Eight Nigerian academics, including the distinguished historian of Africa, J.F. Ade Ajayi, here present a history of the slave trade. Their perspective is that the focus has hitherto been primarily on the external trade, particularly the trans-Atlantic trade to Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, and less so on the equally important and much older trans-Saharan and trans-Indian Ocean trades, the launch pad for the external trade. The profusion of documents and records on the European and American aspects, and the absence of African voices in these records, has given rise to this. However,...