AFRICAN START FIGHTING SLAVE TRADE

Africans started to fight the transatlantic slave trade as soon as it began. Their struggles were multifaceted and covered four continents over four centuries. Still, they have often been underestimated, overlooked, or forgotten. African resistance was reported in European sources only when it concerned attacks on slave ships and company barracoons, but acts of resistance also took place far from the coast and thus escaped the slavers’ attention. To discover them, oral history, archaeology, and autobiographies and biographies of African victims of the slave trade have to be probed. Taken together, these various sources offer a detailed image of the varied strategies Africans used to defend themselves from and mount attacks against the slave trade. The Africans’ resistance continued in the Americas. They ran away, established maroon communities, used sabotage, conspired, and rose against those who held them in captivity. Freed people petitioned the authorities, led information campaigns, and worked actively to abolish the slave trade and slavery. In Europe, black abolitionists launched or participated in civic movements to end the deportation and enslavement of Africans. They too delivered speeches, provided information, wrote newspaper articles and books. Worldwide abolition: 1838-1870 When the 'apprenticeship' system ended, women joined the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) to fight slavery throughout the world. At this point they were still not accepted as officials of the national society, and they could not speak at mixed public meetings. In 1840, the BFASS organised the first World Anti-Slavery Convention in London and among the American delegates were several women who had made their interest in other causes, such as women's rights, clear. Their subsequent exclusion from the convention led to the birth of the women's suffrage campaign in the US. I have been received here as the sister of the white woman. By the 1850s, there were more women's anti-slavery societies than men's. Now that the aim was to exert pressure on other countries, the ability of men to influence parliament was not as important. Moral pressure, considered particularly the realm of women, was required. That pressure was mainly exercised as support for the American abolitionist campaign, with the bazaar becoming the women's way of raising money. Women made the goods, many of which were sent for sale at US societies' bazaars, and were the main purchasers. They also continued to write for the cause. Harriet Martineau, who witnessed slavery in the US, published 'The Martyr Age of the United States' (1838), which linked the status of women and slaves. American women were invited by women's societies to lecture in Britain. In 1853, the Glasgow society sponsored a tour by Harriet Beecher Stowe whose novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' had already sold 1.5 million copies in Britain. Several African-American women, including former slaves, also lectured. The first African-American woman to address mass mixed audiences was Sarah Remond. Her lectures covered both anti-slavery and women's rights. She was very popular and wrote: 'I have been received here as the sister of the white woman