Aminata Diallo is an eleven-year-old African girl, when her life changes completely, going from a beloved daughter to an orphan who is captured and enslaved. Aminata is shown in the novel Somebody Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill as a strong young protagonist who manages to survive the odyssey around the world first as a slave and then as a free activist of the English. In the book, the various stages of his life are always connected to the clothes he wears or lack of clothes and show the degree of dehumanization that accompanies slavery. The first thing slavers do is strip their captives naked, as they treat the people they capture not as human beings, but as a commodity from which they want to make a profit. They train their prey from the moment of internment, "they began with humiliations, they tore our clothes from our shoulders" (Colle 29). Aminata is Muslim, and the reader can see from the first pages how proud her people were and how much they respected their family. Women were the main workers and Aminata was trained by her mother as a midwife. The village life is shown as a normal community which includes jealousy and other usual occurrences. When Aminata is first captured, she is orphaned, as slave traders kill her parents. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to humiliate someone means “to lower or depress one's dignity or self-respect; mortify” (humiliate). The first thing that the kidnappers do to the newly captured is therefore deprive them of their dignity and consequently of their humanity. The kidnappers make it clear to the captives that they see them as a commodity; human beings are commodities that they intend to sell to make money. I’m not…half the paper…” (Hill 435). The practice she encountered many years earlier is still the same, and the reader sees the dehumanizing effects of stripping slaves and placing them in bondage worse than animals more through Aminata's eyes. In conclusion, Aminata is working for abolitionists in London, England, when she is older. Now he is able to dress as he sees fit and this seems to represent the freedom he has gained. On the other hand, does it really possess freedom, since it is still being used and manipulated for a cause, a cause which is the end of the slave trade routes in Britain, and not the end of the practice of slavery? In telling his story, Hill makes the reader understand how dehumanizing slavery was and that it began with nakedness. Work cited Hill, Lawrence. The Book of Negroes. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2007. Print.