Samuel L. Jackson traces the history of slavery

"We always only talk about the ships that arrived at their destination, not those that never arrived. There were ships that sank with our ancestors and we want to tell their stories. Enslaved is much more than a TV series; for me is the attempt to give back the voice to millions of people: a voice that had been silenced ".

Thus actor Samuel L. Jackson introduces Enslaved: the cruel Atlantic trafficking of African-American slaves, the six-episode documentary TV series conducted by Jackson himself, together with journalists and documentary makers Afua Hirsch and Simcha Jacobovici, broadcast on the History Channel (channel 407 of Sky) from 22 February at 9.00 pm (two episodes per evening).

It is the dramatic reconstruction of the trafficking - which lasted 400 years - of human beings from African countries to the new world: over 12 million people kidnapped and sold into slavery, of which at least 2 million died during the journey.

In the first episode, Samuel L. Jackson embarks on a personal journey, after discovering that his DNA dates back to the Benga tribe of Gabon.

Welcomed as a long lost son who has returned home, he participates in an initiation rite.

But Jackson takes it one step further: he transforms his personal journey into an effort to raise audience awareness of the history of the transatlantic African-American slave trade.

To this end it involves the diving association "Diving With a Purpose" (DWP) to go in search of slave ships sunk in the Atlantic Ocean.

Samuel L. Jackson, actor in Pulp Fiction, Jurassic Park, Django Unchained, Shaft, Star Wars, without forgetting the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for the first time agreed to lead a documentary series that allowed him not only to return to his first academic love, the ocean (Jackson graduated in Marine Biology from Morehouse College) but above all to talk once again about civil rights.

In 1968 he attended the funeral of Martin Luther King among others.

In the Enslaved series, for the first time, new underwater technology - such as advanced 3D mapping and ground-penetrating radar - made it possible to locate and examine numerous sunken slave ships, revealing a whole new perspective on the history of the transatlantic slave trade.

At several dive sites across the UK, Jamaica and Florida, an experienced team of divers located six ships that sank with slaves on board.

Meanwhile, on the mainland, experts have been investigating the stories that bind the slaves of Ghana, the stately homes of England, and the American plantations.

The investigative and scientific work, the clues recovered from the bottom of the sea, the reportage and the reconstructions outline the ideology, the economy and the politics of slavery, and bring to light the lost details of past events and the forgotten stories of suffering. of millions of people.

In the second installment in your quest to tell the story of the slave trade, how did slaveholders try to justify 400 years of trafficking and the exploitation and murder of millions of people from African countries?

In the ancient world, color was not a criterion by which people judged each other.

So how did the ideology of racism come about?

Jackson sends Jacobovici and Hirsch on a mission to understand the process that led Europeans to consider slavery not only economically profitable but also rationally founded.

Parallel to this investigation, in the English Channel, DWP divers locate one of the oldest wrecks of slave ships, recovering an object dating back 350 years.