Archbishop Michael, as one of the Anglican Communion’s Primates, attended an international consultation in Tanzania organized by the Anglican agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) on trafficking in persons and modern slavery.

Based in Dar es Salaam the sixty or so participants—archbishops, bishops, priests, deacons, and lay people from across the Anglican world, including Joel Kelling and Canon Wadi’e Far from our own Province—went deeply into many aspects of the forced or deceitful migration and exploitation of vulnerable men, women, and children.

Particularly poignant was a day of pilgrimage to Zanzibar, where the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral was deliberately built both to obliterate and to memorialize the site of the slave market and whipping post: the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, a predecessor of USPG in the nineteenth century, played a leading part in suppressing the trade in enslaved Africans which sent them from their homelands in servitude to various parts of the Arab world.

Participants exchanged information on many instances of the various modern manifestations of slavery, by trafficking, across many lands including the West, and pledged to join others in vigorously publicizing and combatting it.  Among those who addressed the conference were the Vice-President of Tanzania and the country’s Commissioner-General of Immigration.  The whole event was hosted by Archbishop Maimbo Ndolwa.