'Enslaved' Episode 2 Preview: Africa’s dungeons and European barbarity explored for slavery 'rationalizations'
While Episode 1 focussed on ancestry, homecoming and lineages and an emotional return to the roots, Episode 2 will seek to locate slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade within the context of the European legacy of colonialism and imperialism.
The slave trade was not a blip on the radar. It was a sustained practice that stretched over 300 plus years. Between 1525 and 1866, approximately 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean, and South America to work at plantations. A plantation in the Carribeans for instance could have 150 slaves working on fields to grow cash crops to feed the factories the Industrial Revolution had spawned. Therefore, the story of slavery is entwined with the growth of European capitalism that depended entirely on extracting resources in their colonies through free labor to turn a profit.
So in Episode 2, we see Samuel L Jackson 'recruiting' two award-winning journalists to go on a mission to understand the process that led Europeans to see slavery as "profitable, rational and justified", according to the episode's official synopsis. One of the journalists is Simcha Jacobovici, an internationally acclaimed journalist and a New York Times bestselling author, who is also directing this docuseries. Jacobovici is a world-renowned documentary film director and producer, who has three US Emmys for “Outstanding Investigative Journalism”.
The other journalist is Afua Hirsch, who has worked for 'The Guardian' newspaper and was the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News from 2014 until 2017. She is also a writer on the 'Enslaved' team and as involved in the project as Jacobovici.
Simcha Jacobovici will head off to Europe to better understand how Europeans viewed Africans and their sale. He will also pursue the sort of rationalizations used to justify this kind of barbarity as 'business as usual' for so long.
Jackson and Hirsch on the other hand will stick to African coasts where the slaves were kept in dungeons before their fateful journey over dangerous waters, shackled in ships built to carry human cargo. The duo will seek out landmarks, oral histories, and artifacts around the slave trade, that will include a tour of the infamous slave dungeons and a slave ship designed to carry humans. Hopefully, the series will look into why so many Africans participated in the slave trade and how they rationalized this trade in people who looked like them. This aspect was missing in Episode 1.
In the other narrative thread, you also have divers with 'Diving With a Purpose' locating the earliest slave wreck ever found, which will shed some light on the fate of those approximately 2 million enslaved Africans who died at sea. So get ready for some eerie underwater shots exploring the ghost ship that carried them to their death. Hopefully, the episode will be able to juggle all three narrative threads included in this episode and do all of them justice.
'Enslaved' Episode 2 will air on September 21 on Epix at 10 pm ET.