Alaba Ajiye

Captured and Enslaved 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 trafficker's 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.