Last episode we stood in the home they took us from. Now meet the men who came to take it. West Africans had a word for them: toubob. This episode asks one question — did they stumble into evil, or did they choose it? We follow the record: twelve people seized in 1441, then 235 sold in the open at Lagos in 1444; the Pope's 1452 order granting permission "to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude" — slavery with no end date; Elmina Castle, built in 1482 for gold, not people; São Tomé, the island rehearsal where the plantation machine was invented; John Hawkins sailing with the Queen of England's own ships and her crest bearing a bound man; the Royal African Company, which Britain's National Archives says carried more enslaved people than any other single institution; and the asiento — 144,000 human beings written into a peace treaty. We close with the count from the Slave Voyages database — 12.5 million forced onto ships, 1.8 million dead in the crossing — and Walter Rodney's verdict: underdevelopment was made, not born. They were not blown off course. They chose. If this episode moved you, follow Sankofa Chronicles — and send it to one neighbor who needs to hear it. That's how we grow this porch.

Thirty-five episodes, and we do not start with the ships. We start with home. Before the taking, there was a continent of two thousand languages: Mansa Musa crashing the price of gold in Cairo in 1324, Timbuktu's scholars paid for by the king, hundreds of thousands of books smuggled to safety in 2012, Benin's walls called the largest earthworks ever built by hand, Ife's bronze heads so lifelike Europeans said Greeks made them, the Oyo Empire's courts and taxes, the Asante Golden Stool that holds a nation's soul, Kongo's two million people choosing Christianity as strategy, Igbo towns with no kings at all, Akan families running through the mother's line, and iron smelted from rock two thousand years ago by African hands alone. Named kingdoms, real trades, real families — so everything after lands as loss, not just violence. The series premiere of The Taking. If this episode moved you, follow Sankofa Chronicles — and send it to one neighbor who needs to hear it. That's how we grow this porch.

Before Episode One, meet the man telling the story. Mr. Black History took a DNA test, and what Ancestry sent back wasn't a pie chart — it was the map of this entire series. Eighty-eight percent African across twenty-two peoples: Igboland (16%), the Gbe peoples of Benin (9%), Western Bantu and forest peoples (9%), Hausa and Fulani, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Yorubaland, the Mandé world of Mali and Senegal, Cameroon, Liberia, Zimbabwe, the Luba of Congo. His blood covers nearly every coast the slave ships loaded from — the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, the Windward Coast, Kongo and Angola. His Gbe nine percent comes from Dahomey's coast — where some sold, and some were sold, and he comes from that ground either way. And twelve percent of him is England and Ireland — in his blood through the plantation world this series exists to name. "I am not a tour guide. I am a descendant, reading his own file out loud." This is Episode 0 of The Taking, a 35-episode series on the slave system. Start here, then go straight to Episode 1: Home. Follow Sankofa Chronicles — and send this to one neighbor whose blood might be a map too.