The Enduring Life of Exploitation On Modern Slavery in Africa

In the contemporary moment, we are becoming increasingly aware of how the many structural, social, political and economic inequities that underpin exploitation in all its guises have been deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This special issue comes about as a result of efforts to cultivate collaboration and partnerships which challenge exploitation in its various guises, with this understood as modern slavery or otherwise, in some African contexts. The work of the Antislavery Knowledge Network (AKN) has ranged, for instance, from exploring the challenges faced by survivors and returnees in Nigeria, communities tackling discrimination and descent-based slavery in Mali and Niger, ex-child soldiers rebuilding their lives in Uganda and supporting and safeguarding victims of trafficking in Kenya, Uganda and across the region.

As a co-produced issue between the AKN and The Republic magazine, this complements the wider work of the AKN in exploring, together with our African partners and colleagues, how the arts and humanities can be used creatively to comprehend and confront exploitation. We offer here a glimpse into some of the conversations pertaining to modern slavery in Africa, which of course could not hope to cover the full breadth and complexities around exploitation across the entire continent. They constitute here an invitation for further thinking about and research into how we respond to the challenges of the enduring life of exploitation, whether understood in historical terms as part of the legacies of slavery and colonialism, or as a manifestation of contemporary relationships of power and hierarchy, themselves not synonymous with nor separate from, these histories.