,000 Herero who had been living elsewhere in the territory. They were systematically rounded up and executed: shot, stabbed, burned alive, or hanged. No one was spared: not women, not children, not the elderly. In some cases, Herero were deceived with promises of safety, only to be slaughtered minutes later.

Although the extermination order was officially directed at the Herero, German soldiers often struggled to distinguish between different ethnic groups, and members of other communities were also killed.

Yet even amid the carnage, some voices in the German administration saw a perverse utility in preserving Herero lives – not out of mercy, but as a supply of cheap, expendable labor. By early 1905, camps were constructed to detain captured Herero, most of them women and children. Many who had survived in the wilderness by eating insects and roots eventually surrendered. Starved and barely more than walking skeletons, they staggered forward and collapsed at the feet of German soldiers.

These were not shelters. They were concentration camps. Or, as Israeli ministers today euphemistically call them, "humanitarian cities." Built close to German settlements, the camps ensured that prisoners were readily available for forced labor: laying railroad tracks, constructing roads, or loading and unloading cargo ships. Many were also leased to private businesses and households, where they were exploited as domestic servants or agricultural workers.

Inside the camps, prisoners were packed into overcrowded halls behind barbed wire. They were given meager rations of uncooked rice and flour and forced to work from sunrise until late into the night, under constant threat of brutal corporal punishment. Heinrich Vedder, a German missionary who visited the camp at the coastal town of Swakopmund, observed that the prisoners were "driven to death like cattle and like cattle they were buried".

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This reign of terror wasn't chaotic – it was calculated. It served a clear economic and political purpose, as made disturbingly clear in a letter written by Hans Tecklenburg, vice-governor of German South-West Africa, and cited in David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism:

"The more the Herero people now feel the consequences of the uprising on their own bodies, the less the coming generations will feel inclined to rebel. Sure, the death of so many natives has a negative commercial impact, but the natural life-force of the Hereros will soon allow them to recover their numbers; the future generations, which could possibly be mixed with a bit of Damra blood, would thus have been bottle-fed with (an understanding of) their inferiority to the white race."

In the fall of 1905, General von Trotha issued yet another extermination order, this time targeting the Nama people, who soon met the same fate as the Herero in the German concentration camps. By the time the killing stopped, up to 80 percent of the Herero and around half of the Nama population had been wiped out.

"How could it happen?" was the question I asked myself then, as a clueless teenager. Today I know.

For nearly two years, we've watched Israel reduce Gaza to rubble, massacre close to 60,000 people, and produce an entire generation of children without arms, without legs, without parents. Those who survived the bombs are now being starved – deliberately, methodically – as Israel inches closer to its goal of ethnically cleansing Palestine.

And all of it has happened in plain sight. With the cameras rolling. With our politicians watching.

"How could it happen?" should, therefore, never be asked again. It should be permanently struck from the vocabulary of shock.

Further reading:

Let Us Die Fighting by Horst Drechsler (1966)

The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen (2014)

(Content warning: This article contains descriptions of violence against women and sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.)

What is Diddy accused of?

The indictment consists of five criminal charges: two counts of sex trafficking, two counts of transporting individuals across state lines for the purpose of prostitution, and one count of racketeering—a sweeping charge often associated with organized crime.

Prosecutors argue that Combs led a decades-long criminal enterprise involving coercion, prostitution, and abuse. If convicted, he faces life imprisonment.

Notably, Diddy is not facing criminal charges for the violent assault of his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura at The InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in 2016, a moment caught on hotel surveillance footage. The reason is California's statute of limitations.

However, it was that very assault that prompted Cassie to file a civil lawsuit against Combs in November 2023. Civil suits and legal actions between private individuals cannot result in prison sentences; they only result in financial damages.

Within 24 hours of the lawsuit becoming public, both parties reached a settlement. During this federal trial, we learned the amount: $20 million.

Because of that settlement, Diddy and his legal team have admitted to the assault, knowing that he cannot be charged again for the same incident.

But even though he cannot be criminally convicted for that particular act, prosecutors are using the 2016 video as evidence to demonstrate that violence was a key feature of their relationship and that the so-called freak-offs Cassie was forced to participate in occurred under duress or threat of violence.

How has Diddy responded?

Diddy's public stance has evolved as more information has emerged. In December 2023, shortly after settling with Cassie, he denied all wrongdoing. He claimed the allegations were fabricated attempts at a quick payday.

But when the hotel surveillance video leaked in May 2024, clearly showing him assaulting Cassie, Diddy appeared visibly shaken as he posted an apology video on Instagram. In it, he admitted to the assault, described it as a "dark period" in his life where he had "hit rock bottom". He claimed he had since sought help.

Despite that partial admission, he continues to deny all charges currently brought against him in this federal case.

Haven't over 100 people accused Diddy of abuse?

A total of 120 individuals have accused Combs of various forms of sexual misconduct. However, some of these claims have only been made to the media, while others remain under preliminary investigation. The vast majority are playing out in separate civil cases. Only a small handful of witnesses are part of this federal criminal indictment.

What were freak-offs?

"Freak-offs" is the name Diddy himself used to describe the drug-fueled sex parties he allegedly hosted since at least the early 2000s. They often followed his more mainstream celebrity events, acting as a secretive, debauched third act after official afterparties.

That context is important: not all celebrities seen at a Diddy-hosted event necessarily participated in a freak-off. For example, someone might attend Diddy's famous White Party in the Hamptons without having been present at what followed later that night. While speculation continues about which public figures may have participated, that remains unconfirmed.

As for the 2016 assault caught on camera, it allegedly took place at 11 a.m., when Cassie attempted to leave one of these freak-offs.

How did Cassie and Diddy meet?

The two met in 2006, the same year Cassie signed to Diddy's Bad Boy Records. She was a 19-year-old aspiring artist; he was already 36 or 37, a multimillionaire, and one of the most powerful figures in the music industry.

Diddy already had a reputation for aggression – rumors of violent behavior dated back to at least the late 1990s – and the power imbalance between them would shape their entire relationship.

In keeping with a familiar pattern, Diddy reportedly signed Cassie to a highly restrictive and exploitative record deal. She was contracted to deliver ten albums, a staggering figure for a newcomer. Given her age, inexperience, and the blinding influence of Diddy's celebrity status, she likely didn't fully grasp what she was signing away.

The contract gave him complete control over her creative and musical output. And sure enough: despite recording hundreds of songs, only one album was released: her debut, Cassie in the summer of 2006.

By 2007, the two began dating, though their relationship remained secret for years. They were on and off until they finally separated in 2018.

The Trial – Day 1

The prosecution delivered its opening statement on Monday, May 12, laying out the case against Diddy and previewing the graphic nature of what the jury would hear. One example: an incident in which Diddy allegedly forced a male sex worker to urinate in Cassie's mouth.

During these freak-off sessions, prosecutors say Diddy watched, directed, masturbated, referred to himself as "king," and often filmed the encounters.

In court, Diddy appeared with gray hair, a detail that didn't go unnoticed. Media outlets like The New York Times and BBC reported that Diddy lacks access to hair dye in detention.

But the timing also sparked speculation: similar visual transformations have been seen before in the courtroom strategies of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, appearing older, weaker, and, perhaps, more sympathetic.

After opening arguments, the prosecution called its first two witnesses:

Witness 1: Israel Florez

A hotel security guard, Florez, described responding to reports of a disturbance on one of the floors. Exiting the elevator, he saw a distressed Diddy wearing only a towel. Cassie, visibly injured, curled up on the floor.

Florez: "As soon as I walked out, the best way I can describe it is a devilish stare. He was just looking at me … looking at me with no movement."

He said he tried to separate the two and calm Diddy down. At one point, Diddy allegedly offered him money, something Florez interpreted as a bribe. He declined, instead telling Diddy that the hotel had no intention of escalating the situation and asked him to ensure no further disturbances before checkout.

Witness 2: Daniel Phillip

The second witness, Daniel Phillip, is a male sex worker. He testified that he was paid up to $6,000 to have sex with Cassie while Diddy watched and directed. Sessions sometimes lasted up to ten hours, and Diddy would occasionally withhold payment if dissatisfied.

The last two encounters allegedly ended with Diddy physically assaulting Cassie in front of Phillip.

Philip: "I asked her why she's staying with this guy if he's hitting her and beating her like this. I tried to explain to her that she's in real danger if she stays with him. She basically tried to convince me that, 'It's OK, I'm OK.'"

Phillip testified that he didn't report the incidents out of fear. He also claimed Diddy photographed his license plate, which he interpreted as an intimidation tactic.

Extreme misogyny in comment sections

I've observed a familiar pattern in the media cycle. Reputable outlets initially publish careful accounts of courtroom developments. Click-driven platforms like No Jumper, Complex, and DJ Akademiks follow up with sensationalized summaries and provocative and misleading headlines, stirring the pot and feeding the comment sections.

What's there is harrowing: a flood of misogyny, mostly, but not exclusively, from men, mocking or minimizing the allegations. Posts about the trial routinely generate hundreds of comments ridiculing Cassie or questioning her motives.

It is difficult to say how representative these comments are of men's real-life views. But if they are representative, the situation is dire.

The cruelty is hard to overstate. One recurring sentiment stands out: men expressing sympathy not for Cassie, but for her husband, writing things like "man, her husband must really be going through it."

It's depressing to see that a particular kind of men are so incapable of seeing women as human beings that they can read about all the horrors a woman has been subjected to and still conclude that the real victim is her husband.

Another common refrain reveals staggering ignorance: why is Cassie testifying after settling for $20 million? They fail, or refuse, to understand that this is a federal criminal case. If the U.S. government calls her as a witness, she is legally obligated to testify.

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Other Witnesses

Several more women are expected to testify, many of them anonymously.

• One, identified only as "Jane", says she began dating Diddy in 2020 and was forced to have unprotected sex with sex workers, against her will.

• Another, referred to as "Mia", worked as his personal assistant and will testify about multiple instances of rape.

Other witnesses will include former employees, additional sex workers, and members of Diddy's inner circle. According to prosecutors, their testimonies will establish a pattern of manipulation, exploitation, and abuse spanning two decades.

Day 2 & 3: Cassie Ventura's Testimony

Tuesday and Wednesday were dominated entirely by the prosecution's star witness: Cassie Ventura. Now eight months pregnant, she took the stand to testify. An experience that, by any measure, is difficult to imagine.

Instead of doing what a heavily pregnant woman might want to do during that period – resting, turning inward, and preparing for the birth of the child – Cassie was forced to relive and articulate the darkest chapter of her life. During parts of her testimony, she had to examine explicit images from the so-called "freak-offs" to identify herself and others involved, doing so in full view of the judge and jury.

The court has not released a full transcript of the proceedings, but journalists in the room have compiled summaries of key moments. Here are the most significant revelations from her time on the stand:

• Cassie testified that Diddy controlled every aspect of her life. He could show up any time, banging on her door, furious over real or imagined infractions.

• In the early days of their relationship, she said, they didn't have nicknames for each other until Diddy asked her what she used to call her grandfather. When she said "Pop Pop," he allegedly responded that he also wanted that to be her nickname for him.

• She testified that Diddy arranged for male sex workers to be flown in from Los Angeles and Miami, which is central to the case: transporting people across state lines for the purpose of purchasing or facilitating sex is a federal offense. While Cassie said she was often expected to handle the bookings, Diddy footed the bill.

• She described how he repeatedly demanded freak-offs, pressuring her until she gave in. The longest sessions could last up to four days, after which she often needed IV fluids and massages just to recover physically.

• During the freak-offs, she said she regularly used drugs, mainly ketamine. Not for recreation, but to dissociate, to numb her awareness of what was happening to her.

• Cassie made it clear: she hated every moment of it. She said she felt humiliated and that the only personal time she got with Diddy was between these orchestrated, degrading encounters.

• The freak-offs, she testified, followed a consistent script. Diddy would direct every act. At times, he'd prevent the escorts from ejaculating until he gave the go-ahead. Afterward, she said, he would sometimes take her into another room and ask her to rub his chest with the semen of the escorts.

• Baby oil and lubricant, she added, were constant features. Diddy allegedly demanded they be reapplied every five minutes. His instructions were specific: "You need to put on more oil. You need to be glistening. You need to be shining."

• Throughout her testimony, jurors were shown photos of physical injuries she says he caused. In one instance, he allegedly hit her, knocking her over so her eyebrow struck the headboard, splitting the skin. Diddy then reportedly instructed his security to take her to a plastic surgeon. She still bears the scar.

• She said she frequently wore heavy makeup and sunglasses to cover the marks on her face.

• Cassie recounted one incident that took place during the Cannes Film Festival, where Diddy allegedly became enraged and kicked her off a boat without shoes or a passport. On the flight home, she tried to avoid him by booking a separate seat, but he managed to switch seats so that he was next to her. During the flight, he allegedly pulled out his laptop and showed her a freak-off video as a threat.

• She also described how Diddy's staff – bodyguards, drivers, assistants – routinely witnessed the violence. At least once, she said, a staff member physically prevented her from escaping. On another occasion, she was allegedly taken to a hotel and kept there for a week, isolated, so she could recover from her injuries.

• During one of their breakups, she began seeing rapper Kid Cudi. When Diddy found out, she said, he lost control, threatening violence and again warning he would release the videos.

• Near the end of her testimony, Cassie spoke about the long-term psychological toll. In 2023, plagued by flashbacks, she said she became suicidal. She planned to walk into traffic on a highway, but her husband stopped her. Afterward, she began trauma therapy.

• Finally, she recounted the end of her relationship with Combs. In August 2018, after catching him with another woman, she decided to leave him for good. They had one last dinner together, which seemed relatively calm. But when he drove her home, he allegedly forced his way into her house and raped her on the living room floor.

Day 4: The Defense Strikes Back

On Thursday, May 15, Diddy's defense team began its cross-examination of Cassie Ventura. It focused heavily on the nature of their relationship. Many of their text messages were read aloud.

Given that they were together for eleven years, it can be assumed that there must have been periods of normality or even times where they expressed love for each other. It was these moments of intimacy, affection, and mutual desire that the defense sought to highlight. Their strategy: show that their relationship, while tumultuous, was not the product of coercion or trafficking, but of mutual toxicity.

Here are some of the key parts:

• They read multiple text messages that painted Cassie as a willing participant in freak-offs, or someone who expressed a desire for Diddy. In one message, she allegedly wrote: "Baby I want to F.O. so bad,"…followed by plans to keep the session short so she'd have time to recover before attending an event.

• Cassie countered that these texts were being presented without context and that she often used language like that to appease Diddy or to avoid triggering his anger.

• The defense also emphasized their shared drug use, chronicling a pattern of substance abuse that they suggested blurred the lines of consent. They also pointed to episodes of jealousy and infidelity, seeking to portray the relationship as volatile, but not criminal. In doing so, the defense appeared to be constructing an argument that their relationship, while clearly damaged and dysfunctional, did not meet the legal threshold for trafficking or organized abuse.

Day 5: Final Day of Testimony from Cassie Ventura

On Friday, May 16, Cassie Ventura returned to the witness stand for her fourth consecutive day of testimony. The defense continued its cross-examination, aiming to undermine her credibility and reshape the narrative around her relationship with Diddy.

Here are the most significant developments:

• The defense also zeroed in on the timeline of the alleged rape in 2018, which Cassie said occurred after a dinner at the end of their relationship. There appeared to be confusion about whether it happened in August or September.

• Using old text messages, the defense established that Cassie had consensual sex with Diddy at least once after the alleged rape. She confirmed this, explaining that her emotional bond hadn't simply vanished, despite the breakup and the abuse she endured. That sexual encounter reportedly happened while she was in the early stages of dating her now-husband, Alex Fine.

• The defense then suggested that Cassie had financial difficulties in 2023, when she filed her civil lawsuit and ultimately settled with Diddy for $20 million. They claimed that after receiving the settlement, she canceled plans for a tour. They also argued that, before receiving the money, Cassie, her husband, and their children moved in with her parents in Connecticut to cut costs.

• Cassie pushed back, stating that neither the canceled tour nor the move had anything to do with money. Instead, she said, the family was simply relocating to the East Coast and temporarily stayed with her parents during the transition.

• The defense played an audio clip of Cassie threatening another man's life. According to their framing, she believed he had stolen or discovered a video from the freak-offs.

• They also presented a 2012 text exchange between Cassie and Diddy. In it, Diddy asked whether she wanted to have a freak-off "one last time." She allegedly responded, "no," adding that she wanted a freak-off for "the first time for the rest of our lives" – a phrase the defense used to suggest a kind of ongoing desire or consent.

  The prosecution then re-questioned Cassie, offering important context to that same exchange. They read additional texts from Cassie: "I want to see you, but I'm emotional right now. I don't want to do one last time. I'd rather not do it at all." This nuance, they argued, clearly contradicted the defense's interpretation.

Homeland Security Agent Yasin Binda Testifies

Next, the prosecution called Homeland Security agent Yasin Binda, who participated in the raid on Diddy's properties in September 2024. Binda testified that during the search, authorities seized:

• Large quantities of baby oil and lubricants

• Prescription medications

• Cash

• Illegal drugs

The prosecution offered this inventory to reinforce the accounts of witnesses who had described freak-offs involving all of the above.

Singer Dawn Richard Takes the Stand

Before the day ended, prosecutors called a powerful final witness for the week: Dawn Richard, a former member of Diddy's groups Danity Kane and Diddy Dirty Money, who worked closely with him between 2004 and 2011.

Richard recounted a 2009 incident at Diddy's Los Angeles mansion. She and Cassie were in the kitchen when Diddy stormed down the stairs, yelling about why his food wasn't ready.

Richard: "He came downstairs screaming, belligerent, asking where his food was, and proceeded to hit her over the head, kicked her, and beat her to the ground in front of us."

Richard said he grabbed the frying pan Cassie had been using to make eggs and struck her with it. Though the pan may not have hit her hard, Cassie collapsed into a fetal position, seemingly to shield herself. Diddy then allegedly continued hitting and kicking her, eventually dragging her upstairs, where the assault continued.

Richard admitted that she did not intervene, was paralyzed by fear, and did not call the police.

She said Diddy called her in for a private meeting the next day. There, he reportedly justified the attack, claiming it resulted from "a passionate relationship" and assuring her that Cassie was fine. He allegedly warned her not to speak about what she saw, saying, "People disappear." Richard said she understood that as a threat.

She is scheduled to continue her testimony on Monday, May 19.

What Is This Trial Really About?

I'm far from a legal expert, but based on the cross-examination of Cassie, the legal battle hinges on consent.

Diddy's defense has argued that Cassie was a willing participant in their sexual relationship, including the freak-offs. During cross-examination, they read text messages that showed Cassie agreeing to meet with him despite knowing what might await.

But the prosecution disputes that version completely. They argue that Cassie's apparent participation wasn't consent but survival. They cite the 2016 hotel video as proof of what she was up against. And beyond physical violence, prosecutors point to the threat of reputational ruin. Diddy had filmed the freak-offs, they say, and used that footage to manipulate and silence her.

At the heart of the case is this question: When someone says "yes" while under the threat of violence, under emotional coercion, under fear of blackmail – is that truly a yes?

Under U.S. federal sex trafficking laws, the answer is no. Consent given under duress, threats, manipulation, or fear of retaliation is not legally considered consent.

The defense has to walk a tightrope. On the one hand, they cannot appear to attack or dehumanize Cassie too openly – that risks alienating the jury.

On the other hand, their entire case depends on casting doubt on her narrative by using her own words, like old text messages, to portray a complicated, non-traditional, and dysfunctional relationship, but not one that meets the criteria for trafficking or organized crime.

The Road Ahead

As noted, the trial is expected to run for at least eight weeks, and there are likely many twists. While I do not intend to write weekly updates, this piece offers a snapshot of the trial's opening chapter – what the case is about, and what emerged during the first week.

Rest assured: I'll likely write some follow-ups.

Statement from Cassie and Her Husband

Following the conclusion of her testimony on Friday, Cassie's attorney delivered brief public statements from both Cassie and her husband, Alex Fine. The couple is expecting their third child very soon.

In his statement, Fine addressed the disturbing trend of people portraying him as either the victim or the "hero" in Cassie's story, particularly after the traumatic details of her abuse were made public.

They arrived on Monday: the first white South Africans to be granted refugee status in the United States. The reason? The Trump administration claims they are the victims of discrimination and even genocide in South Africa.

Their arrival at Dulles International Airport in Virginia on May 12 was met with fanfare that bordered on surreal. Around fifty South Africans, men, women, and children, were greeted by a waiting press corps and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, who declared it an "honor" to welcome them.

Perhaps it needs to be emphasized: nothing suggests that white South Africans are being subjected to genocide. The group these "refugees" belong to, formally identified as "Afrikaners", are descendants of primarily Dutch settlers who arrived in southern Africa from the 1600s onward. Far from being persecuted, they remain among the most economically privileged populations on the continent.

Multiple studies show that although white South Africans make up just 7-8 percent of the population, they still own more than 70 percent of the country's commercial farmland. On average, they possess 20 times more wealth than their Black compatriots and continue to dominate the upper echelons of business and finance.

Some voices, often from the far right, try to paint this economic disparity as the reward for hard work. But the truth is, of course, primarily rooted in centuries of racial subjugation.

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For hundreds of years, Black South Africans were stripped of basic rights: denied the vote, restricted in their movements, exiled to barren and unproductive lands, and legally forbidden from owning property. Their access to education was deliberately limited, and they were relentlessly surveilled and suppressed by a violent state security apparatus. The list goes on.

The tyranny took many forms over the years. Eventually, it evolved into the formal policy of apartheid, which lasted until the early 1990s. Although apartheid was officially dismantled in 1994, the deeply rooted economic inequalities it fostered have persisted.

In response to these ongoing imbalances, South Africa passed an expropriation law in January 2025. The law allows the government to reclaim land without compensation, but only under strict conditions: the land must be unused and no existing development plans must exist.

The process is governed by transparent legal proceedings and oversight to ensure that expropriations are fair and not arbitrary. Notably, the law contains no racial provisions – simply being white does not make one a target. And so far, not a single parcel of land has been seized.

The parodic spectacle of the South African "refugees" takes place shortly after the Trump administration shut down all other refugee admissions. People fleeing war and devastation in places like Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are being turned away. Thousands who had already endured years-long vetting processes and received approval suddenly had their cases frozen or revoked, stranded in bureaucratic limbo.

It's obviously about race. That this special pathway is suddenly extended to white South Africans is no accident. Historically, Black Africans have faced steeper hurdles than others when seeking asylum in the U.S., including longer processing times and dramatically higher denial rates.

As is customary in today's digital echo chambers – fueled by propaganda, low standards of fact-checking, and an avalanche of AI-generated misinformation – the myth of a white genocide in South Africa is flourishing on social media.

Many posts spread fabricated claims: that 60 white farmers are murdered each day, or that 4,000 have been killed since 2018. Not least on Twitter, where the South African owner and billionaire Elon Musk has amplified them

Official crime data tells a different story. South Africa is undeniably plagued by high levels of violence, but there is no statistical basis to suggest that white farmers are being targeted disproportionately. Even when measured by percentages, Black farmers face a significantly higher risk of being killed.

The narrative of white victimhood in South Africa isn't new. It is part of a broader myth-making tradition aimed at shielding white economic dominance and sanitizing the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.

Alongside the genocide myth, there's the long-debunked "Empty Land Myth," which falsely claims that European colonizers found South Africa uninhabited. Or the narrative that apartheid wasn't as brutal as commonly believed.

The difference is that those spreading the myth now include the world's richest man. And that he has influence over the leader of the world's most powerful country.

Further reading:

Reports:

Land Audit Report – Phase II: Private Land Ownership by Race, Gender and Nationality (November 2017, version 2)

Policy & Advocacy Report (vol. 4, nr. 15) by U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (May, 2021)

Scholarly articles:

"The Racial Wealth Gap in South Africa and the United States" by Grieve Chelwa, Mashekwa Maboshe & Darrick Hamilton in Review of Political Economy (vol. 36, nr. 2, 2024)

Articles:

"African asylum seekers afraid ahead of US election" by Kaine Pieri for BBC News (October 30, 2024)

"False data distort complex picture of South African farm murders" by AFP Fact Check (March 10, 2025)

"Trump administration cancels travel for refugees already cleared to come to America" by Farnoush Amiri, Rebecca Santana & Gisela Salomon for Associated Press (January 22, 2025)

Today's episode of the Black History Unveiled podcast is about one of pre-colonial Africa's most famous regents. A woman who, for several decades, resisted Portugal's attempt to conquer her country. A woman whose actions throughout history have been both demonized and glorified.

Today's episode is about Njinga – The Mother of Angola – and the woman who, in the 17th century, was prepared to do everything to avoid losing her country.

Black History Unveiled is found wherever you get your podcasts.

Sources used in the episode:

Books:

Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 by James H. Sweet (2003)

Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America by Jane Landers & Barry Robinson (editors) (2006)

Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen by Linda M. Heywood (2017)

The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories by Janell Hobson (2021)

Scholarly articles:

”Nzinga of Matamba in a New Perspective” by Joseph C. Miller in The Journal of African History (vol. 16, nr 2, 1975)

”Legitimacy and Political Power: Queen Njinga, 1624–1663” by John K. Thornton in The Journal of African History (vol. 32, nr 1, 1991)

”Nzinga Mbandi: From Story to Myth” by Orqui-dea Ribeiro, Fernando Alberto Torres Moreira & Susana Pimenta in Journal of Arts Science and Technology (vol. 11, nr 1, 2019)

Articles:

”Queens of Infamy: Njinga” by Anne Thériault for Longreads (October, 2019)