Remembering the Slave Trade, Honouring Resistance

Today, on the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, we pause to remember one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity. The transatlantic slave trade uprooted millions, scattering them across the Atlantic through systems of violence that treated human beings as property, as cargo, as disposable. Yet even in the darkest of conditions, resistance endured.

Remembrance is not simply about mourning the past. It is about recognising the persistence of its legacies today and honouring the acts of survival, rebellion, and creativity that enslaved people carried forward.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, over twelve million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic. Millions more died before even boarding the ships captured in raids, lost on forced marches, or perishing in coastal forts.

The Middle Passage has become a symbol of this horror. Human beings were chained in the holds of ships, packed so tightly that movement was impossible. Disease swept through the vessels, killing many before they reached shore. Dysentery, smallpox, and starvation were rampant. Insurance claims reveal the chilling truth: enslaved Africans were thrown overboard so traders could claim compensation for “lost cargo.”

This was not just an economic system. It was an assault on humanity itself. Sylvia Wynter (2003) reminds us that the modern category of “Man” was constructed by designating others as less than human. The slave trade was one of the primary sites where this division was made material.

And yet, the enslaved were never merely passive victims. Resistance began long before the ships reached the Americas. Some mutinied on board, seizing control of vessels or forcing captains to turn back. Others resisted by refusing food, or by jumping into the sea rather than live in chains.

Everyday acts of survival were also resistance. To sing in one’s own language, to whisper prayers, to keep cultural knowledge alive, to braid seeds into one’s hair before boarding  all of these were ways of refusing total domination.

In Jamaica, resistance took organised form through the Maroons: communities of escaped Africans who built independent settlements in the mountains. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Maroons fought repeated wars against the British, defending their autonomy and forging treaties that recognised their freedom.

The island also saw large-scale uprisings. Tacky’s Rebellion (1760) brought together hundreds of enslaved people, shaking the colony and terrifying planters. Later, the Sam Sharpe Rebellion (1831–32) mobilised as many as 60,000 enslaved Jamaicans. Though brutally suppressed, it played a decisive role in pushing Britain toward abolition.

Across the Americas, uprisings were constant. The most famous remains the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), which created the first Black republic and the only successful state founded by formerly enslaved people. C. L. R. James (1938) argued that Haiti forced Europe to confront its own hypocrisies the so-called universal rights of man were made real only by those who had been denied them.

These examples remind us that abolition was not gifted by benevolent reformers. It was fought for, demanded, and won through the courage and sacrifice of the enslaved themselves.

Slavery’s violence was not only physical; it was also an assault on memory. Names were stripped, kinship ties severed, languages suppressed. To erase the past was to control the future.

Today, erasure continues in different forms. Statues still stand for traders and planters, while the names of the enslaved remain unrecorded. School curriculums often reduce slavery to a footnote, focusing more on white abolitionists than on the enslaved people who resisted.

Hartman (2008) describes slavery’s afterlife: systemic racism, premature death, incarceration, and the ongoing disposability of Black life. Gilroy (1993) shows that the same trade also created the Black Atlantic a diasporic culture of music, thought, and survival that continues to shape the world.

To remember slavery is to confront this tension: it was both an attempt at annihilation and a site of extraordinary creativity and resistance.

The past is not over. Its structures remain.

Mbembe (2003) writes of necropolitics — the power to decide who lives and who dies. Under slavery, Black life was extracted as labour and discarded when no longer profitable. Today, the logic persists in mass incarceration, in migration detention centres, in health inequalities that leave Black communities disproportionately exposed to premature death.

Sharpe (2016) reminds us that we live “in the wake” of slavery. This wake is not a simple shadow of the past but a turbulent sea, constantly shaping how we live and move.

hooks (1989) warns against romanticising resistance. Rebellion was not easy or inevitable; it was costly, brutal, and often met with unimaginable violence. Yet to deny resistance is to deny humanity itself. Remembering means holding both truths together: the horror of domination and the insistence of survival.

What Remembrance Requires

Remembrance must be active. It cannot be reduced to annual rituals or empty words. It asks us to act.

• Educate fully: Teach the history of slavery without euphemism. Go beyond stories of white abolitionists to centre the voices of the enslaved.
• Acknowledge resistance: From Jamaican Maroons to the Haitian Revolution, we must remember that abolition was fought for, not handed down.
• Repair: Reparations matter not only financial but symbolic, through investment in communities, the return of stolen artefacts, and dismantling systems that perpetuate racial injustice.
• Transform: Inclusion without accessibility, or diversity without justice, is not enough. To remember slavery is to work for the abolition of racism, exploitation, and exclusion in all their forms.

To remember is to resist forgetting.

The transatlantic slave trade reshaped the modern world. Its scars remain in our economies, our institutions, our daily lives. But from that violence came resistance, resilience, and visions of freedom that continue to inspire.

When we speak of remembrance, let us not only grieve. Let us also honour the courage of those who fought and let us commit ourselves to finishing their work.

Abolition is not past tense. It is present and future.

#RemembranceDay #NeverForget #SlaveryAbolition #Justice