It is against this background that the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition is commemorated on 23 August each year.
This International Day is intended to inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of all peoples. In accordance with the goals of the intercultural project “The Slave Route”, it should offer an opportunity for collective consideration of the historic causes, the methods and the consequences of this tragedy, and for an analysis of the interactions to which it has given rise between Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean.
The Director-General of UNESCO invites the Ministers of Culture of all Member States to organize events every year on that date, involving the entire population of their country and in particular young people, educators, artists and intellectuals.
International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition was first celebrated in a number of countries, in particular in Haiti (23 August 1998) and Goree in Senegal (23 August 1999). Cultural events and debates too were organized. The year 2001 saw the participation of the Mulhouse Textile Museum in France in the form of a workshop for fabrics called “Indiennes de Traite” (a type of calico) which served as currency for the exchange of slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
“This 23 August, we honour the memory of the men and women who, in Saint-Domingue in 1791, revolted and paved the way for the end of slavery and dehumanization. We honour their memory and that of all the other victims of slavery, for whom they stand. (…) To draw lessons from this history, we must lay this system bare, deconstruct the rhetorical and pseudoscientific mechanisms used to justify it; we must refuse to accept any concession or apologia which itself constitutes a compromising of principles. Such lucidity is the fundamental requirement for the reconciliation of memory and the fight against all present-day forms of enslavement, which continue to affect millions of people, particularly women and children.” — Audrey Azoulay, Director General, Message on the occasion of the International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition
Comments
Initially, why do we have to accept their description of their crime as TRADE?
It is an insult to all Black people to accept what the did as TRADE. Is it not about time this criminal activity was given the right title?
THE TRANSATLANTIC GENOCIDE, PLUNDER, HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND RAPE OF AFRICANS BY EUROPEANS
We should DENAND – books describing this criminal activity be changed
Where is my comment
And perhaps we commemorate the bulk of human suffering at the hands of others.. through the slave taking by African rulers in war and subsequent sale to the slavers, the Arab slave caravans and the Barabary enslavement of Europeans .. all horrible and all should be remembered and learned from for the future generations.. from my perspective this is the propagation of unity not segregation.
Ekue my friend,
No, it WAS a trade.
Forget the romanticised, false image of Kunta Kinte being kidnapped on a beach in the TV series Roots, the sad truth is that very few black Africans were ever kidnapped by white Europeans, the vast majority of black Africans ended up in Brazil, the West Indies and the U.S.A. because West African kingdoms and empires waged war against their fellow black Africans to capture them and sell them to white Europeans for a profit.
My dear late Dad was black African, from Senegal, the western most point of the African continent, where the Goree fort is located, a place where captured and traded Africans were held before being transported across the Atlantic.
The fact that Africans were complicit in the slave trade does not excuse the way in which the descendants of imported slaves were treated in Brazil, the West Indies and the U.S.A, or the racism that black people still face today, but we have to accept the fact that black Africans were mainly responsible for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not to do so is childish and immature; sadly it was a trade, in human lives, motivated by greed on both sides.
Nice article
Post a comment