Slave: Snatched off Britain’s streets. The truth from the victim who brought down her traffickers.

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His daughter described how a letter he wrote to that effect “dropped like a bomb in 10 Downing Street”. 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. To conclude, Slave: My True Story is not an easy book to read. It's upsetting and it's unpleasant. However, this is also a remarkable tale of a brave young woman and a first hand account of a huge problem.

I wish there was more about how she got used to living in the UK because that scene with the bus was really interesting. The contentious core of the book by Williams – who was the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago for 25 years until his death in 1981 – was that the abolition of the slave trade was not born out of humanitarian wishes but of economic necessity. To think that, almost 80 years after it was published, Britain is finally discovering Capitalism and Slavery is amazing Erica Williams Connell Slave is the true story of Mende Nazer, a Sudanese woman whose childhood ended when she was captured and enslaved around age 12. One thing that made Mende’s story particularly stand out to me is that we are about the same age. Her slavery did not take place in the huts and villages of Sudan, but in the relatively modern city of Khartoum, where her well-to-do captors had most of the modern conveniences that we do (electricity, washer/dryer, stove/oven, etc). 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. Mende eventually came of age, started to attract the attention of adult male visitors to the household, then was "traded" to a family in London. She eventually escaped and was granted amnesty within the UK with aide from fellow Sudanese and British supporters. One of those supporters, Damien Lewis, is the co-author of the novel. Both he and Mende dedicate their time and resources supporting human rights organizations and government assemblies. She has since learned that her parents survived the raid and are alive near her village and communicates with them periodically. Unfortunately with her sensationalized trial, publicized battle for political asylum in the United Kingdom and the release of the novel, came noteriety that prohibits her from returning to the Sudan. Thus Mende's ultimate plea for the abolition of slavery everywhere is coupled by a simple desire to see her family again.

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. Ottobah Cugoano, ed. Vincent Carretta, 'Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery' (Penguin Classics 1999) In this book, Mende recounts the story through her own eyes with the help of author Damien Lewis. Because of the oral-tradition culture in which Mende grew up, she was able to remember and retell many vivid details and facts of the life she knew during her childhood and the life she later came to know as a slave in a bustling modern city. The first portion of the book recounts Mende’s childhood growing up in the Nuba mountains, a life full of familial love and enjoyment of life, with a few accounts that convey disdain for some of the difficult ways and traditions of that life (e.g., female genital mutilation/circumcision). I was touched by the recounting of her parent’s love and gentleness with her, loving her always, and sometimes with firmness, but without physical force—something that became routine in her days of enslavement. His thesis was that slavery just became economically unviable, and that the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was driven more by the Industrial Revolution changing the way that Britain did business rather than any moral desire to stop the practice of slavery in its colonies. Mende Nazer lost her childhood at age twelve, when she was sold into slavery. It all began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, murdering the adults and rounding up thirty-one children, including Mende.

What a book - I cried and my heart broke. The language of the book is easy and simplistic. The story is told, with no literary embellishments and in the author's own voice - she is not a writer and so there is a matter of fact style (it was told to Damien Lewis, a journalist who helped Mende during her escape and who penned the book, but I'm glad he kept it simple). The book has 2 halves. The first is about Mende's life growing up in a small village in the Nuba mountains of Sudan; and then life after Arab raiders killed many of the people in her village, and captured her and other kids to be used as slaves for wealthy families. Although virtually unknown in the UK, Capitalism and Slavery has never been out of print in the US since its first publication by the University of North Carolina Press. It is now on its third edition and between that and the second edition, just a few years ago, has sold 40,000 copies.

Mary Prince, 'The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave' ed. Sarah Salih, Penguin Classics 2000

Emma Christopher, 'Slave ships, sailors and their captive cargoes 1730-1807' Cambridge University Press 2006 This book is roughly split into three parts. The first part details her childhood in the Nuba Mountains. While Mende describes it positively, there were definitely some heartbreaking scenes here, such as her experiences with female genital mutilation. However, as a whole, Mende's family seems so full of love and warmth and hearing stories of her childhood was really interesting. The second part describes her abduction and work in Khartoum. Finally, the last part talks about London and her eventual escape. For the first time since I'd been captured, I was sitting on a chair in a living room being treated like everyone else. The strange thing was that I didn't really like it. I'd spent so many years being treated like a slave and that's what I'd become used to. (259)One of my professors is convinced megacities are the future. Even today, London's budget is bigger than several countries. Such mega-cities are fascinating because they are so international. There are so many cultures represented everywhere. Reading this book was the first time I had considered that international cities also import the troubles of their residents. It makes me think about how our world is so connected, slavery in Sudan also means slavery in London just as covid-19 in China can easily mean covid-19 everywhere else. Recovered Histories Anti-Slavery International has digitised its collection of 18th and 19th century literature on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Recovered Histories captures the narratives of the enslaved, enslavers, slave ship surgeons, abolitionists, parliamentarians, clergy, planters and rebels. There have been many rebuttals and affirmations of what has become known the Williams Thesis since it was first published in 1944, and in answer to these, Williams Connell quoted from the foreword of the recent third edition, by William Darity of Duke University in North Carolina, who wrote: “Although scholars of the British Industrial Revolution generally have ignored Williams’s proposition, they only can continue to do so by placing their own intellectual integrity at peril.” The next portion describes her capture, abuse, and rape, and then her being sold as a slave to a respected family in Sudan’s capital. There she worked for seven years, suffering physical, verbal, and emotional abuse before being sold to her “master’s” relatives, who ironically worked for the Sudanese embassy in London. London is where Mende escaped to freedom, but even there such an escape was an unlikely possibility. Paul Lovejoy, 'Transformations in Slavery: A history of slavery in Africa' Cambridge University Press