President Muhammadu Buhari at the weekend said four centuries after the first 20 documented African slaves arrived on the shores of Virginia, the slave trade still exists.
The president said this via a statement released on Saturday to mark the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition.
Buhari said in the years that followed, millions more were shipped in dehumanising conditions across the ocean and enslaved.
“Slavery had, of course, existed before. But this indicated the beginning of a mechanised trade that saw human beings reduced to property on an unprecedented scale,” he added.
The president explained that despite the fact that descendants of African slaves have made valuable contributions across society, they are still dealing with the effects of this poisonous legacy. They still have to navigate its everyday manifestations, such as discrimination, racism or lack of access to resources and opportunities. This must not be overlooked or forgotten.
Yet, as we reflect on this day, International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition, it is clear slavery did not only thrive then. It still thrives today. Across the world it is estimated there are as many as 40 million men, women and children living in forced servitude. They are the industrial victims of a business many believe was abolished hundreds of years ago. They are the modern enslaved.
Their exploitation appears in many guises, though usually unrecognized as slavery. Many victims are unseen, hidden beneath opaque supply chains. Others are hidden in plain sight, entrapped by circumstances that rob them of autonomy. In any case, their labour, often dangerous, is no product of choice and its conditions are self-perpetuating.”
He said in Africa, its modern forms include debt bondage, the enslavement of war captives, commercial sexual exploitation and forced domestic servitude. Holding people held against their will, controlling their movements and forcing them to work for the sole profit of others – wherever they are – is slavery today and always.
The abolitionists of the 19th century succeeded more than any before: By working to extinguish the transatlantic slave trade that had claimed 15 million victims, they laid the groundwork to ensure it did not manufacture millions more. But their work is not done. We must take up their examples as we forge a path forward to eliminate modern-day slavery in all its forms.
Slavery, once again, has become entwined in the global economy – and it is largely unseen. For instance, most of us might know in principle that the mining of cobalt crucial to our smartphones might have used forced labour.