The word ‘Maafa’ is derived from a Kiswahili word meaning great tragedy. The term today collectively refers to the 500 hundred years of suffering of people of African heritage through Slavery, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, rape, oppression, invasions and exploitation. The African Holocaust is a pan-African discourse on the global historical and contemporary genocide against the mental and physical health of African people.

While Europeans targeted men in West Africa, the ‘Arab’ trade primarily targeted the women of East Africa to serve as domestic slaves, wet nannies and sex-slaves in the infamous harems. This trade trickled over millennia is estimated to have taken more than 10 million Africans via the Swahili coast to India, Saudi Arabia, China, and Turkey, and also via the Trans-Saharan route to North Africa and the Mediterranean, where in slave markets such as Ceuta, Morocco. Africans were purchased to work as domestic servants in Spain, Portugal, and other Western European countries

Mental Slavery is far more sinister than physical slavery because the chains are invisible and are transmitted across generations. If African slavery was only physical, African people would have within one generation been able to skip the plethora of social-economic issues which plague African people which worsen with every generation.