I’ve completed my three score and ten and a few more years on top and can look back on a good life, well lived.

I probably started this blog, because I had enjoyed writing about photography in previous blogs (here and here) long ago but I’m only interested in wildlife and conservation photography these days.

Photographing elephants led to trying to understand the ghastly slaughter of the ivory trade and that, inevitably led to the East African slave trade, the two are inextricably linked, so much of my research and writing has been about slavery and specifically about the slave trade on the East African coast.

I try to add the odd post about conservation but that is a well documented subject which the East African slave trade is not.

Conversations about slavery often focus on the trans-Atlantic slave trade which shipped, in horrific and inhuman conditions, at least eleven million Africans from their homelands to the Americas. This focus on the “Middle Passage” is unsurprising given the trade’s long-term consequences on both side of the Atlantic and it was without doubt a significant episode of human cruelty that lasted at least 250 years.

However, if it is viewed in isolation or labelled, as it often is, as The Slave Trade, we remove it from its African context and misrepresent its place in the global history of slavery. Some historians estimate that a total of 30 million Africans were enslaved and transported either across the Sahara or north up the coast of East Africa or across the Atlantic.

To capture and remove 30 million Africans foreign and indigenous slavers often with the compliant of local kings and chiefs murdered millions more people that never made the journey. It is impossible to estimate how many people’s lives were destroyed and equally impossible to overstate the impact this has had on Africa.

Every one of those men, women and children murdered or taken into slavery had a story to tell but very nearly none of them left any mark on this earth to show they ever existed or to tell us of their fate.

Much of my research is about the untold, or once told but seemingly unheard, stories of East Africans: the people of Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, the Congo Basin, Tanzania and their neighbours who were enslaved or left behind to try and survive.

My target audience? The children of those nations who might find and read these essays and learn something about their heritage that perhaps they didn’t previously know and in doing so learn something about themselves.

Thank you for reading.

Steve Middlehurst

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My portfolio can be found at stevemiddlehurst.myportfolio.com