Nantes confronts its past with memorial to the Atlantic Slave Trade

Africanews (in English)

Nantes confronts its past with memorial to the Atlantic Slave Trade  Nantes, once France's largest slave-trading port, now honours its history with a powerful memorial to the transatlantic slave trade  READ MORE : http://www.africanews.com/2025/02/23/nantes-confronts-its-past-with-memorial-to-the-atlantic-slave-trade  Subscribe on our Dailymotion channel and receive all the latest news from the continent.    Africanews is available in English and French.  Website : www.africanews.com  Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/africanews.channel/  Twitter : https://twitter.com/africanews

Transcript

00:00Nantes, a city that prospered from maritime trade, but for more than a century it was

00:06also France's largest slave trading port. Today the city is acknowledging this with

00:11one of Europe's most significant memorials to the transatlantic slave trade.

00:18When you come to this place you face two southern boards on the ground floor which are coming

00:22to relate you a part of history through the vessels' names and of course the counters

00:28which are all represented here and you've got there more than 1,700 boats' names represented

00:35so that faces you with the big investment of the port of Nantes and the traders and

00:41ship owners into the slave trade in the 18th century.

00:47Inside exhibits include plantation registers, shipping logs and paintings that document

00:53the forced movement of people across continents.

01:01We are here in a room within the Nantes History Museum dedicated to the Atlantic slave trade

01:06and colonial slavery. Particularly in this room we are describing a journey of a Nantes

01:11slave ship since Nantes was in the 18th century the leading French city specialised in the

01:16Atlantic slave trade and in the deportation of slaves from Africa to America. It was the

01:21fourth largest slave trading city in Europe. More than 500,000 enslaved people were deported

01:26by Nantes ships during the 18th century.

01:33The memorial to the abolition of slavery stretches along the banks of the Loire, its design blending

01:38into the landscape. Set into the ground are more than 2,000 glass inserts.

01:43The first object of memory was a statue in 1998 and the statue which came to celebrate

01:51the 150 years of the abolition of slavery in France was completely pulled down the first

01:57night it was set on the quay. So when you think that memory is easy, is an easy subject

02:02to deal with today, in France it's a big subject for many cities to say do we keep the names

02:09of the ship merchants on the street names, on the street lanes.

02:13The memorial stands as a reminder of the ongoing fight against slavery in all its forms.

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