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

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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. 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.

William St. Clair, 'The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British slave trade' Profile Books 2006 Melinda Elder, 'The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of 18th Century Lancaster Keele University Press 1992 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 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. 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.Michael Jordan, 'The Great Abolition Sham: The True Story of the End of the British Slave Trade' Sutton 2005

Something about the dignity and courage of Mende Nazar as she recounts her appalling story grabs hold of your heart, allowing you to read on when it is almost unbearable. 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). And where are the limits of international involvement? Mende was literally enslaved to a Sudanese diplomat. There's a scene where someone tells Mende that in the UK you can't work and not get paid and this surprises her. At what point does culture relativity stop?Emma Christopher, 'Slave ships, sailors and their captive cargoes 1730-1807' Cambridge University Press 2006 Paul Lovejoy, 'Transformations in Slavery: A history of slavery in Africa' Cambridge University Press My original intention was to find a book that would describe Sudan positively. I fear I've failed at that.

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.Ottobah Cugoano, ed. Vincent Carretta, 'Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery' (Penguin Classics 1999) 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.

this freedom was a terrifying thing. I was captured when I was still a child. I spent my teenage years and my early adulthood in slavery. For all that time, I had no freedom. I was a non-person. I didn't really exist. (311) 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.” Williams Connell is the founding curator of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives and Museum at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. Speaking from her home in Miami, Florida, she said, “To think that almost 80 years after it was published, Britain is finally discovering Capitalism and Slavery is amazing to me.

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. After all those years, Rahab [the woman who owned me] had completely destroyed my sense of my own identity and my own self-worth. I believed that I didn't deserve to be paid for my work. I lived in a state of complete terror of her. And I was still only a child. To rebel against the woman whom I called "master" and who called me "slave" had become unthinkable. It lay outside the range of possibilities that I could contemplate. (200) The National Archives also has a slavery section, which is a portal to research guides, digitised documents and teaching resources on Britain's slave trade and the abolition movement. I wish there was more about how she got used to living in the UK because that scene with the bus was really interesting.

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