Escape from Slavery by Francis Bok

To acknowledge that any form of slavery still exists today is difficult. To think about the enslavement of any member of the Afrikan Diaspora is excruciating. To reflect on the fact that modern enslavement is again steeped in racism and religious discrimination is mind-boggling. Yet Francis Bok (Piol Buk) stands today as an ex-slave and an abolitionist lecturer, much like Frederick Douglass did in the 1800's.

In addition to my own struggles as a descendant of African slaves from Guinea-Bissau, I am also disturbed from the aspect of being a Muslim...having to again defend the essence of Islam against the daily rituals and practices of individual cultures. Much of my study of slavery and slave systems has been looking at the distinctions between the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Trans-Saharan slave trade and those African slave systems in existance prior to that. I never expected it to be so in a modern world.

What it brings me to is the same sentiment I had at learning of the discrepancies in treatment of Haitian refugees vs. Cuban refugees (since the 1980's) or Rwandan genocide victims vs. Bosnian genocide victims (1990's) - this feeling that the peoples of the Afrikan Diaspora are still looked upon as "less than" or as people not worthy of immediate support/help/salvation. It's a hard pill to swallow as a citizen of a country that supposedly is based on liberty, but has yet to even acknowledge or apologize for its own role in slavery hundreds of years ago.