Question: Amazing Grace is a 2006 British-American biographical drama film directed by Michael Apted, about the campaign against slave trade in the British Empire, which term means the history of slavery spans many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day?

Amazing Grace is a 2006 British-American biographical drama film directed by Michael Apted, about the campaign against slave trade in the British Empire, led by William Wilberforce, who was responsible for steering anti-slave trade legislation through the British parliament.  The title is a reference to the hymn "Amazing Grace".  The film also recounts the experiences of John Newton as a crewman on a slave ship and subsequent religious conversion, which inspired his writing of the poem later used in the hymn.  Newton is portrayed as a major influence on Wilberforce and the abolition movement. <SEP>  However the social, economic, and legal positions of slaves were vastly different in different systems of slavery in different times and places. The history of slavery spans many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. <SEP> Maafa (or African Holocaust, Holocaust of Enslavement, or Black holocaust as alternatives) are political neologisms (popularized from 1998 onwards) used to describe the history and ongoing effects of atrocities inflicted on African people, particularly when committed by non-Africans, specifically in the context of the history of slavery, including the Arab Slave Trade and Atlantic Slave Trade, and argued as "continued to the present day" through imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.  For example, Maulana Karenga (2001) puts slavery in the broader context of the "Maafa", suggesting that its effects exceed mere physical persecution and legal disenfranchisement: the "destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples." <SEP> Slavery in Niger involves a number of different practices which have been practiced in the Sahel region for many centuries and which persist to this day.  The Bornu Empire in the eastern part of Niger was an active part of the trans-Saharan slave trade for hundreds of years.  Other ethnic groups in the country similarly had a history of slavery, although this varied and in some places slavery was largely limited to the political and economic elite.  When the French took control of the area they largely ignored the problem and only actively banned the trade in slaves but not the practices of slavery.  Following independence, many of the major slave holders became prominent political leaders in both the multiparty democracy period and the military dictatorship (1974 until 1991), and so the problem of slavery was largely ignored.  In 2003, with pressure from the anti-slavery organization Timidria, Niger passed the first law in Western Africa that criminalized slavery as a specific crime.  Despite this, slavery persists throughout the different ethnic groups in the country, women are particularly vulnerable, and a 2002 census confirmed the existence of 43,000 slaves and estimated that the total population could be over 870,000 people.  The landmark "Mani v. Niger" case was one of the first instances where a person won a judgement against the government of Niger in an international court for sanctioning her slave status in official decisions.