BLACK HISTORY SEASON 2008

THEME

AFRICAN RENAISSANCE

"I HAVE A DREAM"

TO JOIN THE BLACK HISTORY SEASON CONSORTIUM AND HAVE A SAY IN THE SEASON AND MORE CALL THE NUMBER BELOW

If you have an event for Black History Season 2008

and you would like to have it published in the official BHS brochure please call (0116) 2616881 or email lacaf_c@hotmail.com  for an application form

BICENTENARY 2007

The Bicentenary of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade Act

25 March 2007 marked 200 years – to the day – that a Parliamentary Bill was passed to abolish the transatlantic slave trade in the then British Empire. 1807 was the beginning of the long road to the eventual abolition of African Slavery itself within the British Empire via the Act of 1833. Even then, Africans did not gain their final freedom until 1838.

The act of abolition document was drafted at Rothley Court, Mount-sorrel Leicestershire and enacted in 1807.  Although this act of abolition was passed through parliament it was not the ultimate deed that brought an end to the catastrophic episode known as the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade.

• The Acts of rebellion and resistance on the slave plantations through-out the Caribbean and the Americas which made the system unsustainable,
• The Haitian revolution in 1879 acted a catalyst in urging the plantation owners and the politicians in Europe and Americas to re-define their relationships with their chattels,
• While the activities of African personalities such as Harriet Tubman, Sourjourner Truth, Olaudah Equiano, also contributed enormously to the liberation and emancipation of the captive slaves.
• The roles of non-Africans in the fight to put an end to the Slave Trade Act following 1807.

Wolde Selassie 2007

BHSC CHAIR LEICESTER

Useful Links

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/Collections/OnlineResources/RWWC/Themes/1078

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/church_and_slavery_article_06.shtml

http://www2.le.ac.uk/ebulletin/news/press-releases/2000-2009/2007/01/nparticle.2007-01-24.59764263

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article1441068.ece

http://www.guyanajournal.com/ethno-politics.html

http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/snapshots/snapshot27/snapshot27.htm

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/374.html

http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/

EQUIANO, THE AFRICAN: Biography of a Self-made Man

Definitive biography tells the story of the former slave Olaudah Equiano (1745?-97), who in his day was the English-speaking world's most renowned person of African descent. Equiano's greatest legacy is his classic 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. A key document of the early movement to ban the slave trade, it includes the earliest known firsthand description by a slave of the horrific Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas. Filled with fresh revelations about this many-sided figure - most notably that Equiano may have been born not in Africa, as he claimed, but in South Carolina, that Equiano may have fabricated his African roots and his survival of the Middle Passage not only to sell more copies of his book but also to help advance the movement against the slave trade. Index, bib, 400pp, USA. UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS.

ROUGH CROSSINGS: Britain, The Slaves and The American Revolution
Schama, Simon

Now in paperback. Set against the backdrop of the American Revolution and its aftermath, this is the epic of the struggle for freedom by tens of thousands of slaves who believed that their future as free men and women was bound up with staying British, not becoming American. Follows the odyssey of the escaped blacks into the fires of the war, the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, and into inhospitable Nova Scotia where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed in their promises to receive land. Index, bib, notes, col & b/w illus, 500pp, UK. BBC.  2006 2005 0563493658 Paperback

A NARRATIVE OF EVENTS, SINCE THE 1st AUGUST 1834

Williams, James & Paton, Diana

An Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica. This book brings back into print, for the first time since the 1830s, a text that was central to the transatlantic campaign to fully abolish slavery in Britain's colonies. James Williams, an eighteen-year-old 'apprentice' (former slave) came to Britain in 1837 at the instigation of the abolitionist Joseph Sturge. The Narrative he produced there, one of very few autobiographical texts by Caribbean slaves or former slaves, became one of the most powerful abolitionist tools for effecting the immediate end to the system of apprenticeship that had replaced slavery. Illus., figs, bib, index. lxiii, 141pp. USA. DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 0822326477  2001 paperback