The Deported Teacher Who Exposed Slavery

Around 1929, in a desert outpost in Mauritania, a deported schoolteacher from Dahomey took in a dying young captive and won her family's freedom before a colonial court, only to see the ruling overturned. He turned it into a pamphlet, published in France in 1931: thousands of French subjects were still enslaved "in the middle of the twentieth century". Louis Hunkanrin was dismissed, deported twice, sentenced by Vichy, and played a part in a 1936 trial that is still disputed.

Great figuresColonial historyAnticolonial resistanceMemory and redressJustice and trialsBeninBDBlaise DiagneLouis Hunkanrin