Date: 30/07/2007
Source: Department of Education
Title: SA: Pandor: Exhibition on abolition of slave trade

Address by the Minister of Education Naledi Pandor at the launch of the bi-centenary exhibition commemorating the abolition of slave trade in 1807, Slave Lodge Museum, Cape Town

Professor Jatti Bredekamp
Chief Executive Officer Iziko Museums
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen

It gives me great pleasure to be here at the Slave Lodge as part of the Department of Education's programme of activities in commemoration of historically significant events.

The Department of Education has encouraged all schools to participate in the commemoration of the significant historical events during 2007 while continuing to observe South Africa's national days and important international days.

One of the significant anniversaries that we are commemorating this year is the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade on 25 March 1807.

We are here to remember the horrors of the African slave trade and to celebrate its demise. It is appropriate to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade here in the Slave Lodge Museum, the place where about 9 000 slaves lived and died between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries.

It is difficult to imagine how this building at any one time held between 500 and 800 men, women and children, including at times indigenous Khoi-San people, prisoners and mentally disturbed.

We need to remember that although the slave trade was formally abolished in 1807 and slavery itself in 1834, slavery did not come to an end with those legal acts of abolition. The buying and selling of slaves continued in many parts of our country well into the twentieth century.

Abolition led to labour shortages on farms and plantations. It led to a various forms of bonded labour, of unfree labour, of indentures, of inboekselings in Afrikaans.

We should never forget that, as a result of slave-trade abolition and the emancipation of slaves, a new labour force was required to replace slave labour throughout the world.

Between 1834 and 1917, 2,5 million Indians and thousands of Chinese were used to replace slave labour in the West Indies, South America, Mauritius, Fiji, here in South Africa, east Africa and the Seychelles.

These labourers were not slaves but indentured labourers, but they were treated in similar ways. And indenture was often not a system of voluntary migrant labour undertaken to escape the poverty of the subcontinent, but a system of enslavement.

In many ways the evil of slavery only began to come to an end with the first democratic elections in 1994 and the enactment of the final South African Constitution in 1996. Until then, forms of slavery continued to manifest themselves through the colonial period, and the twentieth-century periods of segregation and apartheid.

Our Bill of Rights for the first time ensured, in law at least, the principles of freedom, human dignity and equality. However, we should still remember that we have not eradicated human trafficking, the exploitation of farm workers, and the exploitation of child labour. Until we do, we cannot say that slavery has been eradicated from our society.

The Department of Arts and Culture and Iziko Museums is running a Freedom Project not only to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade this year but to raise public awareness of the legacy of the slave trade, building up to the commemoration of the first Cape Slave Rebellion of 1808.

The Iziko Freedom Project is an exciting one, showing how collaboration between various stakeholders can enrich the learning experience of all.

Iziko's collaboration with other museums of the old slave triangle � in Britain, Africa, and the Caribbean and America; its collaboration with higher-education institutions and the national library, as well as the involvement of artists and poets, has enabled it to enrich the experience of all who visit the exhibitions.

The reproduction of the Buxton-Wilberforce table and its prominent display, as well as the Memory Centre exhibitions, including the Memory Wall and Map of Origins, all strengthen the underlying message of the consequences of the abuse of human rights.

We need to remember that the popular notion that most Cape slaves were imported from the East is untrue. The slave trade to the Cape started in West Africa, turned east after 1706, and finally became re-Africanised after 1780.

The 63 000 slaves imported to the Cape between 1652 and 1808 were diverse in origins to a degree unparalleled in any other recorded slave population anywhere in the world. A slim majority of slaves imported to the Cape were African. The exhibitions put faces and names to slavery at the Cape; they humanise the real suffering of people so often simply referred to as numbers.

It is our responsibility in the Department of Education to enrich the learning experience of our children and to stimulate public interest in order to create learning opportunities. And this is what this exhibition helps us to do.

Iziko Museums has shown how to take the difficult themes of the historical experience of slavery to exciting levels of public engagement. The posters on display bear testimony to these efforts at this historical site. Iziko is to be congratulated on the institution's education outreach programme, specifically targeting learners and educators. Visits to the Museum, and in particular, the Slave Lodge and workshops, are designed to strengthen visitors' understanding of slavery.

In closing, it is probably fair to say that apart from the Second World War more has been written about the Atlantic slave trade than any other historical subject. That enormous interest is a sign of its importance in shaping world history, but it is also a sign of its contemporary resonance.

The hurt inflicted by the Atlantic slave trade is still deeply felt today, deeply felt because slavery was justified by a collective European belief in African "inferiority".

It is important our children learn about that hurt and learn to understand the way it shapes our culture and society today. Remember also that slave-owners were compensated for the loss of their slaves. In 1833 the British government awarded slave-owners �20 million; a huge amount of money in contemporary terms. Slaves themselves were never compensated for the loss of their liberty and the loss of their human dignity.

So as Barney Mthombothi, Financial Mail editor wrote recently, with reference to the prosecutions of apartheid crimes, a period much closer to us in time than slavery:

"The past keeps coming back to haunt its victims because the wounds have not healed. And they will not, until there is a genuine acknowledgement of the hurt caused."

I thank you.

Issued by: Department of Education
30 July 2007