The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: New Directions in Teaching and Learning

The Harriet Tubman Institute and the Slave Route Project have announced the launching on 16 April at UNESCO headquarters a new title in the Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora: “The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: New Directions in Teaching and Learning”.

Edited by Paul E. Lovejoy and Benjamin Bowser, this book is an anthology of papers from an international workshop that the Slave Route Project jointly organized in November 2010 in Toronto, Canada, with the Harriet Tubman institute and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, in order to define new approaches for teaching the slave trade and slavery and to examine the psychological consequences of this history.

Read more!

Design Competition: The Slave Trade

 

More details have been announced about the UNESCO coordinated competition to design a permanent memorial to honor the victims of the transatlantic slave trade at the United Nations in New York.

 

This competition involves two phases. First, 16 semi-finalists will be chosen. From these 7 will be chosen for interviews by an international jury, which will make the final decision about the competition winner.

 

The deadline for this competition is Monday 12/19. If you know of any American artists/designers who would be interested in competing, please send them here!

Slave Routes: A Global Vision

The film presents the diverse histories and heritages stemming from the global tragedy of the slave trade and slavery. Through the compilation of images, historical narration, and interviews with experts from all the continents, the film shows how African slaves and their descendants, in contrast to incorrect racial theories, helped shape the modern world. The film's main objective is to give a global vision of the different dimensions of this tragedy and raise crucial questions regarding its consequences in modern societies in order to come to terms with this collective memory

Slave Routes: A Global Vision

23 August: Teachers from three regions learned about the slave trade

To mark the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition (23 August), teachers from UNESCO Associated Schools (ASPnet) in Africa, the Caribbean and Europe and North America gathered at an international teacher professional development workshop (Accra, Ghana, 11 - 13 August). More....

Florida Task Force on African American History Honors Harris Rosen

Members of the Florida Task Force on African American History recently honored hotelier and philanthropist Harris Rosen with their Ring of Giving Humanitarian Award for his long-time support and in particular, their recent very successful July 10-15 African American Heritage Tour. 

The tour incorporated material from UNESCO's Transatlantic Slave Trade (TST) Education program and provided an in depth look at African American history in north and northeast Florida to educators of grades K-12, college personnel, religious and community leaders, and history enthusiasts.

The International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition

23 August 2010

The night of 22 to 23 August 1791, in Santo Domingo (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) saw the beginning of the uprising that would play a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

The International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition is intended to inscribe the tragedy of the transatlantic slave trade in the memory of all peoples. Bringing to light all aspects of slavery is essential to constructing an overall dispassionate vision of this tragedy.


UNESCO's Slave Route project endeavors to promote such research that helps to explain, understand and reconstruct the threads of sometimes conflicting narratives and fill the silences of the past.

On the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, we remember the battles our predecessors fought to overcome the scourge of slavery, and the persistence of a twisted logic that continues to deny people the right to live freely even today.
Susan Rice
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations

Read more of Ambassador Rice's statement on the occasion.

Meeting of the International Scientific Committee of the Slave Route Project

This 9th meeting of the Committee took place on 17 and 18 February at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. Committee members reviewed the many activities which had taken place in 2007 and 2008 and devoted most of their time to the discussion of a new strategy for the Slave Route Project, to be presented at the Executive Board in April. Professor Michael Gomez was elected to the chairmanship of the Committee. He is on the History faculty of New York University where he specializes in the African diaspora and Islam in West Africa.

The Slave Route Project, launched in 1994, has three objectives, namely to:

• contribute to a better understanding of the causes, forms of operation, issues and consequences of slavery in the world (Africa, Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, Middle East and Asia);
• highlight the global transformations and cultural interactions that have resulted from this history; and
• contribute to a culture of peace by promoting reflection on cultural pluralism, intercultural dialogue and the construction of new identities and citizenships.

Interview with Ali Moussa Iye

Ali Moussa Iye is the Chief of the Inter-cultural Dialog Section of UNESCO where he coordinates the slave routes projects and UNESCO's History of Africa. He was recently interviewed by McPhilips Nwachukwu for Vanguard Online (Nigeria).

African leaders in the 1960's were concerned that the available historical record of Africa had been written by Europeans and reflected the views of the colonial powers rather than of the Africans themselves. As a result, UNESCO was asked to take on the job or coordinating the production of a major survey of African history written by African historians. Over a period of 25 years that history was published in eight volumes. In his interview Iye states:

Now at UNESCO, we are launching the second phase of the Journal History of Africa. We are launching a project to try to elaborate three contents to be included at the primary and secondary levels for all the African Union member States. So, we are working with African Union.

Iye also discusses UNESCO's Slave Route Project, which was started in 1993. That project initially focused on the Atlantic slave route, but Iye (who is from Djibouti on the Horn of Africa) is seeking to move now to include the trade of slaves from Africa into the Islamic lands.

Read the full interview.

"Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery"

Unfinished Business was commissioned by UNESCO’s Slave Route project and prepared by Joel Quirk of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE, U.K).

The publication is divided into five chapters:

• defining slavery in all its forms;
  
• presenting data on the scale of slavery, slave trading and other forms of human bondage;
  
• examining differences and similarities between historical and contemporary practices;
  
• identifying, via case studies in the United States, Saint Domingue/Haiti, Great Britain and Portugal, the main paths through which abolition of slavery has historically occurred; and,
  
• through a further series of case studies, exploring the key limitations of the legal abolition of slavery.

This book provides a history that is important for the understanding of our American culture. I would be a useful text for a unit on slavery.

Slavery may have been legally abolished around the world, but it remains “a widespread and deeply rooted component on contemporary life” concludes the first-ever comparative analysis of historical slave systems and modern forms of human bondage, published online today by UNESCO.

Click here to download the 141 page report.

200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Source: Locke and Slavery

August 23rd is the day marked by UNESCO to commemorate the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. On March 2, 1807, the U.S. Congress approved an act to abolish the importation of slaves effective January 1, 1808. Thus, this year marks the 200th anniversary of that event.

Here are a number of useful resources available related to the anniversary celebration:

• The Global Slavery Rememberance website
• The U.S.National Commission Rememberance website
• UNESCO's Slave Trade Archives
• The Breaking the Silence project website. The project was created to help educators break the silence about the slave trade.
• ASPNet Breaking the Silence, a website created for the Associated Schools Project Network to facilitate teaching about the slave trade in those schools.

The Slave Trade

© Unesco

The Slave Trade While the notion of a “duty to remember” was in large part developed in the aftermath of the Second World War, the tragedy of the slave trade and slavery has only recently entered the debate, raising specific ethical and socio-political issues in the societies concerned. The Slave Route Project endeavours to enhance mutual understanding among peoples by creating a dynamic process to help develop new forms of citizenship, respect for cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue and the fight against prejudice and racism. The Slave Route project: Shedding new light on slavery A set of international conventions: Outlawing slavery and human trafficking Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade: United Kingdom commemorates Teaching about the slave trade: A new web resource