World remembers slave trade and its abolition

Between the nights of August 22 and August 23, 1791, a remarkable chain of events took place in the then French colony of Saint Domingue on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which today is divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, that signalled the beginning of the first slave rebellion of modern times.

The suffering of tens of thousands of slaves working on the island's sugar plantations came back to haunt their white "masters" in all its brutality.

Incited by their leader Dutty Boukman, a maroon (runaway slave) and voodoo priest, the slaves gave vent to their fury in an unimaginable orgy of bloodletting.

Voodoo ritual

Sealed by a voodoo ceremony, the uprising began with slaves swarming through the fields, slaughtering every single white person they encountered, regardless of whether they were men, women or children.

The leaders of the slave gangs carried a wooden spear with the skeleton of an impaled white baby on its top.

During the course of a week-long rampage, they killed more than 2,000 whites and set fire to some 300 sugar plantations, burning entire fields and thus destroying the very economic basis of the island's monocultural farming industry. Sure enough there was a backlash. White colonists trained their guns on the slaves, leaving more than 10,000 dead.

August 23 is the date chosen by the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation (Unesco) as the International Day for the Remembrance of Slave Trade and its Abolition.

It is celebrated in several countries that had been involved in slave trade during certain eras of their history, notably in the Caribbean and in West Africa.

"The uprising in 1791 shook the slave system radically and irreversibly and provided the impetus for the process which would eventually lead to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade", says Unesco's General Secretary Koichiro Matsuura.

For Watson Dennis, political advisor at the Secretariat of the Association of Caribbean States, the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue "sounded the bell heralding the end of slavery and the slave trade". According to him, "the immediate and long-term repercussions of the slave rebellion of 1791 have made August 23 an unforgettable date in history".

However, slave trade did not fold up so soon. The Saint Domingue rebellion was followed by others on the Caribbean islands, in southern USA and in South America, the "Great Revolt" in Bahia, Brazil, in 1835 being the biggest and, the last.

Among European slave-trading countries, Denmark was the first nation to abolish the practice in 1792, followed by Britain in 1807, the Netherlands and France in 1815, and Portugal in 1830. In the United States, a law prohibiting the import of slaves came into effect in 1808. Brazil was among the last countries to abolish slavery in 1888.

It is estimated by historical surveys based on database research and other studies that during more than 400 years of slave trade, 10 to 12 million slaves from Western and Central Africa were shipped via the Atlantic Ocean and sold on slave markets in the New World.

The death toll accredited to the whole procurement process is believed to be significantly higher than the number of Africans actually enslaved, says US historian David Stannard.

Though not entirely verifiable, it is estimated that between 16 and 20 million African slaves never reached their destination due to inhuman conditions on board the slave ships. Diseases and sheer exhaustion killed a great many before the horror of the rebellions made the world take notice.