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Breaking the shackles

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Stories real and imagined about the moral cost of slavery, and its implications on humanity.

‘No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery,’ wrote former slave, author and abolitionist Harriet Ann Jacobs in her 1861 memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Sadly, more than 150 years later, the Global Slavery Index estimates tens of millions of people are subjected to human trafficking and slavery every year. And while, as Jacobs said, no words can apt describe the effects of this corruption, books and stories can help raise awareness and alarm in the face of injustice. Here are some books that do just that.

 

Read an extract

Extract
When Elephants Fight

My older brother, Deng, doesn’t live with us anymore. I don’t know where he went.

Extract
The Water Dancer

And I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life

Extract
Master Of My Fate

I wake with a start. Been dreaming. Dreaming bout a light that shine bright, strong, hot, even though all round is a cool, shadowy darkness.