For three decades, studies of the African slave trade and the system of slavery have proliferated. Conferences have been held one after another: in Copenhagen (1974), New York (1978), Port-au-Prince (1978), Washington, Harvard University (1979), Manchester (1982), Nantes (1985), Madrid (1988), Paris, Port-au-Prince, Saint-Louis, Dakar (all in 1989), Nantes (1993), and Nouakchott (1995). Numerous specialists from universities in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas (Brazil, the United States, and Canada) have convened to compare the results of their research. Year after year, archival records have been brought to bear and the bibliography has grown ever longer. A number of studies of oral tradition have been undertaken in Africa.

Born in 1799 in Moscow, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin - who has been called the “founder of poetic and literary language in Russian” (Belinski, Turgenev), “the first of the Russians” (Dos-toyevski), “the first Russian artist-poet” (Belinski), “the original model for Russian identity” (Grigoriev), “an extremely rare and perhaps unique phenomenon of the Russian spirit” (Gogol), “the sun of the Russian intellectual conception of the world” (Dostoyevsky) - could trace his roots back to African ancestors. His mother, Nadine Hanibal, was the granddaughter of “The Negro of Peter the Great,” Abraham Petrovich Hanibal, who at the beginning of the eighteenth century fell victim to the black slave trade with the Ottoman Empire.