The politics of slavery have shifted their ground again, and in the twenty-first century the optics are different, and the ‘additive mixture’ of all the light has created a particular prism through which to view the pasts, presents and futures of slavery. The shadows have a colour. It is no longer possible to find people defending slavery or making arguments for gradual rather than immediate abolition. Slavery as an idea has become the epitome of a moral wrong, and an ‘appalling anachronism’ (O’Connell Davidson 2015, 9). At the same time, we live in a world saturated with inequality, violence, exploitation, oppression, brutality and indifference, and in a history full of fits and starts and repetitions, of memories and rememories. In order to understand the current politics of slavery, we need to spend some time in the discomfort of slavery as a part of our shared property-history, not as the special property of people racialised as black. The politics may be different, but the debates between the modern abolitionists and those who focus on the afterlives of racial slavery are still about the waving line between slavery and servitude, the mobile borderlands between personhood, subpersonhood and humanity, and what it means to live in those spaces and to seek to escape them. In the eighteenth century debates over slavery, Hegel located history outside Africa and inside Europe (Purtschert 2010, 1046), and set up the spatio-temporal difference between a time of development and a time of non-development. Africa, he declared, ‘is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit’. It was, Hegel went on, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, on the threshold of the world's history. As we have seen, this sense of Africa as a state of nature is very clear in the abolitionist and anti-abolitionist writings of the late eighteenth century, where ‘Africa’ emerges as a space of abundance and plenty, defined by the conditions of mere nature. Conservative identity politics, of the sort that chooses to quote from William Wilberforce, is committed to defending the existing hierarchical social order and inequalities of social prestige and status. It still trades in this understanding of history, in which Africa remains in a kind of state of nature, suspended between the affective innocence of subsistence and the impossibility of progress.