My Life as a Slave - Essay Sample

My name is Nantes Mutiso from the Amore tribe, living in the village of Juffure in The Gambia. I had a lovely and idyllic childhood and I was surrounded by love and traditions. However, all these were cut short when I was kidnapped by white slave traders as I attended to my fathers cattle.

I was brought to a slave ship where I was brutally beaten, abused and chained with fellow enslaved Africans, most of them super sick and wounded. We were locked in the belly of the ship in pitch darkness full of sickening stink and steamy heat. As the voyage drags on, the situation even became worse since the prisoner's bodily fluids accumulate and get hold, forming thick grease. These were the horrors of the American slave trade particularly the trans-Atlantic route that left most of its imprisoned slaves died before reaching America. I managed to endure all unimaginable treatment, despite our plan to fight back, the conditions were appalling making it impossible for any uprising to become a success.

America was an immediate culture shock for me. I detected a new smell, mingling of many smells most of them unknown and strange to me. In America, I was auctioned off to a man who brought me to a firm, locked me up and later forced me to carry out manual labour. The man had a series of plantations; some were nice while others were ramshackle. It dawned on me that was the facilities where slaves were abused, dehumanized and forced into labor. Slaves were poorly treated by their owners because whites considered slaves to be inferior to the Whites. Slaves acted as if the plantations were their homes.

My life as a slave in America broke both my body and spirit. In the morning, afternoon and the evening I worked in the field because the plantations were always large. Workday started very early in the morning when it is still dark, and breakfast was always served after several hours of work. However, the diets were inadequate and could not meet the demands of our heavy workload. In the rest of the day, we had to work without breaks, and the overseer punished anyone who took a rest. Apart from working in the cotton plantation, I tended the horses, kept the gardens and drove the carriages. I feared and hated overseers because they carried a whip which they commonly used on slaves. After about 15 hours of work every day, I would return to my cabin to mend my clothing and prepare myself an evening meal. Sunday was the only day we could rest, and the only holidays we were free of work were Fourth of July and Christmas.

There was a slave code created by slave owners that prohibited slaves from learning to write or read. Slaves were considered as property; they could not testify against the whites in court, own firearms, strike the Whites, gather or leave without the permission. Those who ran away could be punished by mutilation, torture, whippings, sold or imprisoned. The only way we were able to resist unfair treatment was through destroying crops, feigned sickness, disable machinery and slow down during work. Overtly or subtly we found ways of sabotaging the system that we lived.