Schiavo è l’individuo senza storia

The essay is shaped as a journey –and told as a journal– through and out the territories of the past and contemporary forms of economic exploitation of slave labour in Africa. Following the routes des slaves, from Africa to America, and the integrated cycles of offer and demand that linked American plantations to European markets, the author explores the ways in which men, women and children were de-humanized and transformed into ‘socially sterile’ individuals, cut at the root both from their families and from their descendants; he addresses and compares different anthropological definitions of the phenomenon of slavery and conflicting interpretations of slaves’ social status in African societies; finally he analyzes evidences of the resilience of the phenomenon in Africa after the abolition of slavery in 1926 and focuses, on the one hand, on child labour and recruitment in irregular armies, on the other, in girls and young women involved in trafficking for purpose of sexual exploitation. Keywords: razzia, tratta, mercato, schiavitù, viaggio, memoria; raid, slave trade, slavery, travel, memory