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Slave: The True Story of a Girl's Lost Childhood and Her FIght for Survival

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After the bloody Civil War ended in 1865, slavery was formally abolished in the United States. However, slavery is still practiced today with an estimated 30 million living enslaved worldwide.

So Slave: My True Story is an autobiography of Mende Nazer. Born in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, when she was about 12, she was kidnapped by Arab slave raiders and sold to a wealthy family in Khartoum. Eventually, she was taken to London and manages to escape, after seven years of slavery. So what Northup does, where he reaches across the ages and a race divide that I can never cross - he takes a look at his oppressors and states: "I get it." You take a white boy, the son of a slave owner, and from his birth you instill in him that there is no humanity in a slave. Northup: "..with such training, whatever may be his natural disposition, it cannot well be otherwise than that, on arriving at maturity, the sufferings and miseries of the slave will be looked upon with entire indifference." So in 2013, I am equally unable to understand the mind of a white slave owner. I was not born into this - how could I ever empathize with a multi-generational slave owning white southern man? "Brought up with such ideas - in the notion that we stand without the pale of humanity - no wonder the oppressors of my people are a pitiless and unrelenting race."According to Wikipedia, there are between 21 million to 46 million people enslaved today. Which is a pretty large margin but also a very very big number regardless.

Nigel Tattersfield, The forgotten trade: comprising the log of the Daniel and Henry of 1700 and accounts of the slave trade from the minor ports of England, 1698-1725 (Jonathan Cape, 1991) The focus of this book is Mende. The Sudanese wars aren't explained at all. I recently finished First Raise A Flag: How South Sudan Won the Longest War but Lost the Peace so I felt like I could understand what was going on but for people who have not, this is not the book to turn to for Sudanese history. Rather, it describes Nuba culture and life in Khartoum through the eyes of a young girl. At such times, the heart of man turns instinctively towards his Maker. In prosperity, and whenever there is nothing to injure or make him afraid, he remembers Him not, and is ready to defy Him; but place him in the midst of dangers, cut him off from human aid, let the grave open before him, then it is, in the time of his tribulation, that the scoffer and unbelieving man turns to God for help, feeling there is no other hope, or refuge, or safety, save in his protecting arm." And because of that, it is absolutely heartbreaking. I don't want to survive, I want to live. You can learn about slavery in history class but reading bland facts does not compare to first hand accounts. This sheds a complete new light on this shameful part of history.This book is told from the view point of a man who was a slave, not some historian’s interpretation of the events or a novelist’s aggrandisement. It is a frank narrative of the events that surrounded one man’s persecution into a woeful existence and allows the reader to form their own opinion of the life of a slave. This is a unique enlightenment into the American slave system, of the 19th century, conveying the hypocrisy of the land of liberation, allowing insight into the prejudices and cruelty these men and women were subjected to. Running away was the most common form of resistance, and Caribbean newspapers are full of notices for runaways (for example CO 7/1– Barbados 1786 & 1789; CO 71/2– Dominica, 1798; CO 137/14– Jamaica, 1771-1772; CO 260/48 St Vincent, 1831). Everyone who has heard about the book finally being re-published in the UK has said the same thing to me: well, it’s about time!” Solomon Northup é, sem sombra de dúvida, mais uma figura inspiradora, que prova que o melhor da natureza humana tem um poder capaz de milagres!

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