Olaudah Equiano, once enslaved and later a writer, bears witness:“ Today I am a free man, and I will never forget that my freedom was won at the price of unspeakable suffering.” Nearby, the voice of Toussaint Louverture, captured and imprisoned, still prophesies:“ In overthrowing me, you have only cut down the trunk of the tree of Black liberty in Saint- Domingue. It will grow again from the roots, for they are deep and numerous.” Then come the words of Victor Schoelcher—“ Slavery is a violent and permanent negation of humanity”— followed by those of Martin Luther King, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and Nelson Mandela. Each, in their own way, anchors memory in the present and reminds us that dignity is never a given right but a perpetual act of struggle.
This procession of voices functions as both a ritual and a call. It is not only about remembrance but about recognising that memory itself is action.
For the Memorial does not close upon the past; it opens onto the urgencies of the present. Far from being a mausoleum, it confronts us with the intolerable
persistence of slavery in new forms. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, more than fifty million people worldwide still live under the yoke of forced labour, sexual exploitation, forced marriage or human trafficking. Women, children, and the most vulnerable continue to bear the cost of an unequal world.
What the Memorial tells us— silently yet with profound force— is that the memory of the slave trade is not a page turned, but a light cast upon contemporary realities we would rather ignore. It is not about guilt but about responsibility: to act, to prevent repetition, and to name the new chains, even if they are no longer made of iron.
Because it links past and present, the personal and the universal, the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery is not merely a place of remembrance. It is a mirror held up to our age, a threshold towards ethical engagement. It reminds us that forgetting is complicity— and that only an active, living, and shared memory can prevent the return of the worst. Freedom, that fragile conquest, must always be defended, reclaimed, and passed on.
4. Memorial to the abolition of slavery, Nantes( Loire-Atlantique) © PHILIPPE PIRON / LVAN
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