AFRICA | The Slave Trade Seen From Africa: Zeinab Badawi Goes Back to Where It Began
BBC News Africa, History of Africa with Zeinab Badawi, Slavery and Suffering
BBC News Africa published Slavery and Suffering, episode 16 of History of Africa with Zeinab Badawi, in October 2020. It runs 45 minutes.
Most accounts of the transatlantic trade begin where the ships landed. This one deliberately does not. In the BBC’s own description, Badawi “looks at the impact on Africa itself,” travelling to several countries to show “how, where and why” the trade began — which, the programme says, was in Cabo Verde in 1510.
On the Senegalese island of Gorée she meets a man who, the BBC says, has spent 35 years telling the story of slavery to thousands of visitors. And the episode does not step around the hardest question in the subject: “leading academics tackle the controversial subject of why some Africans helped sell their fellow Africans into slavery.”
That question is often raised to dilute responsibility. Here it is put by historians, on camera, as part of an honest account rather than an alibi. That is what earns the episode its place in The Big Story.
For Caribbean viewers it fills in the half of the history that is least often told on this side of the Atlantic: what the trade did to Africa itself. Forty-five minutes is a commitment. It is also the right length for the subject.
Video: BBC News Africa (@BBCAfrica), “Slavery and Suffering - History Of Africa with Zeinab Badawi [Episode 16]”, published October 2020. Quoted passages are from the BBC’s own published video description. WiredJA is not affiliated with the BBC.
