Captured and Enslaved

By Alaba Ajiye

Okiki was captured, chained, shacked, manacled, and whisked away from his ancestral village on the day one that his life ambition would have been fulfilled. He was cargo to servitude across the Atlantic Ocean.

He escaped death by a whisker when he took part in the insurrection that attempted to set slaves free from chains during the perilous middle passage voyage that took him to a sugar plantation in Pernambuco.

Soares was one of the slaves that trekked 1,870 kilometers to Calabouco from Pernambuco, both in Brazil, under grueling and callous condition after his masters decided to relocate to a bigger plantation far away from where they were to continue the inglorious trade.

Later, he became an inheritance of his new slave master, who took him to Saint Michael, Barbados, in the Caribbean and finally to Charleston, South Carolina, USA, by his master, who appointed him valet and, subsequently, butler.

Jackson Fey, a Yoruba slave enjoyed the largesse of freedom when the dastardly act was abolished. He chronicled personal events and happenings around him during his captivity in major slave plantations and documented them in a manuscript, where he described slavery as days of darkness and gloom, days of clouds and of thick darkness, as morning spread upon the mountains. This he also summarized in his native dialect, as Iparun Nla literary means the greatest destruction the world has ever witnessed in Yoruba.

Steve McLaren, a Scottish scholar, was privileged to lay hands on the manuscript. He had a personal interaction and shared in the grief and feelings of what enslaved Africans went through, having been unsatisfied with the available materials a popular librarian offered him and the information he gathered personally on plantations.

With misty eyes and pangs of horror, he recalled how the entire black African race was almost annihilated by European slave merchants, and Africans had to endured years of contempt and obloquy; some of those acts were rendered in mnemonic interjections captured by his feelings, emotionally delivered from the thought of victims.

Albert McLaren carried on with the promise his great-grandfather gave to Jackson Fey, a freed slave, to continue activism against any form of slavery. He chronicled the history of sexual slavery, exposing the technicality of the traffickers ploy, and shared individual experiences of some captors, proffering solutions on how the world may conquer or mitigate sexual slavery and human trafficking.

During one of his presentation, Linda Rowenski, sold into slavery by a family friend, gave her livid and loathsome testament in the hand of her ogre exactor, who the arm of the law caught up with in unprecedented vagaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524557560

Alaba Ajiye

Alaba Ajiye has a strong thought for creative writing. He is a versatile, imaginative, and distinct writer and poet. His enthusiasm in black heritage compelled him to write this perspicacious literary and enthralling story of what African slaves went through in the hands of ogre masters and horrendous overseers. He describes slavery as days of darkness and gloom, days of dark and of thick darkness as morning spread upon the mountains. This book aims to draw the world’s attention to correct the anomaly that surrounds transatlantic slavery and the need to combat sexual slavery and overcome it now. Alaba, a proven author of many outstanding books in multiple disciplines, retired from banking in 2008 and is currently the CEO of a Lagos-based consulting firm.

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Copyright © 2016 by Alaba Ajiye.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/12/2017

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CONTENTS

Glossary

Prologue

Chapter 1 The Capture

Chapter 2 Slavery and Africans

Chapter 3 Middle Passage

Chapter 4 I Prefer My Home

Chapter 5 After the Wreck

Chapter 6 The Old Slave

Chapter 7 Cold Death Passage

Chapter 8 Freedom at Twilight

Chapter 9 Confronting His Fear

Chapter 10 Sexual Slavery and the World

Chapter 11 Caught in the Web

Chapter 12 Yet Another Entangled

Chapter 13 Raping My Ignorance

Chapter 14 Massage Parlor

References

About the Author

To my darling wife, Olajide who took a bow to the dreadful cancer just before this publishing.

To the souls of the victims of trans-Atlantic slavery, white slavery, yellow slavery, and sexual slavery and those who are currently in any form of slavery and are looking forward to their emancipation.

Glossary

Prologue

The trans-Atlantic slave trade—the greatest involuntary migration of all time, the greatest disaster of all time, and the most repressive, oppressive, and obnoxious practice meted out to any race at any time in the world. The dreadful hardships and sufferings unleashed on Africans were so terrible and excruciating that no one will ever willingly dare to experience them.

Throughout the annihilation period, about 930 ships carried Africans: family heads, mothers, infants, and adolescents from Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Gambia, Congo, Mali, and other West African nations. Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, and other African countries also were sources of slaves.

From West Africa alone, about twenty-two million Africans were captured; they voyaged across the Atlantic in inhumane conditions. Another four million slaves—the living and the dead—were fed to the creatures of the sea.

This disgraceful and inglorious branch of commerce captured another eight million Angolans, mainly from the Luanda and Benguala areas; other African colonies and states added yet another three million Africans. They were transported against their wishes so that they could supply the need for free labor in the sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice, and mining plantations of the West Indies and the rest of the Americas.

Its economic worth was prodigious and enormous yet commanded little scholarly attention, and it painted pictures of mild and undetailed stories, particularly when it comes to the real numeric of Africans involved in servitude.

Europeans oppressed, brutalized, and coerced them to do the bidding of slave masters. On the plantations, visages of African slaves wore gloomy looks with no sign of hope; all shared virulent emotions toward their overseers.

White plantations were normative social structures of cruelty that enslaved Africans trifles, with no life of theirs. The future of the African slaves was tied to a whirligig, vitiate her legacy, destroyed her essence of living.

Rigorous fieldwork strained their strength to the maximum limit. With little or no relaxation, ferocious flogging wore them out and made them useless as days or years rolled by on the plantations. When they were unable to serve effectively, masters resorted to buying another Africans to fill up their ranks and continue the oppression.

To the Europeans, slaves were unimportant valuable, which could be discarded or destroyed as they pleased. Such was the way African generations were treated for about 447 years, beginning from the voyage Antão Gonçales and Nuno Tristão undertook in 1441 at the instruction of Prince Henry, returned two years after with first African slaves of twelve men, until 1888 when Brazil finally stopped the trade in 1888.

The man-hours each slave expended on various European and American plantations, the torture and grueling treatment, and the number of deaths due to brutality, grief, and extreme exhaustion were all unquantifiable yet deserved compensation. This servitude only witnessed tad recognition, respect, and attention it deserves in history and memorials.

Much more questionable, no expiation was made for the forced free labor and killings of this magnitude that got families separated never to be united and heinously used as chattel on plantations and freely dehumanized by agents of slave masters.

The injustice suffered by the Africans used to develop European and American cities, factories, and plantations under unprecedented circumstances was more than the injustices suffered by any other race.

No day has been set aside in memorials to commiserate; neither was any expiation mentioned or paid to assuage the wrongdoings of the Europeans and Americans against Africans.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade deserves more than what it has gotten.

In 1860, the value of the slave population was roughly three times greater than the total amount invested in the banks in the United States, equal to about seven times the total value of the currency in circulation in the United States, three times the value of the livestock population in the United States, twelve times the value of the entire US cotton crop, and forty-eight times the total expenditure of the federal government of the United States of that year.

The contributions of cotton production to the economies of Britain and the United States during that time were huge; both nations thrived and lived on the contributions of African slaves:

• Cotton was the leading American export from 1803 to 1937, upon which the economies of British and America thrived.

• Britain, the most powerful nation in the world during that era, relied on slave-produced American cotton for over 80 percent of its essential industrial raw material.

• English textile mills accounted for over 40 percent of Britain’s exports, the labor of which was supplied by African slaves.

• A fifth of Britain’s population of twenty-two million people survived and lived on cotton textiles.

• The economies of Britain and the United States were driven by the contributions of African slaves.

To assuage Africans, the initiation of the expiation process by all the exactors of African slaves is a sine qua non for the atonement of their wrongdoings; until we do this, the fairness, justice, and equity sponsored by the world will not be fair, just, and equal.

Albert McLaren, the sexual slavery and human trafficking protagonist was compelled by the gentleman’s agreement between his great-grandfather Steve McLaren and the freed slave Jackson Fey to continue activism against all forms of slavery. He had earlier read the wish of his great-grandfather, who fought a hard-won battle against slavery during his lifetime. Steve became the arrowhead of the abolitionists in Scotland and in Europe, teaming up with others abolitionists to wear down and tear down trans-Atlantic slavery.

Albert saw the true likeness between the two forms of slavery in terms of acts, growth patterns, and effects on the victims.

Aimed at seeing the end of modern slavery as the abolition protagonists saw the end of trans-Atlantic slavery. The task of seeing out this cruel and gratuitous violence against mankind, like its contemporary African slavery was overcome steer him in face, exposing and drawing the world’s attention to do more to combat it.

Sexual trafficking is a criminal act that introduces a minor or an adult to commercial sexuality by fraud, coercion, or violence. It is a barbaric trade that has existed since the dawn of civilization, and its purpose is sexual exploitation. It is a form of enslavement that limits one’s autonomy relating to one’s sexuality.

It affects all races in the world, capturing and detaining victims in rape camps, comfort stations, brothels, massage parlors, bars, farms, and pimp-controlled streets.

Its range is wide, wild, weird, and cruel; it is an old but thriving trade. Captors deliberately wreck havoc on a victim; they addle her or his mind take control of it to dominate her or his power of rationality. Their actions diminish their victims, alienate them from their minds, and take away their confidence.

Their actions make their victims paranoid and feel odd and confused. They believe these would make a victim hate sex and place no value for it and believe that it’s what everyone wants. The ordeal of the victims in the hands of exactors is beyond normal chronology but can be better imagined.

Sexual slavery dates as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Portuguese visitors and their crew members bought or captured Japanese women and girls for sexual servitude on their ships. Since then, capturing or buying women and girls for sexual activities gained prominence among nations.

In 1662, in what was known as Fort Zeelandia, Chinese Ming forces, commanded by Koxinga, besieged and conquered the Dutch East India Company’s presence there; they adopted Dutch women and children and coerced them into sexual slavery.

During the African-slavery era, white masters and overseers forcefully had sex with African women and girls. Some were sold into brothels outright for sexual slavery. Before the twentieth century, sexual slavery was practiced in the Middle East. Barbaric pirates captured about 1,000,250 slaves from Western Europe, most of whom were women and girls used for domestic slavery, sexual slavery, and concubinage in what later formed part of the white slave traffic.

The white slave trade or white slave traffic was mainly the sexual enslavement of white women that took place between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England. Victims were sold to brothels in America, China, India, Singapore, and the Middle East.

Similarly, in a separate network of Japanese prostitutes trafficked across parts of Asia (such as China, Korea, and Singapore) and the British Isles in what was known as the yellow slave traffic or yellow slave trade.

The act boomed till the late 1840s, when Chinese merchants transported young Chinese girls and babies from China to the United States. The slaves were as cheap as forty dollars, which is about 1,200 dollars in 2015 currency, in Guangzhou, and then they were sold for four hundred dollars, which is about twelve thousand dollars in 2015 currency, in the United Sates. Many girls became drug addicts not by choice but by force and lived their entire lives in sexual slavery.

Sexual slavery is gratuitous violence, insults, cruelty against mankind that is sponsored and serviced by a few oligarchies. It scuppers its victims’ plans and sinks their emotions, making them deeply melancholic or psychotic.

This noble prose’s aim is to underscore vociferously the African slaves’ past and the importance of African heritage, which has been polluted, stolen, or destroyed by the Europeans.

It’s a perspicacious literary critique of what African slaves went through in the hands of ogre masters and horrendous overseers; it aims to draw the world to address the conspicuous oversight of necessary expiation and honor played against those who lost their lives to the trade.

It also beams its searchlight on sexual slavery and the attendant implications and harm it would cost the world if nations do not decisively deal with it now. This simple story that is twirled around research work exposes the technicality of the ploy of human trafficking and proffers solution to effectively control the act of modern slavery, which leaves its victims physically, emotionally, and psychological traumatized and delights its perpetrators and makes their bank accounts grow.

The story climaxes with the testament of an emancipated girl who was sold into sexual slavery by a family friend. She gave her livid and loathsome testament about her experiences in the hands of her brute exactor, who the arm of the law caught up within unprecedented vagaries.

Finally, this whole prose demands that a day be set aside by the United Nations, to be called Slavery Emancipation Day to commiserate with and immortalize in memorials the innocent lives lost to sexual slavery, as well as offer the hope of freedom to the millions currently in sexual servitude.

Chapter 1

The Capture

Deep in the hinterland of the southwest part of the present Nigeria lay the Akensi community. It was a small halcyon village. The Yoruba-speaking tribe prided itself with its culture, heritage, which was celebrated with lots of adherence to their forefathers’ values. Their belief in their deities was unflinching and accorded a huge respect to their constant renewal. Sango, Oya, Obatala, Ifa, Olokun, and Egungun are some of the principal deities the people worshipped. Each was worshipped individually in an annual roaster that only the weather and season determined; thus, the community calendar was guided by the prevalent climate.

They were a purely atheist people that believed they enjoyed divine protection, harmony, and prosperity from the gods.

Recreational activities formed parts of the Akensi calendar; festivals for traditional wrestling, new yam, and tales by the moonlight lit up the people’s seasons. Balaga, the marriage-attainment age, and Ero, the adulthood age of retirement from farming and strenuous activity, were also celebrated with dances, jubilation, and lots of palm-wine drinking. This ancient village’s main economic activity was agriculture, and it effectively combined its ancestral experience in farming with rudimentary know-how to sustain the yearly bumper harvest.

Yam, cassava, cocoyam, maize, and other vegetables were the major food crops they produced, while cocoa, kola nut, and timber were the cash crops the community’s economy revolved around. Primitive trade by barter, or the exchanging or swapping of goods, was the only way the people got their needs satisfied. The head of the village was Oba Adebayo, a tall, dark-complexioned man who ascended the throne of his father after his demise. He lived in an ancient palace made of mud and a thatched roof; it was the ancestral