Africa has experienced historic events tragic because of hard impacts caused by the company colonial european who has occupied a continent that was originally peaceful, hospitable, structured, with its kingdoms, its culture, its codes. Declared wild, not civilized, Africa has known for centuries of the slave trade, colonization, requiring the cessation of a history of afro-african.
Benaouda Lebdai has recently organized with the university of le Mans and that of Abomey-Calavi, Benin, a symposium on the issue of slavery © DR
A human tragedy…
slavery has lasted several centuries, resulting in a profound change in Africa, the Americas and Europe. During the deportations of non-return, millions of Africans have been shamefully exploited in the plantations, abused, raped, beaten, sold and resold like cattle, millions of others have found death during the passage of the medium. The history of the triangular trade inhuman was catastrophic to the millions of African slaves who had become non-persons.
philosophers such as Voltaire or Rousseau would have condemned slavery as evidenced by this excerpt, written in 1766 : “The purchase of negroes to reduce them into slavery is a trade that violates the morality, the religion, the natural laws and all the rights of human nature. “Slavery, declared to be” an attack against human dignity “, was abolished officially in France on 27 April 1848. Now, the abolition of slavery is commemorated on the 10th may, a date to be decided by Jacques Chirac in relation to the law which recognized slave trade and slavery ” crime against humanity “, adopted by the Senate on may 10, 2001.
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… whose abolition is now commemorated
associations such as Memories and Sharing of Bordeaux, universities that organize symposia to commemorate the abolition of slavery and deepen the research in this field as that of the Mans, intellectuals of the african diaspora who write on slavery show how great is the need to face History. However, a part of the intellectuals of the african diaspora believe that there is no point dwelling on the past and indulging in a position always of victim, like Fatou Diome who thinks that ” the old song on colonization and slavery became a business “. It is certain that it is necessary to go ahead and confront the evils of today, but it is clear that slavery remains a trauma that is passed down from generation to generation as evidenced by the literature black american of the early Twenty-first century.
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slavery, a strong theme of the literature of the afro-descendant…
The presence of the tragedy of the slave trade in the texts of fiction of novelists such as Marilynne Robinson, Eward P. Jones, Yaa Gyasi, Caryl Philips, Isabel Wilkerson, or Colson Whitehead, the Martinique Fabienne Kanor, is to emphasize. In fact, the books published in this century prove that this young generation of writers is inhabited by the memory of slavery, as the previous generations, like the writings of the slaves themselves, who testified of their experiences as Olaudah Equiano.
Burning of the London News showing a group of slaves in Jamaica in April 1857. © Manuel Cohen / Manuel Cohen via AFP
These novelists black americans, and the French feel a need to tell the Story of their ancestors through their perception and their own words. They are narrating the experiences of their ancestors according to their new visions of the world, they rewrite the tragic experiences of the slaves through their imagination. They feel the need to return to their account what they have retained of the collective memory, and the memory of his family. Marilynne Robinson tells in Gelead the transmission of the memory of slavery and of the struggles for the abolition of slavery, such as the reverend Friends tells it to his son. Edward P. Jones narrates in An unknown world of slavery in the Nineteenth century, the sale of Blacks from one family to another, as it sells a piece of furniture that no one wants more. This new generation does not hesitate to reveal that some Blacks, free and rich bought black slaves, denouncing as well the laundering of the rich Blacks who have integrated the mindset of slavery. They break some taboo subjects.
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… which is not unanimously
The autobiography of Solomon Northup Twelve Years a Slave was brought to the screen in 2013 with a resounding success among young Black americans. La Martiniquaise Fabienne Kanor was published in 2006, his first novel, Humus, which tells a story which took place in 1774, in the present instance the lives of fourteen female slaves, herded in the holds of a slave ship from nantes with the ironic name of Sun. Fabienne Kanor tells of their rebellion and their courage, their strength and their desperation. With sensitivity, Fabienne Kanor, teacher, novelist and actress, is actually inhabited by the stories of her ancestors as I have found in Ouidah at the time of our symposium on the memory of slavery. Its sensitivity reveals that this is not for her, ” a business “, but rather a longing to understand the meaning of his presence in the world.
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similarly to the young Black new yorker, Colson Whitehead took up the torch of the inscription of the memory of his ancestors that he tells with his own sensibility in the Underground Railroad, a novel which was awarded the prize Pullitzer. The story of the young slave Cora is invested by this novelist who has the art of re-creating the tragic life of his ancestors, slaves who were embarked from Ouidah in Benin. Cora decides to break free of his life of a slave in the plantations of Georgia in fleeing to the free States of the North. Colson Whitehead is scathing in his phrasing as “body stolen who worked stolen lands” where he denounces and slavery and the dispossession of Indians of their lands by the Whites, or as those ex-slaves who believed that they were free, but were still ” a herd domesticated “.
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Colson Whitehead denounces the sterilization of the slaves for they are not more numerous than the Whites. Thus, it takes over from Toni Morrison, by the strength of its writing and the way in which it addresses the memory of the slave trade, to move forward in an America that is receding. The history of slaves remains a trauma passed, the traces of which are still alive, unfortunately. The number of novels published on this topic in the beginning of the Twenty-first century proves it.
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* university Professor of african literature colonial and postcolonial.
writing will advise you
Quai Branly, this museum that Jacques Chirac has left for the diversity of cultures of Rokhaya Diallo : “there is a form of social tolerance for racism” Workshops of the thought of Dakar : to capture a humanity scorned How the abolition of slavery has legitimized the forced labour in Ghana : this the “Year of return” which gives a boost to the tourism Docu tv Arte : “Décolonisations “, dip in a past not simple
