Creativity Quote by Abdullah Ibrahim

The sentence refuses the passive grammar that history loves to hide behind. “Slaves were taken” makes the Atlantic trade sound like a logistical mishap, a category of cargo moved from one place to another. Abdullah Ibrahim snaps that euphemism in half: no one is born a slave, and “slaves” were not the thing taken. People were. The pivot is small, almost conversational, but it’s a moral correction disguised as a semantic one.

Then he sharpens it. “Among them healers and priests” isn’t just a plea for empathy; it’s a cultural inventory. Ibrahim is insisting that what was stolen wasn’t merely labor, but expertise, memory, and spiritual authority - whole infrastructures of meaning. In a single clause, he drags the conversation away from plantation economics and toward civilizational damage: the deliberate stripping of status, vocation, and sacred roles to manufacture “slave” as an identity.

The subtext is also about narration and power. If you accept the word “slaves” at the start of the story, you quietly accept the enslaver’s viewpoint: these people were always destined for that condition. Ibrahim, a South African musician whose work has long braided jazz with African lineage under apartheid’s shadow, is allergic to that framing. His wording mirrors an artistic mission: to restore names, complexity, and dignity where oppressive systems demand blur and silence. It’s not just historical revision; it’s a fight over who gets to define what happened, and therefore what is still owed.