African Saga is an authoritative discussion of the African experience in South America, starting with African origins, the colonial experience as captive laborers, and the contemporary period. It includes an extensive discussion of the African towns set up by runaway slaves, which proliferated in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The author gives an extensive discussion of African resistance to the slave trade. Nina S. de Friedemann is considered one of Latin America's foremost authorities on the African Diaspora, and this book includes detailed ethnohistorical and ethnographic data based on the author's research over three decades in every area of African life in Colombia. The author wrote seventeen books, largely on this subject, but this one is considered the summation of her life's work. She was one of the creators of the field of Afro-Colombian studies, and she was the Latin American coordinator for the UNESCO Project on the Route of the Slave.