In Toronto there was the launch of the Itineraries of African Canadian Memory Initiative at York University on August 23, 2011. This date coincides with the UNESCO proclaimed International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition during the UN designated International Year for People of African Descent. See UN Resolution A/RES/64/169. Presenters and participants discussed the legacies of slavery and how the topic can be incorporated into the classroom. I co-presented a workshop with Dr. Joel Quirk of WISE, University of Hull and my presentation focused on the topic ‘Teach us about us: Using the lens of culturally relevant and responsive teaching practices to embed inclusive curriculum into the classroom’ at a Summer Institute hosted by the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples. I used the opportunity to look at new narratives of the African Canadian Presence and Contribution to Canada and the world during three stages of Canada:
- The French Colonial Period (1600-1760)
- British North America (1760-1867)
- Confederation and Contemporary Canada (1867-present)
I also provided a framework for culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy that focus on high impact instructional leadership in curriculum, teaching and learning that can be used in daily practice. These include:
- Conditions for learning rooted in equitable and inclusive teaching practices
- Students seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum through the resources used, posters in the schools, diversity of staff and experiences, diversity of ideas and student engagement
- Personalization – know the students, their interests and where they are coming from in terms of lived experiences
- Making curriculum, teaching, learning and the conditions for learning meaningful, relevant, rigorous for all students in a diverse society
- High expectations for staff, students, parents and community partners in education
- Closing the achievement gap by providing all students with the necessary supports they need to succeed
I will post details or a link to my full presentation or send it by email on request.
With Canada's Former Governor General The Rt Honourable Michaelle Jean who is UNESCO Special Envoy for Haiti at the African Canadian Itineraries launch event
Giving my greetings to Canada's Former Governor General The Rt Honourable Michaelle Jean who is UNESCO Special Envoy for Haiti at the African Canadian Itineraries launch event
Canada’s former Governor General, The Right Honourable Michaelle Jean who is currently UNESCO Special Envoy for Haiti participated and gave the keynote address on the Occasion of the Launch of the Itineraries of African Canadian Memory Initiative at York University, Toronto, Ontario, August 23, 2011. Below is her speech:
Dear friends, chers amis,
C’est un immense plaisir de me joindre à vous aujourd’hui et je vous remercie de l’accueil chaleureux que vous me faites.
Let me begin by telling you how pleased I am to join you this evening.
Just minutes ago, I was immersed in a lively dialogue with Canadian and Haitian instructors and researchers, as we explored ways to integrate the teaching of slavery into school curricula.
All the participants presented very creative ideas on equipping instructors with the pedagogical tools that can empower their students to understand and respond to the legacy of slavery and the slave trade in their communities.
Our conversation served as such an invigorating prelude to this evening’s event.
In fact, I must admit that it is hard for me to contain my excitement, as we prepare to launch the “Itineraries of African Canadian Memory Initiative.”
Conceived to raise awareness about the history of African peoples in Canada, this project is one of the most innovative academic initiatives of its kind in the country.
It cannot be a coincidence that not too long ago, I joined many of you to launch this very centre: the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Migrations of African Peoples.
Professor Lovejoy: you were there!
As a Black woman from the Americas, I was so moved to celebrate the launching of the Institute at a time in which our entire nation was marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, in the British Empire.
As we pondered the significance of the bicentenary, we vowed to do everything in our power to see the four-hundred year old story of Canada’s African diaspora given its due recognition.
So you can just imagine how delighted I am—four years later—to see that we have stayed true to our promise—this time during the International Year of People of African Descent.
For today we are inviting all Canadians to join us in ushering in a deeper, more extensive understanding of the African diaspora’s presence in our country by confronting our past together.
We must acknowledge that the Itinerary of Memory Initiative is the culmination of decades of meticulous research, archaeological exploration, and political advocacy by historians, anthropologists, teachers, public officials and human rights activists of all hues, many of whom are here with us today.
Through your unique contributions, you have conferred greater visibility upon the historic sites, dotting the Canadian landscape, which bear witness to the enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples, which salute their resolve to resist oppression, and which pay tribute to the Underground Railroad, which gave sanctuary to fleeing African American slaves during the18th and 19th centuries.
But today, you bring new impetus to the struggle.
With the blessing of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization, UNESCO, you are establishing a procedure according to which undiscovered historical sites can and will be designated “Sites of African Canadian Memory,” within the broader context of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project.
In so doing, you join your efforts to a transnational circle of solidarity, which finds unity in the belief that knowing the history of slavery is essential to seeing a global culture of peace flourish around the world.
To that belief, I say yes!
I concur!
For our story is fundamentally about lifting humanity out of the sinking sands of barbarism and injustice.
Our story is about finding the strength and fortitude to shatter the walls of indifference and tyranny that have held us back for so long.
Our story is about instilling a global ethic of fellowship that emboldens humanity to prevent the crimes of the past from dictating the trajectory of the present and future.
Having used documentary film, with my husband, the filmmaker and philosopher Jean-Daniel Lafond, to raise awareness about the history of slavery in my home province, Quebec, I would not be surprised to learn that your road to the Slave Route Project was not an easy one.
When you began, two or three decades ago, I am sure there were times in which you felt alone.
Some of your colleagues may have ostracized you.
Your peers may have rejected you.
Some of your friends may even have ridiculed you.
But the good news is that you stood your ground.
You refused to be dissuaded.
You resisted the temptation to give in.
And thanks to your tenacity, the entire country will reap the fruits of your labour.
For the “Sites of African Canadian Memory Initiative” will ensure that the story of Canada’s African diaspora ignites hope in the hearts of many, reminding everyone of our responsibility to safeguard the sacred principles of justice, equality and liberty.
And this point is crucial.
Because I am persuaded that memory is not simply there for us to meditate upon; memory can actually help us elucidate certain issues concealed deep within our relations with ourselves and with others.
Let’s think about it for a moment.
Contemporary forms of racism, prejudice and discrimination did not emerge in a vacuum.
Their roots run deep into our collective conscience, feeding like scarecrows off the same sallow ideas that underpinned the transatlantic slave trade.
How many of us are willing to bleach our skin several tones lighter?
How many of us are ashamed of the beautiful kinks in our natural hair?
How many of us have been refused housing for a disingenuous reason?
How many of us have been stopped on the side of the street for “walking while Black”—as the young people like to say?
Dear friends: that is a legacy of slavery—a legacy that persists in distorting our social interactions and diminishing or increasing—depending on where you stand—our sense of self.
That is why I encourage you to scour through the archives brought to life so vividly in Marcel Trudel’s Deux siècles d’esclavage au Canada and Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes.
I encourage you to wander along the graceful streets of St. Catherine’s in Ontario, where a vibrant community of freed slaves once flourished.
I invite you to meditate peacefully in the mostly unmarked slave cemeteries of southwestern Quebec.
And I invite you to learn from the experience of our African Canadian brothers and sisters of Nova Scotia.
When you do, please be attentive.
Please listen carefully.
For you will hear, ever so faintly, the voices of African Canadian women and men, free and enslaved, exhorting us to never, ever forget the gruesome chapters in our nation’s history.
Let me tell you that their message—“Never forget. N’oubliez jamais.”—resonates deep in my heart.
For it is the same message I heard during the State visit I undertook to Ghana, as Canada’s first Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of African descent.
Part of a five country diplomatic “blitz” of the continent, my visit to the “Black Star,” as Ghana is proudly known, was particularly meaningful to me.
It came on the heels of President John Kufuor’s public apology to the African diaspora for the role some African peoples played in facilitating the transatlantic slave trade.
During a State dinner filled with local and foreign dignitaries, including the King and Queen of the Ashanti, I chose to respond to the Ghanaian president.
As the great-great-grand daughter of African slaves, I unequivocally accepted his apology by thanking Ghana for its willingness to confront the past in such an honest way.
During our bilateral meeting, we both acknowledged that while we cannot go back to correct past injustices, we have a duty to learn from the lessons of the past—even the painful ones—and use that knowledge to build a better future together.
It was with that aphorism in mind that on the next day, I embarked on a visit to Elmina Castle, arguably the oldest European slave outpost on the African continent, built by the Portuguese in the 15thcentury.
To this day, you can find similar fortresses, along the West African coast, established by the French, the British, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Spanish.
It was there that captives—women, men, children and youth—were imprisoned, after being kidnapped from the interior, and thrown, like merchandise, onto large ships destined for faraway lands where the Africans were deprived of their memories, of their languages, of their heritage, of their dignity and, most of all, of their freedom.
During a tour of the castle, I was struck by the extent to which each brick, each gallon of mortar, each plank of wood, was set by people determined to crush the spirit of the captives.
Guides showed me the dark corridors through which the prisoners were escorted on their way to the dungeons.
They led me into the cells where women and men were enchained, barely fed and left to wallow in their excrements.
Then, they took me outside, into an open square, where, on a nightly basis, the governor of the time would pick a female slave to bring to his private quarters and rape.
The guides then brought me to a chapel. Yes, I imagine, a chapel, where, in the midst of the cries of agony emerging from the surrounding prison chambers, the governor and his fellow men would attend religious services, after inflicting a day’s worth of pain on their captives.
Lastly, the guides took me through another dark corridor that led to a very small door, so small that I could barely get through.
Some of you may have heard of it.
It is known as the “Door of no return.”
“No return”, because it was through that tiny opening that emaciated women and men were expected to cross before being mounted on to slave ships bound for South, Central and North America, including Canada.
Please note that the size of the door corresponded to the space allotted to each captive on the slave ship.
And it reveals the lengths to which the castle’s architects went to turn the most cruel and inhumane practices into architectural principles, guiding the very construction of that fortress of unspeakable horrors.
And that, my dear friends, is but one example of the Janus-faced character of modernity, through which rationality and barbarism became so closely intertwined that they were indistinguishable.
So you can imagine just how painful my visit to Elmina castle was. And I experienced that same pain again visiting a similar fortress in Senegal in the beautiful island of Gorée.
Standing in prayer in some of the darkest cells, where women and men had once been tortured, I could still make out the stench of human suffering and hear the faint moans of the captives, whispering, “Never forget. N’oubliez jamais.”
Even though I felt a sense of emptiness, as I faced that Door of No Return and confronted the terrors of the past, I found strength and comfort in the joyful noises of children playing on that same beach upon which the slave ships were once anchored.
Their playful sounds reminded me that in the midst of adversity, pain and suffering, life, joy and humanity always triumph over the forces of destruction.
For despite over four-hundred years of being subjected to one of the greatest crimes against humanity, we, the descendants of slaves, remain standing, and the transatlantic slave trade has been torn down.
We are survivors.
And we are strong.
My return to the land of our ancestors, Africa, evoked in my mind the very history we are commemorating today, on the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.
As many of you know, I was born on a Caribbean island renamed Hispaniola, by the Spanishconquistadores.
I prefer to call her Ayiti Boyo Quisqueya—the land of many mountains—as the original indigenous inhabitants, the Arrawaks, Tainos and Caribes named the island.
Once the richest colony in the world, Saint-Domingue—as the French later baptized her—became the stage of a revolution in which, for the first time in history, the slaves of the plantations took a stand for the universal values of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and won by reclaiming the land from their former masters.
I emphasize the universality of those values—liberté, égalité, fraternité—because, as you remember, they were the rallying call of the French revolution, which, a decade earlier, had liberated France from the arbitrary rule of a monarch.
The slaves of Saint-Domingue heard their desire for freedom and equality echoed in the clarion call of France’s Tiers État.
By adopting it as their motto, they sought to demonstrate that those same values, those same rights, applied to them too.
In so doing, they wisely and decisively (created a dent in the) ideological pillars that constituted the very foundation of slavery.
We must not forget that throughout the modern era, theological, philosophical and scientific beliefs converged around the notion of the inferiority of the African race.
And that convergence found its most elaborate articulation in the infamous Code Noir, through which France maintained Black people in a state of subservience throughout her colonies.
Here, torture, rape and mutilation were the instruments of choice; and an arbitrary and corrupt legal system was the mechanism through which slave owners were given immunity, rebellion was stifled, and the colonies’ free Black and mixed-race populations were kept at bay.
So when the Black Jacobins—as Trinidadian Historian C.L.R. James likes to call them—convened deep in the Bois Caiman rainforest, in Haiti, to summon their sisters and brothers to arms, they were not only expressing their resolve to break free from the physical chains of slavery.
They were also ringing the death knell of an entire system of values that upheld the inferiority of the Black race as science, religion and law.
So, in so far as Napoleon Bonaparte’s army was brought to its knees, in so far as British forces were expelled from the island, and in so far as the Spanish colonial authorities were banished, the Black Jacobins succeeded.
They succeeded in proving that Africans could match Europeans in physical strength.
They succeeded in demonstrating that Africans could rival Europeans in devising superior military strategies and tactics.
They succeeded in inspiring confidence and allocating military and financial resources to other subjugated peoples, enabling them to cast off the yoke of colonisation.
Thus, the Haitian revolution was not only a triumph for the African diaspora.
The Haitian revolution was a victory for humankind.
For through the blood and sweat of her main actors, the Haitian revolution proved to the world that the human spirit could triumph over the most trying ordeal, no matter how impossible victory may seem.
And for those achievements, I do not flinch in saying, “Humanity owes Haiti a debt for bequeathing the gift of freedom to the world.”
Yet, Haiti found herself paying dearly for her contribution.
Why?
Because the birth of the world’s first Black republic sent shockwaves around the world.
Global superpowers, whose very economies depended on slavery, feared that their slaves would emulate the Haitians.
As a result, France and the United States conspired to pursue a policy of underdevelopment in its dealings with the young republic.
That is why Haiti was forced to pay millions in reparations to French slave owners who had been forced off their land.
The Caribbean nation also became the first country to ever face an international embargo imposed by European and North American colonial powers.
To this day, Haiti is suffering for standing up for human rights.
Years of underdevelopment have almost brought the country to her knees, allowing despotic leaders to pillage the State’s coffers and see dependency define her relationship with foreign powers.
That is one of the reasons I have called for the international community to abandon the logic of aid and handouts, and near tutelage, which has defined its relation with the country.
And I have asked Haitian political leaders to reclaim the nation’s motto—l’Union fait la force—as the overriding principle guiding their deliberations.
The time has come for a new paradigm of development, which places investment, partnership, accountability, good governance and achievements at the core of what it means to bring assistance to Haiti.
At the center of this new approach should reside the conviction that the international community must support the Haitian people as agents of their own destiny rather than passive recipients of foreign aid.
So if I agreed to campaign tirelessly, as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Special Envoy for Haiti, it is because I am disturbed by the incessant odes to the resilience of the Haitian people.
They make it seem as if the Haitian people was put on this earth only to recover from one crisis, one tragedy, one ordeal to the other.
As I have said many times before, resilience is but the last resort before dying.
It is therefore my conviction that more recognition must be given to the Haitian people for its capacity to create, to think, to invent, to imagine, to do, to produce, and to reach beyond itself.
It is once we invest fully in Haitians’ capacities, their spirit of innovation, their creativity, and their leadership, that we will see Haiti emerge triumphant from the ashes of decades of badly planned and badly coordinated international aid.
Humanity has as much to teach, as it has to learn from the Haitian people.
For the fire of liberty Haiti once kindled, continues to illuminate the path of millions of women and men pursuing the struggle for universal justice and freedom.
That is why during an official visit to France in 2008, I felt so honoured to participate in a commemorative ceremony on the quays of the Garonne River in splendid Bordeaux—a seaport whose very fortune was built on the slave trade.
There, I stood alongside the city’s Mayor, M. Alain Juppé, to pay tribute to the memory of the millions of Africans who transited through the port, on their way to an unexpected calamity in the Americas.
As we meditated, I heard once again the soft voices in the breeze, exclaiming, “N’oubliez jamais. Never forget.”
Never forget the atrocities that slaves were subjected to.
Never forget the nameless millions who died on the plantations.
Never forget the millions of women and men whose bodies are strewn across the ocean floor.
Never forget the struggles they waged for recognition and dignity.
And never, ever forget our duty of memory.
So in launching the “Itineraries of African Canadian Memory Initiative” today, we not only pay tribute to the women and men who lived through of the most barbaric ordeals in the history of humankind.
We honour our responsibility to seek out truth and wisdom from the past, so that the errors of yesterday are never repeated.
The persistence of slavery, slavery-like practices and human trafficking today, should stand as a clear warning that we must continue to be vigilant.
The existence of child slaves in many parts of the world, including Haiti, enslaved domestic workers, and indentured sex workers, stands as a stark reminder that the battle is not over.
Slavery and slave-like practices continue to terrorize thousands of people around the world; we have even heard about disturbing cases of human trafficking here in Canada.
We must remain always vigilant.
We must look out for signs of distress.
And we must draw inspiration from past struggles.
Everyone has a role to play.
Every gesture counts.
It is a battle that we can win if we pool our strengths and work in solidarity across the boundaries of race, ethnicity, language and creed.
For as the Old Negro Spiritual reminds those of us who may have lost faith:
Oh Mary don’t you weep,
Martha don’t you moan.
Pharaoh’s army
Drowned in the red sea.
Pharaoh’s army.
Drowned in the red sea.
