For every 650 people stuffed into a slave ship - or "death ship" - only roughly 150 would survive the passage, delegates to the African Diaspora Heritage Trail conference heard yesterday.

At a conference workshop entitled "Black Holocaust", J. Justin Ragsdale of the `Lest We Forget' Black Holocaust Museum in New Jersey brought the terrible reality of the slave ships to light. "Slave ships were not fun. These were not cruise ships," he said. "Slavery was not a joke."

Shackled human beings - men, women and children - were packed into the ships like sardines, layered on top of one another in tiers.

For the weeks of the passage they sat trapped, immobile in progressively deeper layers of human waste with many suffocating, drowning or simply succumbing to one of the myriad diseases that plagued the death ships, Mr. Ragsdale said.

Even the corpses were not removed from the holds. Mr. Ragsdale and his wife co-founded their museum after collecting over 2,000 pieces of slavery's hardware - shackles, collars, tethers, leg irons, manacles, whips - from an original pair of shackles Mr. Ragsdale obtained from a sharecropper uncle who had served in the US Civil War.

Introducing her husband, Mrs. Ragsdale said when he first took up his project she did not wholeheartedly support it. "At first I didn't see it as a part of my heritage because I was not in touch with my heritage," she said.

"He made me realise that this is as much a part of my history as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or any of the other leaders who made a difference in our lives as African Americans. She added: "I've learned to embrace it, because it empowers me to be better than I am. Because nothing I've experienced to comes close to what my ancestors experienced."

For 10,000 to 15,000 people at a time, the passage to slavery would start in massive slave castles where the men were chained and locked into holding pens behind iron doors, Mr. Ragsdale said.

The women were held in an open pit in order to allow slave buyers to pick the girl they wanted to take for the night. Although the slaves were taken from many areas, few came from the centre of the continent, but Africans bought and sold other Africans alongside traders from European countries.

"Slavery was always in Africa," Mr. Ragsdale said. "They weren't thinking about brotherhood. They were fighting. There was tribal warfare and there was the money factor."

Those that survived the castles were branded with irons so hot it penetrated not only the skin but often the muscle of the arm, Mr. Ragsdale said.

The wounds became infected, adding yet another level of disease to the foetid conditions which would be found upon the ship.

Nets had to be erected around the top of the ship to prevent slaves from committing suicide, he added: "These people were dying wholesale."

They were "property" and they were disposable.

Mr. Ragsdale said traders would pay 50 cents for a slave in Ghana and fetch $1,200 for him in the `New World', adding: "It was very lucrative."

If a slave managed to survive the ships, they would be worked nearly to death by slave owners - beaten, abused, raped and even killed. There were few opportunities for escape in North America, Mr. Ragsdale said, and escaped slaves were often sold back to their owners by Native Americans or even free Blacks who had promised to help them.

Slaves were fed only animal scraps and worked 15 to 16 hour days but they lived, strived, and survived.

Yet much of the history of slavery is lost on today's young people, Mr. Ragsdale said: "For all that they did and went through, our kids act like fools. They don't have that right. They owe us something."

He said there is no reason children of African descent should not be at the head of the class with straight A's in every subject but instead they are a problem.

"You could die in a foot and a half of faeces. Our ancestors who made it ought to be applauded everyday."

Both the Ragsdales suggested people look to their own families to start keeping their histories alive. "This Island has a history and you are part of it," said Mr. Ragsdale. "You have to take responsibility for what you have."

"Our elders are walking, living history," Mrs. Ragsdale added. "We should get children intrigued by their own family history first."

The workshop, which stretched well over an hour, was emotionally charged and many of the participants commented on the heightened energy in the room. "We are the children of the ones they could not kill," said one attendee. "That affirms us."