New Museum Partnerships Commemorate the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

October 2007 -- British, African and Caribbean museums joined hands to celebrate the 2007 Bicentenary Abolition of the Slave Trade by the UK Parliament and to launch a new museum partnership initiative for sharing information about the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

A new museum partnership among British, African and Caribbean museums aims to facilitate access and increase sharing of information on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The partnership was launched as part of the activities organized to commemorate the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade voted by the British Parliament, which included in August 2007 with the inauguration of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool.

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Delegates examined ways to carry out audits of existing collections, the digitization of information on the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade for public access. These new partnerships will also encourage the sharing of exhibitions materials, as well as the sharing of best practices and pedagogical materials for the improvement of community education on the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery.

This strategic partnership is the fruit of a February 2007 meeting in Ghana between the UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura and the former UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott in Ghana, where the UNESCO Director-General appealed for western museum assistance to share information with museums in Africa. Both leaders pledged their support for an African and Caribbean museum cooperation with UK museums to increase access to information on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Moreover, Mr. Prescott announced his country’s plan to donate part of the old Liverpool Slave Trade exhibition to UNESCO’s ‘Slave Route Project’ and some of the fragile objects from the permanent collection to museums in Ghana. UNESCO plans on displaying the 30 panels from the Liverpool Slave Trade Exhibition at the next meeting of the International Scientific Committee for the UNESCO Slave Route Project, which is scheduled for late 2007 at UNESCO headquarters. Afterwards, the panels will be made available to museums in UNESCO Member States as a ‘traveling exhibition’.

In addition to sharing traveling exhibitions and hosting joint-exhibitions, the new museum partnership will also enable museums to share educational programme kits about the slave trade. At a meeting held in London on 23 August 2007 (UNESCO’s International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition), UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Culture, Ms. Françoise Rivière, encouraged the United Kingdom to publish and widely distribute user-friendly and effective pedagogical materials with partnering museums in Africa and the Caribbean. The new International Slavery Museum in Liverpool has already agreed to share their educational kits with partnering museums. The pedagogical material developed by the UNESCO Slave Route project will also be shared with schools in UNESCO’s Associated Schools Project, which will be visited on the Amistad 2007-2008 ‘Atlantic Freedom Tour’—a tour of historic slavery sites such as Liverpool, Dakar, Cape Verde and Barbados aboard the Amistad ‘Freedom Schooner.’

Source: UNESCO Slave Route Project