International Slavery Museum

No. It’s not in the South. No it’s not in West Africa. It’s in Liverpool, UK.

National Museums Liverpool (NML) opens the International Slavery Museum on Slavery Remembrance Day, August 23 2007, with an ambitious mission to use the museum to explore not just the abolition of slavery but also wider issues around racism through history.

The new museum replaces the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery, which opened in 1994. The new museum goes further, according to Richard Benjamin, Director of the International Slavery Museum.

“This new museum is very much a statement, it’s more contemporary, more challenging, something living and breathing, rather than something historically-based.”

August 23 was chosen by UNESCO as International Slavery Day to commemorate the uprising by enslaved Africans on the island of St Domingo in 1791. The uprising took place in what is now modern Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The date was chosen as a reminder that enslaved Africans were the main agents of their own liberation.

The State Of . . . history. The museum has selections from well-known names like Tutu, Mandela, and Toni Morrison. It also focuses on those you may not have heard of. 18th century writer Olaudah Equinao, who chronicled his life as a slave. He writes
“The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. . . This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.”