“Fighting slavery’s legacy of racism through transformative education”
For decades, the institutionalized system of slavery and its horrific effects and traumatic presence have lingered within the global community, whether in the faces of descendants of the former enslaved African people; powerful images; relics of the past or through tangible and intangible heritage. The ‘domino effect’ of this inhumane system signified that no society could remain complacent or indifferent to the intergenerational trauma that followed. With this in mind, each year on August 23, the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition commemorates the memory of lives lost and numerous societies still haunted by the legacies of slavery. The precursor to this was that night of 22 – 23 August 1791 when thousands of enslaved peoples in Haiti revolted in the Haitian Revolution which played a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, which began in Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). The quest for self-liberation is historically significant as the cries of freedom reverberated in other colonies and among the African enslaved masses.