TORONTO, Canada -- Canada’s Haitian-born governor general, Michaelle Jean, continued her tour of the African continent yesterday, urging countries there to follow Ghana’s example and apologize for their role in the slave trade.
Jean, addressing a state dinner in Ghana, said Africans must also acknowledge the role their own forefathers played in the Middle Passage and in selling Africans into slavery, Canadian Press reports indicate.
Her comments came days after British Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s, written apology in the New Nation newspaper and as the world gears up to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in March.
Jean argued that an apology from Africa as well would help to turn the page on the shameful chapter in history. "The time has come to recapture that moment of African history in order to move ahead together," the Governor General was quoted as saying. "As it looks to the future, Ghana has shown that it is willing to confront the past."
She also lauded Ghana’s government for its decision to apologize for its part as a major hub for the slave trade.
Meanwhile, Jean is set to visit Elmina Castle today and walk through its ‘Door of No Return,’ the renowned spot where captured Africans were chained and horded down to the waiting boats, where they were crammed into the dark, dank belly of ships bounds for the Americas.
"I will think of the millions of people packed tightly in rickety ships bound for unknown lands. Faraway lands where they were deprived of their memories, of their languages, of their heritage, of their dignity and, most of all, of their freedom," Jean said of her visit tomorrow according to CP. "I will stand and pray for those who never completed the journey and whose bodies were thrown out to the ocean.As I will stand there and reconnect with the land of my ancestors, I will salute your openness and I will accept your apology."
Jean wraps up her visit to first official state visit to Africa on December 11. She has already visited Mali and Algeria. In Algeria, Jean also touched on slavery, stating, “My ancestors were torn from their lives. (They were) stripped of themselves, of their language, their name, their memory, their history, of their basic dignity as women and men, and were reduced to slavery and deported to the Americas. . . . This trip is especially meaningful and emotional for me. And I am delighted that my first state visits have brought me to this continent - to which I feel forever bound by history, by heart and by blood."
Jean’s slavery apology call came on the same day CARICOM nations introduced a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly calling for the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.
The resolution calls for the 25th of March 2007 to be set aside on the international calendar as the day for the commemoration of the British Act of Parliament that officially ended the trade that resulted in millions of Africans being sold in bondage and shipped across the Atlantic to a life of brutal enslavement in the Americas.
The passing of the Act 200 years ago paved the way for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.
