AFRICA-FRANCE: UNESCO Launches 10-Year Study of African Slave Trade

PARIS, Nov 12 (IPS) - UNESCO officials say their new project to study the African slave trade is the first rigorous, multi- disciplinary assessment of the economic and cultural impact of that trade on all the continents involved.

"There has never been a definitive study of this central question in human history," said Doudou Diene, UNESCO's director of intercultural projects.

"It was received with great enthusiasm at the 1993 UNESCO general conference.

"We want studies of the why and how. It has never been done in a scientifically objective way and without recriminations." Demands for financial reparations will not be raised, he said, although parallels with the holocaust will be drawn.

The 10-year programme brings together historians, economists, artists and others to examine as broadly as possible the effects of the slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean, with some attention to that across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean.

The United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organisation (UNESCO) project links efforts already underway in Mexico, Senegal, France, Britain and other locales, help open and preserve existing archives and prepare teaching materials.

M.L. Sedat Jobe, project officer for the Slave Trade, said Friday that UNESCO will also help restore important cultural sites such as slave trade centres and memorials - "places of memory and of cultural tourism".

Some European cities, such as Liverpool in Britain, and Nantes and Bordeaux in France, that had long underplayed their roles in the slave trade have begun to commemorate it through exhibitions and instruction.

The UNESCO project scientific committee has decided to emphasise the Atlantic slave trade and plans, among numerous goals, to promote research on oral history, to inventory photographs for possible exhibition and to establish a telecommunications network among researchers.

Pascal Blanchard of the French Association for Knowledge of Contemporary African History is among historians who question the need to commit international funds and bureaucracies to such a task.

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