For the past 200 years millions of people all over the world have been erasing local history connected to the trafficking of African people into slavery. Families, communities, entire societies, local, national and traditional leaders and governments, all have permitted and some even encouraged personal and collective amnesia about a commercial trade comprised of capturing and carrying people away from Africa. This commercial trade included places, people and institutions in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Asia & the Pacific, and the Americas. Today in the 21st century we finally can more freely make choices to recover and heal public and private memories of this slave trade history. Our efforts to recover local knowledge will contribute to heal the history globally and the slavery that continues in and from Africa today. August 23rd is International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.
UNESCO chose this date because on the night of 22-23 August 1791 a slave rebellion began on the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo. Today Santo Domingo is shared by Haiti & the Dominican Republic. This rebellion of stolen Africans and their descendants marks a beginning to the protracted ending of the transatlantic commerce in people and enslavement of Blacks in the Americas. Not by accident, in some places enslavement has never totally ended - notably though not exclusively Mauritania, Sudan and certain areas of west Africa. From UNESCO: "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. 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."