• Listen to this segment

GUEST: Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the end of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade – the purchase of slaves and their transport from West Africa and Central Africa, into slavery in the so-called “New World.” The trade relied on kidnapping persons in Africa to make them ready for the arrival of the foreign slave-ships. The slave trade ripped an estimated 12 million Africans from their homelands and transported them to lives of unspeakable suffering and humiliation in Europe and the Americas. According to my guest, Emira Woods, “it is important to reflect on this tragic history, but also, like the Sankofa bird, to look towards ways of abolishing the forms of slavery that still ravage lives throughout much of the African world.” In West African mythology, the “Sankofa” is a bird that flies forward while looking backward, with an egg symbolizing the future in its mouth.

Emira Woods’ commentary can be found here: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3875.