What does it mean to remember slavery?
Written by: Krysta Bisnauth
On August 23, 1791, enslaved people in Saint-Domingue began an insurrection against the most profitable slave colony in the world. Within thirteen years, they had defeated the forces of France, Britain and Spain, abolished slavery, and established Haiti: the first independent Black republic and the only state in history founded by people who had emancipated themselves from slavery.
It is the beginning of that revolution that we choose to commemorate the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. But why do we do so? The transatlantic slave trade ended more than two centuries ago and the people who perpetrated and endured it are long dead.
For the same reason we mark the end of great wars, landmark victories for civil rights, or humanity’s first steps on the moon: some moments alter the world so profoundly that their significance lies as much in the world they produced as in the world in which they occurred.