The UNESCO Courier - Volume 2024, Issue 3, 2024

Long reduced to silence, the memory of the African slave trade began to emerge in the aftermath of the Second World War. Although it is now being recognized symbolically through memorial laws and national and international commemorations, its effects continue to be keenly felt. This can be seen in the manifestations of discrimination and racism that still affect Afro-descendants.

The violence inflicted in the context of slavery has left deep and multiple scars throughout the region. More and more voices are calling for reparation, including financial compensation.

Women constituted the demographic majority on colonial plantations from the 18th century onward. The slavery enterprise relied heavily on the labour and fertility of enslaved black women. Yet their place in historical research has long been marginal.

In Bow’t, Rhodnie Désir, a choreographer from Quebec, blends traditional dance with contemporary influences to tell the story of expatriated slaves. This intimate solo was enriched and transformed by research into the rhythmic cultures of Afro-descendant people, taking her from Mexico to the United States via Haiti and Brazil.

A symbol of the tragedy engendered by the transatlantic slave trade, the Senegalese island of Gorée has become a flagship destination for memorial tourism, attracting tens of thousands of visitors every year, including many Afro-descendants from abroad.

Created by enslaved people fleeing forced labour or by black communities after the abolition of slavery, quilombos remain spaces of memory and resistance. But many are now threatened by real estate projects.

In the early 1960s, Cuban writer and ethnologist Miguel Barnet collected the testimony of 104-year-old Afro-descendant Esteban Montejo. The hugely influential account he drew up is a unique document on the condition of captives and the violence of the slavery system.

Who said skateboarding was a man’s sport, performed in jeans and a hoodie? Certainly not the women skaters of the ImillaSkate collective, who recklessly careen down the slopes of Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-largest city. Since the group was founded in 2019, they have chosen to practice the sport wearing polleras, voluminous traditional skirts. Introduced during the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, the skirt eventually became an integral part of the identity of the cholitas, indigenous women of the Andean highlands.

Transport congestion, skyrocketing property prices, ecosystem degradation: excessive visitor numbers are taking a heavy toll on local residents. From Barcelona to Venice, Kyoto to Bali, authorities are beginning to take steps to stem the flow of visitors without drying up this major source of revenue. A difficult balance to strike.

Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the Caribbean’s leading writers, has published numerous essays and novels, including Texaco, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1992. This native of Martinique (France), heir to Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant, also helped forge the concept of créolité, which places the Creole language at the heart of a project for emancipation and reflection on the cross-fertilization of cultures. Reminding us that no hierarchy exists between languages, he invites us to free ourselves from an inevitably sclerotic monolingual imaginary.

On 15 April, UNESCO Headquarters hosted the second UNESCO Courier Forum, where two panels of international experts discussed the historical impact of cultural exchanges along the Silk Roads, and intercultural dialogue and mutual learning in the contemporary world.