>>1213237*western and southern African empires were built on slavery
https://internationalreportingproject.org/stories/view/slaves-of-the-congoDeep in the jungles of northern Congo, it's still easy to find slave owners. Davila Djemba, the teenage niece of the country's minister of forestry, is eager to show off some of the 100 Pygmies her family owns.
But the bucolic setting masks an ugly truth, one that surfaces as Djemba considers how to entertain her guest tonight. As she nears her family's home, surrounded by half a dozen Pygmy huts, Djemba gets an idea. "We can make them sing and dance for you, if you want," she offers.
The Republic of the Congo is a deeply stratified society of two major ethnic groups. Pygmies, the diminutive people of Central Africa's rain forest, live in servitude to the Bantus, an ethnic group that makes up the majority in this country of 3.7 million but is clearly the minority in jungle villages like Enyellé.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaliSlavery persists in Mali today with as many as 200,000 people held in direct servitude to a master.[34] In the Tuareg Rebellion of 2012, ex-slaves were a vulnerable population with reports of some slaves being recaptured by their former masters.[35]
