After emancipation, most freed Africans found themselves forced to work under conditions equal to slavery. For some, life in slavery has continued until today. Germany conducted public sales of slaves in their African colonies until the end of World War I, while in the Sudan this year thousands of slaves were discovered and freed.

According to UNESCO, there are currently about 450,000 people worldwide, still being physically subjected to slavery. That number increases dramatically when we also consider economic slavery in both under-developed and developed nations.

Post-emancipation slavery
Buying and selling of slaves was made illegal in Denmark in 1803, in Great Britain in 1807, in the Unites States in 1808, in Sweden in 1813, in the Netherlands in 1814, and in France in 1818.

During the struggle of the Abolitionists movements for full emancipation, from 1850-1865, there was in fact an increase in the illegal importation of slaves to North America. In some cases, this increased slave trade activity was used as a political tool, with the U.S. President Buchanan proposing annexation of Cuba to suppress the slave trade in 1860.

In all of the colonial areas where the slave trade effected a significant aspect of their economy, we see the post-emancipation living and working conditions for freed slaves as almost equal to conditions under slavery.

This was the case in West Africa, where palm oil production was the labor-intensive economic pillar that replaced the slave trade, yet maintained near slavery conditions for the workers.

European colonial nations would stimulate these kinds of raw material production and cash crops from the freed slaves, then resell the European finished-goods at a higher price back to the colonies, creating a situation of "economic slavery" which still exists in some regions of the world.

During the Berlin Conference of 1884, all the European colonial nations in Africa compiled a set of rules for their own acquisition of territories in Africa, with no regard to the African leadership in the colonial areas. The final result of these artificial European-imposed national boundaries, was that many indigenous African ethnic groups were broken-up into totally different linguistic and cultural spheres.
It was not until 1954, that there was a majority of African representation in legislative councils in the British West African territories, many of which still maintained a British-appointed governor with veto power.

One of the colonial nations which conspicuously did not ban slavery, was Germany. Germany acquired Togoland (Benin) and Kamerun (Cameroon) in 1884. They actively conducted slavery in these colonies until the English took Togo and the French took Cameroon, after World War I in 1918.

The contradiction of Africans fighting side-by-side Europeans, in both World Wars, against the imperialism and racism of the Germans and Japanese, created the conditions of social unrest that eventually resulted in a rise of African nationalism movements.