Slavery and transatlantic slave trade: The United Nations’ family will never forget the victims
A permanent memorial will be erected at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. On june 30th, 2011, the UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova signed the Memerandum of Understanding lunching the international design competition. As Mrs Angella Hamilton-Brown (Deputy Permanent Representative of Jamaica to the United Nations) recalled at the occasion, the forthcoming erection of a permanent memorial is an initiative of the Member States of CARICOM (Caribbean Community and Common Market) and the Africa group.
Any observer of contemporary international relations could therefore easily understand the symbolic significance of such a memorial in the house of Nations. Indeed, the West has always difficulty faced the wrongs of its passed relationship with Africa. Slavery and transatlantic slave trade have always been a taboo in the West, even in scientific communities. Since an acknowledgement of responsibility would pave the way to possible reparation claims, governments of former colonial powers have chosen to avoid this topic in the public space and to elaborate an educational policy which avoids the teaching of slavery and slave trade as an intrinsic part of their national history.
When signing the memorandum of understanding, the UNESCO Director-General said: “we are proud to be part of this collaborative effort of the United Nations family for several reasons. First, it is a very important project that will serve as a reminder to humanity of this shameful page in our common history. Second, through our involvement in the Slave Route and General History of Africa projects, we have not only aimed to restore historical truth, but to show the impact of the slave trade on the many cultural exchanges that have shaped societies today.”
Despite the good will of the United Nations to restore historical truth, it is unlikely that the erection of a permanent memorial at the UN Headquarter alone will eliminate reparation claims.
Source: UNESCO/CULTURE Culture Sector, 2011.
The picture is from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It is the reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction, in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1769.
NB: For the state of the debates on reparation claims, please refer to the following book:
Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Jean-Marc Coicaud, and Niklaus Steiner (Ed.), The age of apology: facing up to the past, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, 344p.
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