Labelled a crime against humanity by the United Nations in 2011 the slave trade and its legacy
of bondage unfortunately continue to shape modern society through racism discrimination and
unconscious bias. For those who were silenced and for their descendants there is little
reconciliation. Without knowing their individual stories - where they came from where they
were taken - this part of human history remains a generalized story of mass atrocity lacking
details about the experiences of enslaved human beings. While historians have amassed data for
over 12.5 million people involved in the Atlantic slave trade between 1500 and 1867 we have
not been able to piece together enforced population movements from specific African places
inland to slave ships at the coast. By applying methods from GIScience and spatial statistics
it is possible to learn about global migrations resulting from slavery within pre-colonial
Africa. By extracting spatial data from primary and secondary sources it is possible to design
a spatial data repository and digital archive of pre-colonial African places with instances of
conflict to operate on a temporal scale with Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
