The Slave Route

At the proposal of Haiti and some African countries, the General Conference of UNESCO approved at its 27th Session in 1993 the implementation of the "Slave Route" Project (Resolution 27 C/3.13).

Supported by the African Union Organization during its 56th ordinary session in Dakar, the project was officially launched at the First Session of the International Scientific Committee of the Slave Route from 6 to 8 September 1994 in Ouidah (Benin), one of the former pivots of the slave trade in the Gulf of Guinea. The official documents of Ouidah were brought out in book form by UNESCO Publishing in 1998 under the title "From Chains to Bonds: the Slave Trade Revisited".

The idea of a "Route" expresses the dynamics of the movement of peoples, civilizations and cultures, while that of "slave" addresses not only the universal phenomenon of slavery, but also in a more precise and explicit way the transatlantic slave trade in the Atlantic, and slave trade the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.

The project has three major objectives:

to break the silence surrounding the slave trade and slavery through the historical study of the causes and dynamics of the transatlantic slave trade

the clarification of the consequences and interactions resulting from the slave trade

to contribute to the establishment of a culture of tolerance and peaceful coexistence between races and peoples.

Link

The Slave Route page on the website of UNESCO.

Stamp catalogue

Benin 1994

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last revised: 10 February 2008