About the bicentenary

25 March 2007 will mark 200 years - to the day - that a Parliamentary Bill was passed to abolish the slave trade in the then British Empire. 1807 was the beginning of the long road to the eventual abolition of slavery itself within the empire via the Act of 1833. Even then, slaves did not gain their final freedom until 1838.

A number of initiatives and events will mark the bicentenary. These programmes will raise awareness of the slave trade, its effects, and the existence of servitude even now.

Events and initiatives
Minister for Culture, David Lammy, and Minister for Race Equality, Paul Goggins, have published a joint pamphlet that underlines the Government's commitment to the bicentenary:

"Reflecting on the past and looking to the future: The 2007 Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire"
The pamphlet has been sent to a wide range of cultural organisations and community groups around the UK.


More: http://www.culture.gov.uk/about_dcms...entenary.htm#1

So what?

**shakes head**

Actually I think their actions is huegly important for two reasons, once again if unchallenged the view will be put that we ought to grateful to massa for setting us free... When in fact it was our own efforts that forced their hand in the first place..

Second personally it will be a good opportunity to see what members of the Coconut class, actually stand up and support this nonsense....Name & Shame I say!!!

Kunjufu wrote:
Like Kunjufu, I also think 2007's planned activities are important. Chattel slavery didn't end solely by the acts of white do-gooders,the British Government suddenly seeing us as humans or the heroic decisions of racists like Abraham Lincoln.

Africans, we, made slavery untenable.

We have a continuous history of resistance and a will to self determine.

Our history in Diaspora has always been about our story versus HIS Story; one will versus the other.

The fact that the British state have chosen to recognise the abolishment of their official kidnapping and murder of millions of our people is not going to be about resurrecting that phenomenon as an Africanholocaust; precursor to the increased degradation of the African and Africa.

Remember, these people are still yet to apologise for their role in our holocaust; yet they plan next year to show the world how "just" they are by recognising their parliament's historic role in our "liberation".

Remember, too many Africans view their reality from ideas these people have propagated and continue to spin into our lives.

Our people have always had answers to their attacks on our humanity.

Oh here we go again, every year they need to find a new way to pat themselves on the back.

The 2007 Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire"

blkthumbsdownblkthumbsdownblkthumbsdownblkthumbsdo wn

"Three recent books – Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis – show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise – some of them violently – against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps(3). Most of the remainder – over a million – were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes."(4) British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket"(5). The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black"(6). Elkins’s evidence suggests that over 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed by the British or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria(7). Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged."

(Source: How Britain Denies its Holocausts, The Guardian, 27 December 2005)

Celebrate that.


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One of the Members of the British Government's Organising Committee To "Celebrate" The "Abolition" of Slavery[/align]

And in America...................................



A New Coalition for the 2007 Celebration of the 200th Anniversary Of the Abolition of the U.S. and British Slave Trade: WilberforceCentral.org

New York, NY - May 3, 2006 - Nine organizations today announce the launch of a unique coalition, Wilberforce Central (www.wilberforcecentral.org), which in 2007 will sponsor and promote events and activities to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the United States and British slave trade, with particular focus on the inspiration and impact that 18th century British parliamentarian William Wilberforce brought to that historic accomplishment.

Very few Americans are aware that the document to abolish the United States slave trade was signed on March 2, 1807 by President Thomas Jefferson, the same month as the Royal Assent was given to the abolition of the British slave trade, explained Wilberforce Central convener Chuck Stetson.

WilberforceCentral.org is formed to introduce the media and the American public to the numerous events surrounding the 200th Anniversary of both the abolition of the British and U.S. slave trade, which among countless international activities, prominently include:

• The 2007 international release of the Walden Media major motion picture, "Amazing Grace."
• The proposed "Concert of Benevolence" at Westminster Abbey, organized by Walden Media for early 2007.
• A new book and documentary by The Wilberforce Project about the abolition of the British and U.S. slave trade and the little known role of William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and the Clapham Group in putting an end to the slave trade, and how their stories relate to the unfinished business of modern forms of slavery today.

More: http://www.wilberforcecentral.org/wfc/Press/index.htm

How can they have an official ceremony to mark an act that was not in their power to instigate in the first place? Since when did they have the power to set Africans free when Africans were not theirs to enslave in the first place.

Now if they want to mark the commencement of the biggest and most barbaric crime in the history of human kind. If they wish to mark, (lest the world forgets)the evilness of the acts they perpetrated against the AfricanNation............yeah that's fine by me.

MARK AND SET IN STONETHEIR EVILNESS!

NOT

SOME SO-CALLED ACT OF GOODNESS ON THEIR PART

Kiss teet.....Mark their act of setting me FREE? And I am supposed to seethat as a stout and commendable deed?............GTFOH!



Respect

... also in America: http://www.ncobra.org/


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The implications of leaving history and its remembrance to others?

The Europeans will remember and makestate policy,that they "granted" us freedom, highlighting their own "great efforts"- but Africans who liberate themselves are alwayshated and deemed extremistsby these nations.

From Toussaint to Malcolm.

So lets remember some of our ancestors............





Among these large bodies, the little community of Haiti, anchored in the Caribbean Sea, has had her mission in the world, and a mission which the world had much need to learn. She has taught the world the danger of slavery and the value of liberty. In this respect she has been the greatest of all our modern teachers. — Hon. Frederick Douglass, former US Minister to Haiti *Lecture on Haiti* (Jan. 2, 1893) (Quinn Chapel, Chi.)

It was a sweaty, steaming night in August, when a group of African captives gathered in the forests of Marne Rouge, in Le Cap, San Domingue. It was August, 1791.

Among these men was a Voodoo priest, Papaloi Boukman, who preached to his brethren about the need for revolution against the cruel slavedrivers and torturers who made the lives of the African captives a living hell. His words, spoken in the common tongue of Creole, would echo down the annals of history, and cannot fail but move us today, 213 years later:

The god who created the sun which gives us light, who rouses the waves and rules the storm, though hidden in the clouds, he watches us. He sees all that the white man does. The god of the white man inspires him with crime, but our god calls upon us to do good works. Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and listen to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all.

The Rebellion of August 1791 would eventually ripen into the full-fledged Haitian Revolution, lead to the liberation of the African Haitian people, to the establishment of the Haiti Republic, and the end of the dreams of Napoleon for a French- American Empire in the West.

Two centuries before the Revolution, when the island was called Santo Domingo by the Spanish Empire, historian Antonio de Herrera would say of the place, "There is so many Negroes in this island, as a result of the sugar factories, that the land seems an effigy or an image of Ethiopia itself." [From Paul Farmer, *The Uses of Haiti* (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1994), p. 61]. Haiti was the principal source of wealth for the French bourgeoisie. In the decade before the Boukman Rebellion, an estimated 29,000 African captives were imported to the island annually.

Conditions were so brutal, and the work was so backbreaking, that the average African survived only 7 years in the horrific sugar factories.

In 1804, Haiti declared Independence, after defeating what was the most powerful army of the day: the Grand Army of France.

Haiti's Founding Father, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, at the Haitian Declaration of Independence, proclaimed, "I have given the French cannibals blood for blood. I have avenged America."

With their liberation, Haitians changed history, for among their accomplishments:

a) It was the first independent nation in Latin America;
b) It became the second independent nation in the Western hemisphere;
c) It was the first Black republic in the modern world;
d) It was the *only*incidence in world history of an enslaved people breaking their chains and defeating a powerful colonial force using military might.
What did 'Independence' bring? It brought the enmity, and anger of the Americans, who refused to recognize their sou