Enslaved

Samuel L. Jackson goes on a personal journey to the Benga tribe of Gabon, where he travels to meet his ancestors’ tribe for the first time. Jackson then goes further, recruiting divers from “Diving With a Purpose” to search for sunken slave ships.

Jackson recruits award-winning journalists, Simcha Jacobovici and Afua Hirsch, to go in the footsteps of the enslaved to investigate how people rationalized 400 years of trafficking and the murder of millions of people from African countries.

The economics of the transatlantic slave trade are spotlighted, while searching for the sunken slave ship, “The Leusden,” in Suriname. Jackson, Jacobovici, and Hirsch piece together the economic motives that drove centuries of suffering.

Much of the “New World’s” culture was born in the bowels of slave ships, where Africans from different countries and of different tribal origins interacted with each other and with the Europeans that trafficked in them.

Find out how enslaved Africans resisted and sought freedom in Africa, in the U.S., and on the high seas

Politics that brought the enslavement of people from African countries to an end are investigated, including a search for “The London,” a ship that re-enslaved freed Africans from St. Lucia and illegally trafficked them to England.