It is 1940 and Kenneth Lockwood is a Lieutenant in the British colonial armed forces, …
In the old days it was a major slave-trading station where people were brought downriver in canoes and herded together in barracoons before being traded to Portuguese and British slavers for cigarettes and mirrors and gin.
— Unquiet on the Eastern Front by Wole Talabi (16%)
new vocabulary: barracoon
an enclosure in which slaves or convicts were confined for a limited period