Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery

In Nantes there is an almost invisible but moving and eye-opening memorial, built into the quays along the Loire, to the abolition of slavery. The memorial is deliberately intended to help Nantes come to terms with its past as the largest home base for slave trade boats from France, “le premier port negrier”, so it could just as easily have been installed in Liverpool or Boston. The timeline and display shows both the statistics of the 18th and 19th century slave trade as well as the history of the movements to abolish it.

Having been brought up in Great Britain and having lived for over twenty years in the US, I had always thought of this trade as an essentially British and American affair; the traders of the Empire making sure that their ships were always filled with the most valuable cargo and ensuring that the new colonies had the labour needed to prosper. I had also seen abolition as a similarly anglo-centric narrative; William Wilberforce campaigning tirelessly in Parliament and Thomas Paine and John Jay starting a dialogue that led to the Civil War in the United States.

But the graphics in this memorial tell a much more complete and awful story. In total around 12 million slaves were shipped from Africa and it is impossible to know how many people actually died before they got to the ports or who were killed in the process of capture. The majority of these came from Central West Africa (today Angola and Congo) and the rest from what is today Ivory Coast, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Of those 12 million who left, it is believed that maybe 10 million arrived in the Americas.

What totally amazed me was the distribution on the other side. I had always assumed that the US colonies were the major recipient but they “only” took around 650,000 slaves – maybe 6% of the total. The huge majority, probably over 3 million, went to what is now Brazil. Millions more went to the European colonies in South America French Guyana, Dutch Surinam, British Guyana, and Spanish Venezuela. Then Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti took about the same number as all the US colonies combined.

To put this in context. The 1850 population of the USA was 23million of which 3million were slaves. The 1850 population of Brazil was 9million of which 7million were slaves. Perhaps not surprisingly, Brazil was the last western nation to abolish slavery in 1888.

Details on the Nantes memorial
http://memorial.nantes.fr/

Abolitionism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism

Slavery in Brazil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil

Slavery in America
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States