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    Yesterday and Today

    On-line version ISSN 2309-9003Print version ISSN 2223-0386

    Y&T  n.33 Vanderbijlpark Jul. 2025

    https://doi.org/10.17159/2223-0386/2025/n33a15 

    TEACHERS VOICE / HANDS-ON ARTICLES

     

    Reimaging, from a decolonised perspective, the Grade 10 intended curriculum and the start of the era of modernity - Portugal covets the gold of West Africa, sugar, and the start of enslaving black bodies

     

     

    Gordon Brookbanks; Lethukukhanya Mbambo

    Westerford High School Cape Town, South Africa gj@westerford.co.za lm@westerford.co.za

     

     

    Positionality

    Ramose1 (2016) argues the "construction of the education curriculum demands a specific vision of the kind of human being education is designed to deliver to society". While the Department of Basic Education has implemented a process for the 'Strengthening of the Curriculum', this paper contributes to the reimaging of the Grade 10 History curriculum with a topic which has the objective to address, and humanize, the vision of a value-based education.

    Drawing on the work of Howard W French (2021. Born in Blackness. Liveright Publishing, New York), we have introduced a topic at the start of the Grade 10 academic year entitled 'Portugal covets the gold of West Africa and the start of enslaving black bodies'. In the absence of text books available in South Africa which would unpack this explicit focus, we draw on the work of French.2 While the implemented curriculum does introduce various civilisations which existed in 1450, it seemingly addresses them as distinct silos. We infuse the Ghana-, Mali-, and Songhai Empires as well as the Ming Dynasty, Ottoman Empire and Europe (as it emerged out of the Middle Ages) into the narrative.

    French argues that the history of the early years of the era ofmodernity has been heavily skewed in favour of Spain, and its conquests in the Americas.3 Portugal's acquisition to rights of Africa has been traditionally reduced to a mere footnote. Yet, of the two Iberian Catholic Monarchies, Portugal's colonial conquest of the islands off West Africa and its finding and controlling the source of gold, underpinned by a Papal Bull, became the more powerful engine of modernity, as Christendom took root. It was Portugal's far deeper connections with sub-Saharan Africa, first through gold and then enslaving black bodies, more than any other factors birthed the era of modernity. This topic serves to answer the question as to why, beginning in the first half of the fifteenth century, Europeans, led principally by the Portuguese, began to mount a determined push for trade opportunities and political relations with what had previously been regarded by Europeans as impossibly remote and inaccessible regions of specifically West Africa?

    Because of Portugal's colonial conquest, and in the space of less than two hundred years, the course of world history would change in more lasting ways than it had during any comparable period in previous human experience. At the heart of this change lay the mass trafficking of human beings who were transported in chains from the continent of their birth, to new and unfamiliar places-first to Europe, and then to the Americas-with, for the first time, the idea of race as a principle for determining a person's 'enslavability.

     

     

    Portugal's 'discovery' of the source of gold in West Africa served as its first prize, superseded by a new lucrative trade in Black African slaves and a boom in Portuguese sugar production on islands located just off the African continent, fuelled Spain's obsession with finding its own source of gold and exploration into the westward extremities of the Atlantic Ocean.

     

    The premise from which the narrative of French (2021) unfolds

    A Eurocentric historical narrative means people in the West have long been conditioned to believe that Africa has little pre-modern history, or at least little of it that matters to the big picture of the world. Western thinkers and politicians, from Hagel to Trump, have argued African societies have lived, as it were, outside of history.

    French4 argues it so dramatically miscasts the role ofAfrica, that it becomes a profound mis-telling. The author explains the first impetus for the so-termed 'Age of Discovery' was not Europe's yearning for ties with Asia, rather its centuries-old lust for gold and the desire to forge trading ties with legendary Black societies hidden away somewhere in the heart of West Africa.

    French suggests that in developing an understanding of the emergence of modernity requires not only that we explore the early Afro-European contacts in depth and with greater patience, but that we ask ourselves: How is it that this story has gone for so long being so seldom examined or told?

    The Iberian Catholic monarchy of Portugal's acquisition to rights of Africa has been traditionally reduced to a mere footnote. It only returns to narratives about Europe's irresistible rise over the rest of the world with its belated leap to Asia, under the command of mariners like Vasco da Gama who rounded Africa's Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and reached Calicut via the Indian Ocean in 1498. Portugal did not really lose out to Spain at all in the great bargains reached during a series of world-dividing treaties brokered by the Vatican at the end of the fifteenth century.

    French5 argues: Of the two Iberian Catholic monarchies, Portugal became the much more powerful engine of modernity. It was Portugal's far deeper connections with sub-Saharan Africa, first through gold and then through enslaving black bodies, which more than any other factors in this era, birthed to us our familiar world.

     

    West African civilisation: Trade and the source of gold

    It has long been believed that people in sub-Saharan Africa were spurred to urbanise only by contact with Arabs, beginning sometime in the first millennium. The prevailing view has long been held that it was only contact with Europe, which would come centuries later, that dragged what is fancied as 'Black Africa' out of its supposed isolation and connect it to the big currents of change that began sweeping the rest of the world in the late Middle Ages and the start of the era of modernity.

    French6 explains Djenné is the most prominent of many ancient cities in Africa and does not substantiate the previous statement. Djenné had urbanised hundreds of years before Arabs first swept into North Africa in the seventeenth century. It thrived by trading fish, grains and copper and other metals with places hundreds of kilometres away, such as the cities of Timbuktu and Gao. Archaeological findings have uncovered artifacts that date to the city's very beginnings, including glass beads that came from Han China, when the dynasty itself (202BCE to 220CE) was scarcely a century old. Items like these bear witness to the fact that West Africa was never so cut off from the rest of the world or 'lost in time' as is commonly imagined.

    Sometime during its first half millennium of existence, Djenné-jeno became an important southern terminus in a highly lucrative trans-Saharan trade in gold. This commerce became plentiful around the sixth century, as parts of what would later become the Ghana Empire, began to trade gold with Berbers from the north for salt, cloth and other goods. All of this was aided by the recent introduction into the region of the desert-hardy camel, which revolutionised transportation. The real power of Ghana's rulers was based on control of strategic chokepoints through which gold passed from south to north, and through which other essential goods like salt travelled in the opposite direction. By the eleventh century, Ghana's wealth and prestige allowed it to field impressively large armies.

    Based on this trade, Ghana became known throughout North Africa, Mediterranean Europe and as far away as Yemen as the 'country of gold'. In time, Ghana would generate as much as two-thirds of the supply of metal to the inhabitants of medieval Western Eurasia. The gold that flowed out of the region played a crucial role in the Arab golden age, a period of explosive growth and political expansion that began around 750CE, and extended until the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. As a result of the trade in this precious metal, the hard currency of the Arab world, the gold Dinar, became prized everywhere it circulated. This included medieval Christendom, where Arab coins were often copied. The existence of a quasi-universal currency greatly facilitated the growth of Arab commerce from the Levant to Andalusia, the name given to the Muslim empire that flourished in what are now modern Spain and Portugal.

    Ghana paid the ultimate price for its relative isolation and dependence on camel-driven traders from the north. Its power crumbled after 1076, when the Almoravid Berbers, fervent Muslim ascetics from North Africa, seized control from Ghana of Awdaghust, a critical southern terminus of the trans-Saharan gold trade. The Almoravid Berbers soon went on to secure Islam's hitherto vulnerable presence in Europe for another four hundred years.

    The question we ask in our history classrooms as we begin the Grade 10 History curriculum, is: Why, beginning in the first half of the fifteenth century, did Europeans, led principally by the Portuguese, begin to mount a determined push for trade opportunities and political relations with what had previously been regarded as impossibly remote and inaccessible regions of Africa?

     

    Abu Bakr 11, oceanic-explorative intent

    Obscure though it may be to the world today, little known Dejenné constitutes an important piece of this story. Early centres of urbanisation like this one-city-states, in effect-became swept up in a process of empire formation in part of Africa, that would soon become outward looking as Portugal or Spain, only long before the oceanic explorations of the Iberians (in terms of what we refer to as the Era of Modernity). In fact, the most famous of these Sudanic empires, Mali, which succeeded Ghana in the thirteenth century, and gave the present-day country its name, was ruled at the turn of the fourteenth century by an emperor named Abu Bakr II. Abu Bakr II's personal obsession was reaching the limits of the Atlantic Ocean by boat. This was more than a century and a half before Columbus set out to cross the Atlantic from Andalusia (which we unpack in due course as a sub-topic in the Grade 10 curriculum). While surviving documentary record of Abu Bakr II is limited, there can be no doubt of his existence, nor any reason not to credit his fixation on maritime discovery. This is because his much more famous successor, Mansa Müsã (and where Mansa Müsã is covered, as a 'character' or 'topic' in the primary school history curriculum), gave the governor of Cairo a detailed account of Abu Bakr's life and attempts at oceanic discovery during a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324-1325, and which was recorded comprehensively.

    French7 suggests the reason for no knowledge of Abu Bakr Il's oceanic-explorative intent is two-fold: Firstly the near total lack of documentary or archaeological evidence and secondly, the deliberate and pervasive neglect and erasure of the role of Africa and of Africans in the creation of a modern Atlantic world. This is what Kris Manjapra8 refers to as "ghost lining", an issue we drill deeper into as the Grade 10 curriculum unfolds.

    French9 explains, that by Columbus spending time in the Canary Islands, off West Africa, we know he discovered the existence, at a fixed latitude, of powerful winds and ocean currents that circulate in a counterclockwise fashion and swiftly bear ships off to the west. The waters off the coastal region of West Africa controlled by Abu Bakr Il's Mali are dominated by these very effects, helping make sense of a possible survivor's account of a big river effect flowing violently into the midst of an ocean. European mariners did have knowledge of a current just to the north of this large system, which in modern times has been known as the Canary Current, which was an equally large and power clockwise current that thrusts all in its path in an eastward direction-back to Europe. This system explains why Europeans had believed for centuries that sailing westward across the ocean was not only impractical, but also suicidal.

    In addition to gold, each of the three Sudanic empires that succeeded one another in controlling the most important river valleys and the savannah to the south of the Sahara (Ghana-, Mali- and the Songhai Empire-with Songhai itself being a sub-topic at the start of the Grade 10 implemented curriculum) aggressively pursued a trade in slaves. As M'bokolo10 argues: "The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic."

    In the space of less than two hundred years, from the early fourteenth century to the fifteenth century, the course of world history changed in more lasting ways than it had during any comparable period in previous human experience. Since that time, perhaps only the Industrial Revolution has changed human life more. More than anything else, mobility, on a scale never witnessed before in all of history became the new phenomenon. At the heart of this movement lay the mass trafficking of human beings who were transported in chains from the continent of their birth, Africa, to new and unfamiliar places, first to Europe, and then to the Americas. Giving birth to this process was the idea of race as a principle for determining a person's 'enslavability.

    M'bokolo11 reminds us: "...more than four centuries, from the end of the 15th- to the 19th Century, of a regular slave trade to build the Americas and the prosperity of the Christian states of Europe".

    To make sense of the profound changes wrought in this era, it is necessary to address the question of how these transformations got under way. French12 argues that more than any other cause or explanation for Europe's 'Age of Discovery', was the sensation stirred by news of Mansa Müsa's 1324 trip to Cairo, which set the creation of an Atlantic world into motion. In 1346, maps fuelled dreams of a land of unlimited wealth in gold that was simply awaiting 'discovery' in Africa. This prompted a Genoa-born Majorcan named Jaume Ferrer to set out for a southward voyage hugging the West African coastline to explore beyond what had been considered a navigational point of no return, Cape Bojador, located on the coast of modern-day Mauritania. Ferrer was never heard of again after his departure.

    A few years later finding the source of the gold was further boosted by news of a series of lectures by a Berber scholar, Ibn Battütah, about his travels in the region known as Sudan, which he delivered in Granada, in 1355. Then in 1375, the so-called Catalan Atlas was made, which showed for the first time an extent of detail about the interior of the African continent, which identifies the Mali Empire and its emperor, Mansa Müsã. The principal novelty is his unambiguous Blackness, and surrounding him in every direction are the great cities of his realm, Timbuktu, Gao and Mali itself. The Catalan Atlas did more than alert European royalty to the suspected location of the world's greatest source of the precious metal, it drove an explosion of mapmaking that had the mysteries of African geography as its focus.

    The history of maritime exploration during the hundred years after the publication of the Catalan Atlas would be dominated not by thoughts of Asia, but by the emphatic desire to determine the source of West Africa's wealth in gold.

     

    Transitional moment in European history

    The starting point for this expansion can be dated to the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385, when the armies of an illegitimate prince, Joãu I, routed the forces of Castile and established the throne of a new imperial line, the Aviz dynasty. The production of the Catalan Atlas (1375) and the establishment of Aviz rule over Portugal (1385) arrived at a critical transitional moment in European history.

    The second half of the fourteenth century was marked by the 'Black Death' (bubonic plague), killing between one-third and three-fifths of the Western European population, resulting in a dire labour shortage which fuelled interest in both Italy and Iberia for the acquisition of Black African slaves. Compounding this problem, and shortly before the end of the century, came a dramatic balance of payments crisis as output from Europe's silver mines and supplies of Sahelian gold declined, which was linked to political instability in Western Sudan amid succession crises in Mali.

    In this European-wide crisis, the Portuguese monarch, Joãu, using his own six sons, hurriedly constructed a new elite, virtually from scratch. The most famous of his sons was Henry, born in 1394, who posthumously earned himself the title of Henry the Navigator. Henry, who was 21 at the time, did not direct the assault, but was involved on behalf of the Aviz, when they captured Ceuta in 1415-only 258 kilometres from Portugal-while Castile (the Spanish monarch) pushed into the Canary Islands.

    The Portuguese soon realised control of Ceuta did not ensure control of the trade in African gold. It did, however, become an important site of early experimentation in colonisation and empire building. Henry then had a further objective, the Canary Islands, which could replace Ceuta as the premier domain of imperial experimentation until the 1470s. The Canaries was the first European colony in the Atlantic, and where Portuguese, Spaniards and European polities deepened their taste for overseas empire. The Canarians were ruthlessly abducted and shipped off to Europe, where they fed a highly lucrative market in slaves; later they were traded as chattel on nearby islands in the Atlantic for work on new sugar plantations. Spanish and then Portuguese efforts to settle some of the Canary Islands were fiercely resisted by the indigenous population.

    In 1424 indigenous militia routed the first large-scale attempt, the first of many, by men sent by Prince Henry to enforce his claim on the islands, which was disputed by Spain. Henry's motivation for control over Ceuta and then the Canary Islands was his undying dream of establishing a stranglehold on the trade in the gold of continental Africa. What the Portuguese sought was not a way around Africa, as has been frequently supposed, but a way into it that sidestepped the hostile Maghreb region.

    Portugal's failed efforts to wrest control over the Canary Islands from Spain, would spur it to become the most successful explorer of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century. First came Madeira in 1424, and shortly thereafter, the Azores. Henry came into ownership of what was probably the first sugar mill of the Atlantic world on the newly conquered island of Madeira. The Portuguese determined the only way to produce sugar in volume involved copious inputs of slave labour. Slaves were initially brought to Madeira from the Canaries, but as production soared, those rapidly depopulating islands provided inadequate sources, hence, the Portuguese mounted slave raids against the Imraugen, who inhabited the northwestern coast of Africa.

    Henry retained a conviction that a mission to the 'River of Gold' or beyond would win him access to the mines of Mali and their untold wealth. Henry's costly search down the coast of Africa for gold had so far yielded little of the metal. As the expense underpinning the drive for gold piled up, other sources of income had to be found to justify the exploration. Gold had led the Portuguese to slaves, and slaves drove the expansion of a lucrative new industry, sugar, which would transform the world like few products have in history.

    In this way, French13 argues the notion that the Black peoples who inhabited this part of Africa and which was coming under exploration by Europeans for the first time, were uniquely wretched and lacking in the redeeming attributes of civilisation by virtue of the colour of their skin, was first mobilised in the 1440s. The catastrophe for those in the zone of non-being, which would unfold over the next 600 years, had begun.

     

    Capitalisation of the Iberian monarchy - African gold, El Mina and a Portuguese monopoly

    In 1448, Henry officially ordered a halt to the raiding and crusading that had generated African bodies for sale into the salve trade. The first Papal Bull, Romanus Pontifex, was decreed to King Afonso of Portugal by Pope Nicholas V in 1452. It was due to the critical contributions that Africa began to make to European wealth and prosperity in the second half of the fifteenth century, including driving big economic changes, such as the capitalisation of Iberian economies and the launching of a new gold coin, the cruzado in 1457.

    An irony of history is that Portugal's big advances in Africa came only on the heels of Henry's death in November 1460. In 1469, King Afonso leased the rights of exploration to Fernão Gomes, which required Gomes's ships to advance at least 100 leagues (555.6 kilometres) annually along the African coast beyond Sierra Leone, charting new territory as he went. Gomes launched his first expedition in 1470, and he sent a second convoy of ships around the bulge of Africa in 1471, venturing past the lagoons of what is today the Ivory Coast and onwards into the waters of modern-day Ghana.

    They proceeded eastward for another few miles until they reached a village called Shama, where they found safe anchor. Going ashore, the signs of gold were abundant; there was no need to search for it. Assuming the existence of a major mine nearby, the Portuguese adopted the name El Mina for this site of such long awaited good fortune, and secured it by building a fort at El Mina in 1482. Nearly sixty years of Portuguese efforts to win access to African gold had finally paid off.

    While establishing regular trade with the Akan societies of Ghana, the newly rich Gomes's fleets pursued other African discoveries farther to the east, all the way to the Bight of Benin and the island of São Tomé. Under the terms of his contract with Afonso, Gomes was required to surrender one-fifth of his bounty in gold to the crown. Even this payment was enough to breathe life into Portugal's anemic currency. King Afonso, therefore, placed his son, Crown Prince João, in direct control over the booming new trade and its rich proceeds in bullion.

     

    The First Intra-European Colonial War and the Doctrine of Discovery

    Word about Lisbon's immense windfall quickly spread and before long Spaniards, French, Genoese and others began arriving on what Europeans referred to as the Gold Coast, a stretch of West African coastline, between the town of Assinie in the west and the mouth of the River Volta in the east. To protect its discovery, in August 1474, Portugal proclaimed it illegal for 'foreigners' to trade with El Mina, promising the death penalty for all who were caught doing so and King Afonso decreed that what the Portuguese called the 'Mina trade' would become a royal monopoly at the end of 1474. Over the next five years an intense struggle unfolded over El Mina which would impact the destinies of the European Catholic monarchies. In 1475 Afonso unsuccessfully attacked Castile, which resulted in its new monarch, Isabella, and began targeting Lisbon's new holdings in West Africa, El Mina in particular. Some of the early Spanish Castilian convoys did return with rich yields of gold and pepper, and with hundreds of slaves as well. In 1478 the first intra-European colonial war at sea took place between Portuguese ships and a Castile convoy returning from the Gold Coast, and which led to the rival Iberian powers agreeing to peace negotiations mediated by the Catholic Church.

    This set the stage for a papal-sanctioned division of the world with far reaching consequences for the early modern era and well beyond. It is this development; with the first Papal Bull issued by the Pope, that Christendom began to unfold in what was rationalised as the 'Doctrine of Discovery'. Mogobe Ramose14 argues: "The Doctrine of Discovery (the international law of settler colonialism, the justification for its expansionist logic in conquering other lands and subjugating the indigenous people of those lands) was deployed to make war for conquest, as if the indigenous people did not exist, and were simply disposed of as nothing but surplus labour that fed the desires of the conquerors."

    Under the Treaty of Alcáçovas of 1479, Portugal abandoned its claims to the Castilian crown, but would immediately enjoy rights to all the islands already discovered. Therefore, Portugal had won Church-sanctioned control of all sub-Saharan Africa, and Spain had finally won control over all the contested Canary Islands. In 1481, now King João, ordered the construction of a fort to protect Portugal's booming supply of gold from European rivals and pirates. King João placed the construction of the fort at El Mina under the leadership of Diogo de Azambuja, which became known as São Jorge da Mina. It was São Jorge da Mina at El Mina, which was the essential pivot around which European fortunes turned with the bountiful gold it disgorged. One of Azambuja's crewmates was Bartolomeu Dias, the nobleman who seven years later would become the first European to reach the southern tip of Africa and sail from there into the Indian Ocean. Over the next few years, several other Portuguese would be enlisted in supplying or administering Portugal's first major outpost south of the Sahara, attesting to El Mina's role as a linchpin in Lisbon's budding global project. These included Afonso de Albuquerque, who later blazed a trail of imperial conquest in Asia, and Diogo Cão, who was the Portuguese who entered the Kingdom of Kongo (a sub-topic of the Grade 10 implemented curriculum).

    The initial fort built by Azambjua was the first of 60 or so such outposts built over the next three centuries by a diverse assortment of European nations along the coast of modern-day Ghana. The first wave of these was created to procure gold. Only much later, beginning in the 1640s, did this region become a major source of slaves, long after such regions as Upper Guinea, Kongo and Luanda (Angola).

    Within a decade, Portugal was obtaining 8 000 ounces of gold annually from El Mina, an amount that would triple by 1494, and continue to rise thereafter. From the time of the construction of the fort itself (1482), Lisbon typically received a caravel's shipment every month from this new prized outpost, with its ships usually spending about a month in transit. It was not long before these volumes grew so large that they transformed the economic life of this small nation-state. From 1482 to the mid-sixteenth century, Portugal's caravel runs back and forth to the Gold Coast averaged between 46 and 57 kilograms of the precious metal per month for deposit in royal coffers. The kingdom's treasury was even renamed Casa da Mina, reflecting the primary importance of trade with Black Africa.

     

    The template for plantation agriculture reliant on Black enslaved labour

    Portugal's discovery of African gold would serve as its first prize in a series of dramatic pay-offs. It was superseded by a new lucrative trade in African slaves, thereafter, by a boom in Portuguese sugar production on islands located just off the African continent. Soon thereafter, the sugar boom, based entirely on African slave labour, began on the tiny island of São Tomé. Fernão Gomes's men discovered that island in 1471, and it became a Portuguese colony in 1485, creating the vastly profitable template for plantation agriculture reliant on Black enslaved labour in Brazil-sourced through Luanda (Angola).

    Portugal's newfound wealth from West Africa fuelled Spain's obsession with finding its own sources of gold and push new exploration efforts into the westward extremities of the Atlantic Ocean. The Canary Islands would serve as a critical springboard for the Columbus voyages and Spain's Church-sanctioned control over the Americas (with the second Papal Bull of 1493). This then becomes the first official topic of the Grade 10 implemented curriculum, referred to as the 'Early Spanish Conquest of the Americas. The geographic position of these islands, astride the Canary Current, all but assured Spain's success in this incomparably more well-known 'breakthrough' of its own.

     

    Conclusion

    This understanding and grounding in the early Portuguese role in colonisation and conquest in Africa, is an important grounding, since we scaffold the curriculum to the Grade 12 implemented curriculum in the classroom. The 1975 independence of both Angola (Gr 12, P1Q2) and Mozambique, its impact on the mobilisation of youth in South Africa (Gr 12, P2Q4) and the seismic influence on Southern Africa of the ending of the Cold War in the latter part of the 1980s (Gr 12, P2Q1, P2Q6, and P2Q5).

     

    Postscript

    The teaching of this topic is followed by the sub-topics of Spanish colonial conquest of firstly the Caribbean (Columbus), and the decree of the 2nd Papal Bull in 1493 (Intex Caetra), followed by Central America (Cortéz) and then South America (Pizarro). At the conclusion thereof, and having assessed Grade 10 classes, the documentary entitled "Vatican rejects 500 year old doctrine of discovery" is shown, which appeared on TRTWorld, to develop an understanding in the classroom that the past is not the past, but the present.

     

     

    1 MB Ramose, "Teacher and student with a critical pan-epistemic orientation: An ethical necessity for Africanising the educational curriculum in Africa", South African Journal of Philosophy, 35(4), 2016, pp. 546-555 (available at DOI: 10.1080/02580136.2016.1247248)
    2 HW French, Born in Blackness
    (Liveright Publishing, 2021).
    3 HW French, Born in Blackness
    (Liveright Publishing, 2021).
    4 HW French, Born in Blackness... (Liveright Publishing, 2021).
    5 HW French, Born in Blackness... (Liveright Publishing, 2021).
    7 HW French, Born in Blackness... (Liveright Publishing, 2021).
    8 K Manjapra, Black ghosts of empire: The long death of slavery and the failure of emancipation (Simon and Schuster, 2022).
    9 HW French, Born in Blackness... (Liveright Publishing, 2021).
    10 E M'Bokolo, The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa (LA Monde Diplomatique, 1998, translated by Barry Smerin).
    11 E M'Bokolo, The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa (LA Monde Diplomatique, 1998, translated by Barry Smerin).
    12 HW French, Born in Blackness
    (Liveright Publishing, 2021).
    13 HW French, Born in Blackness
    (Liveright Publishing, 2021).
    14 MB Ramose, "Towards a post-conquest South Africa: Beyond the constitution of 1996", South African Journal on Human Rights, 34(3), 2018, pp. 326-341.