Slavery

One of the main issues in The Book of Negroes is the slave trade from Africa to the United States. Africans were captured in their homeland and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to many different continents and countries. Not many people really think about the issue of slavery now a days. Our generation has not really been affected by slavery. According to David Northrup, in his book, The Atlantic Slave Trade 2^nd Edition, most of the Africans slaves in the Atlantic Slave Trade were enslaved between 1700 – 1850. This is a long time ago.

However, the slave industry in the US was big back in the day. But the US was only one place that Africans were shipped to. In school, we are taught about only the slavery in the United States. However, in reality the U.S. only received about 7 percent of all slaves from Africa. According to Paul E. Lovejoy, there were 11,863,000 slaves that were exported from Africa during the whole period of the Atlantic slave trade. Within the novel, Aminata, mentions in her journey across the ”river”, that only two-thirds of the captives made it all the way across alive. Northrup confirms this number when he estimates that one third of the Africans died on the trip across the ocean. When I see numbers, it helps put things into perspective. So looking at these numbers, it is a huge eye opener to the issue that the slave trade was even outside of the US.

Another statistic I found was that 65 percent of slaves were male and 23 percent were children (male and female of the age of 15 or under). In my novel the main character is an 11 year old girl when she was captured and brought to the US, so she would fall under the 23 percent that were children. 

All of these facts about the Atlantic slave trade of Africans were fascinating and new to me.