Canada seems peripheral, especially
when following the course of the slave trade, as represented in images Illustrations 6-31.
The major focus is on Brazil, not Canada or even North America, and thereby helping to
redress our image of Africans in the Americas as not being typically Africans in North
America. There were many more Africans forced to move to the Caribbean than to North
America, and even Hispanic America received more Africans than North America. In absolute
demographic sense, therefore, Canada only had contact with a very few Africans and indeed
very few descendants of Africans relatively speaking. Despite this apparent
"marginality" of the African component in Canadian history, the examples of
Clapperton, Baquaqua, Tubman, and Perkins expose the centrality of slavery in the history
of the "western" world, even on the Canadian "periphery."
