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Articles de cette rubrique

. L'esclavage et la traite dans les programmes et manuels scolaires (fiches synthèses)
. Ecole primaire, Cycle 3
. Ecole primaire, Cycle 3 - points forts
. Ecole primaire, Cycle 3 - Le XIXè siècle
. Collège : Histoire, Niveau 4e - les XVII° et XVIII° siècles
. Collège : Histoire, Niveau 4e - Période révolutionnaire
. Collège : Education civique, niveau 4° - Les libertés et les droits
. Collège : Education civique, niveau 4° - Chronologie
. Lycée, classe de seconde
. Lycée, classe de seconde - Programme
. Lycée, classe de seconde - Commentaire
. Lycée, classe de seconde - Commentaire 2

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L'esclavage et la traite dans les programmes et manuels scolaires (fiches synthèses) . Ecole primaire, Cycle 3 . Ecole primaire, Cycle 3 - points forts . Ecole primaire, Cycle 3 - Le XIXè siècle . Collège : Histoire, Niveau 4e - les XVII° et XVIII° siècles .

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Plusieurs chercheurs affirment qu'au moins 12,5 millions d'esclaves africains ont abordé les côtes américaines à l'époque de la traite négrière. Quelle est l'ampleur de la dévastation causée par l'esclavage à l'échelle planétaire ? Avec l'aide de la spécialiste de l'histoire africaine Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, nous allons aussi faire un point sur les dernières recherches.

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En 1761, l'Utile, un navire français, s'échoue sur l'île Tromelin, à 500 km des côtes de Madagascar et de celles de la Réunion. A bord se trouvent quelque 160 esclaves malgaches, dont la moitié se noie. L'équipage repart, abandonnant les captifs sur l'îlot désert. Une exposition au musée de l'Homme raconte leur extraordinaire histoire, reconstituée notamment grâce à l'archéologie.

Vue aérienne de l'île française de Tromelin dans l'océan Indien, l'"île des esclaves oubliés". Photo prise le 16 avril 2013. (RICHARD BOUHET / AFP)

A cette époque, la France et l'Angleterre se combattent au cours de la "guerre de Sept Ans". Une sorte de conflit mondial avant l'heure.

La frégate Utile a été envoyée à Madagascar pour ravitailler les colonies. Dans la zone de l'île de France (aujourd'hui île Maurice), le gouverneur de cette dernière a provisoirement interdit la traite des Noirs. Mais ce trafic rapportant des sommes considérables, des marins se mettent à leur compte. Le capitaine du navire, Jean de Lafargue, a embarqué clandestinement 160 esclaves malgaches. Il a choisi de les vendre discrètement sur une autre île. Ce qui l'oblige à modifier sa route.

Dépourvu de cartes fiables et contre l'avis de son pilote, Jean de Lafargue
navigue la nuit. L' Utile fait alors naufrage à proximité de Tromelin. La moitié des esclaves se noient, ainsi que 18 marins. Les 210 rescapés gagnent l'île, qu'on appelle alors l'île des Sables.

Les survivants s'organisent. Un puits est creusé. Une embarcation est construite avec les débris de l'épave et grâce aux "secours que nous avons tirés depuis le premier moment jusqu'au dernier, de ces malheureux esclaves", écrira par la suite le premier lieutenant, Barthélémy Castellan du Vernet. Mais seuls les Français repartent. Ils promettent de revenir chercher les captifs, que "nous avons été obligés (d') abandonner", faute de place, dixit le premier lieutenant.

"Les Noirs qu'on était forcés de laisser dans l'île, demeurèrent dans un silence accablant au moment du départ. Mais quel parti prendre dans une pareille extrémité? Ce fut de laisser les vivres aux malheureux Noirs en leur promettant de les envoyer chercher", peut-on lire aujourd'hui dans un document de littérature populaire consacré à ce drame...

Ancre émergée du navire l'Utile, qui a coulé près de l'île de Tromelin en 1761. Depuis le naufrage, elle reste là, plantée dans le corail... (Groupe de recherche en archéologie navale, GRAN)

Quand l'archéologie prend le relais

C'est là le début d'une autre histoire. 80 esclaves sont laissés à leur triste sort : ils resteront 15 ans bloqués sur l'île et oubliés de tous. Sauf, apparemment, de Barthélémy Castellan du Vernet, qui aurait tenté de prévenir les autorités, dont le ministre de la Marine. C'est seulement en 1776 qu'une corvette commandée par Jacques Marie de Tromelin vient les secourir. Seuls sept femmes et un bébé de huit mois ont survécu.

Sur la vie menée par les esclaves restés à Tromelin, île dépourvue d'arbres, les archives écrites françaises, très dissertes sur le reste, sont évidemment muettes. "Le relais a été pris par l'archéologie", souligne Thomas Romon, co-commissaire de l'exposition et archéologue à l'Inrap. De 2006 à 2013, quatre missions de fouilles, à la fois terrestres et sous-marines, ont ainsi été menées sur la petite île coralienne (qui accueille depuis 1954 une station météo). "Nous avons pu ainsi étudier la façon dont les esclaves se sont comportés pour survivre dans cet espace clos de 1 km2. C'est un véritable petit laboratoire!", précise l'archéologue.

Pour les fouilleurs, ce fut une expérience unique. "Nous étions isolés du monde pour mener nos travaux. Dans le même temps, on ne trouve pas beaucoup d'endroits dans le monde avec ce genre de vestiges", explique Thomas Romon. "Une fois qu'on enlève les couches de sable, on a un peu une photo de Tromelin au moment où les derniers esclaves présents ont été secourus. Nous avons ainsi retrouvé, dans ce qui était la cuisine, la vaisselle parfaitement rangée!", ajoute le scientifique.

Tortue sur une plage de Tromelin, comme celles dont se nourrissaient les esclaves abandonnés sur l'île. (Groupe de recherche en archéologie navale, GRAN)

Récupération et alimentation

L'exposition présente certains des objets utilisés par les infortunés habitants. Objets parfois récupérés sur le navire. Tels des éléments de porte transformés en haches ou des gonds de sabord (ouverture pour les canons dans le flanc des navires) devenus des marteaux.

Les esclaves ont aussi récupéré les métaux de l' Utile, qu'ils ont façonnés et fondus. On peut ainsi voir une bassine en plomb réparée à... sept reprises, preuve qu'il fallait faire durer ce bien précieux. Des cuillères ont été découpées dans des plaques de cuivre avec un ciseau, travaillées avec un marteau, puis fixées à un manche en bois ou en cuivre. Rare objet issu des ressources naturelles de l'île, un coquillage évidé semblait servir de louche.

Sorte de bassine métallique retrouvée sur l'île de Tromelin. Cet objet servait peut-être à conserver l'eau de pluie ou celle recueillie au puits creusé juste après le naufrage de l'Utile. Trouvé par les archéologues devant l'ouverture d'un bâtiment, il semble correspondre à une tradition malgache consistant à placer une cruche d'eau à l'entrée des habitations. (J. Kuyten)

Les fouilles ont aussi permis d'apprendre comment les naufragés se débrouillaient pour leur alimentation. Ils se nourrissaient ainsi d'animaux locaux, tortues, poissons, oiseaux, dont les archéologues ont retrouvé les restes. Les extrémités d'ailes des volatiles étaient apparemment préservées, ce qui laisse penser que les plumes ont pu servir pour des pagnes.

Les aliments étaient cuits. Des feux pouvaient être allumés grâce aux briquets et silex prélevés sur l' Utile. Feux probablement alimentés par les éléments de l'épave, comme semblent le prouver la présence de nombreux fragments de charbon de bois.

Les naufragés se logeaient dans des bâtiments construits avec les minéraux retrouvés sur place : corail et grès. "L'étude de ces bâtiments montre qu'ils ont bravé un interdit religieux malgache réservant la pierre aux tombeaux, preuve qu'ils ont su s'adapter à leur environnement", explique Max Guérout, co-commissaire de l'exposition et ancien officier de marine, qui a contribué à la fondation du Groupe de recherche en archéologie navale ( GRAN). Leurs murs, larges d'un mètre et d'une grande résistance au climat cyclonique, rappellent ceux... des édifices mortuaires de la même époque à Madagascar.

Vue d'ensemble du site archéologique (Jean-François Rebeyrotte)

Cyclones et solidarité

La douzaine de bâtiments était regroupée autour d'une cour centrale. "Cet habitat donne ainsi une image de la solidarité qui soudait le groupe. Il diffère de celui de Madagascar, en général individuel et dispersé. De plus, il est orienté par rapport aux vents dominants de Tromelin alors que dans leur région d'origine, les habitations sont construites en fonction des points cardinaux. Ce qui prouve, une nouvelle fois, que les esclaves ont su s'adapter à leur environnement pour survivre", poursuit Max Guérout.

Mais ceux-ci ont su aller au-delà de la simple survie. "Ils ont su s'organiser et recréer une société", commente Thomas Romon.

Objets ornementaux, dont un bracelet, présentés dans l'exposition "Tromelin, l'île des esclaves oubliés" au musée de l'Homme à Paris. (GEORGES GOBET / AFP)

Une société dont les membres se souciaient d'éléments esthétiques. C'est ce que montre, par exemple, les bijoux découverts sur deux squelettes : une petite chaîne et un type de bracelet, originaire du sud-est de Madagascar et appelé vangovango en malgache. Bracelet que l'on trouve encore aujourd'hui sur la Grande Ile.

Illustration figurant dans l'exposition "Tromelin, l'île des esclaves oubliés". Elle est extraite de la bande dessinée éponyme, réalisée par Sylvain Savoia "d'après les recherches menées par Max Guérout (GRAN), Thomas Romon (Inrap) et leur équipe". (© Sylvain Savoia, Collection Aire Libre, Dupuis - Crédit photo © JF Rebeyrotte)

"Tromelin, l'île des esclaves oubliés", exposition au musée de l'Homme (17 Place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre, 75116 Paris), du 13 février au 3 juin 2019. Pour tout autre renseignement, voir le site.

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"Tromelin, l'île des esclaves oubliés" : une exposition au musée de l'Homme à Paris

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En 1761, l'Utile, un navire français, s'échoue sur l'île Tromelin, à 500 km des côtes de Madagascar et de celles de la Réunion. A bord se trouvent quelque 160 esclaves malgaches, dont la moitié se noie. L'équipage repart, abandonnant les captifs sur l'îlot désert.

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Rabat - Four Moroccan agricultural workers in France have filed complaints against their employers for exploiting them.

The Moroccan workers testified yesterday at French labor court, the Conseil de Prud'hommes in Arles, southern France, saying their conditions were close to " slavery."

The workers, three women and one man, who came to France as temporary workers with a Spanish temp agency named Laboral Terra, are demanding a requalification in their employment contract to make it open-ended, known in France and Morocco as "CDI."

The workers, aged 36-48, harvested fruits and vegetables but accused their employers of overworking them. They explained that they do not get paid overtime, paid leave, or compensation for work accidents, a violation of the French labor code.

One of the women plaintiffs told French news outlet France3 that their situation is "no longer temporary work but slavery."

"Many other people were in the same situation but did not dare to speak for fear of being sent back to their countries," she stated.

It is the second time that the same workers have come before the labor court to testify about their situation. They met their employers in trial in October and yesterday, they came to hear the court's decision.

The Spanish temp agency, however, said that the workers' complaints were way out of proportion to the problem.

The situation, albeit not including sexual assault complaints, is reminiscent of the situation of Moroccan seasonal workers in Spain who filed complaints against their employers for sexual assault in May 2018.

The assault complaints made international headlines and prompted Morocco's Ministry of Employment to carry out an investigation on the Spanish farms and take precautions by sending commissions to Spain this year to avoid a repeat of last year's sexual assaults.

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Moroccan Farmworkers Denounce 'Slavery' in France

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Rabat - Four Moroccan agricultural workers in France have filed complaints against their employers for exploiting them. The Moroccan workers testified yesterday at French labor court, the Conseil de Prud'hommes in Arles, southern France, saying their conditions were close to " slavery."

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Filmmakers: Daniel Cattier, Juan Gelas and Fanny Glissant

At the end of the Middle Ages, Europe opened up to the world and discovered that it was at the margins of the world's main area for wealth generation: Africa.

Portuguese explorers were the first to set out to conquer Africa's gold. When explorers reached the coast of West Africa, they saw its people as a supply of labour and the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade was established.

Economic ambition coupled with a religiously driven effort to expand Christendom Pope, Nicholas V morally endorsed the Portuguese enterprise and a legal framework for the enslavement of Africa.

"This was an extremely violent economy of predation," explains Antonio De Almeida Mendes, University of Nantes, France. "The Portuguese would disembark and rush arms in hand to capture the inhabitants of these African coasts, starting with Mauritania and then Senegal, where poor fishermen lived. They were captured with nets."

The Portuguese set up a triangular trading system off the coast of West Africa - between Elmina, Sao Tome and the Kingdom of Kongo.

They traded European goods for slaves in the Kongo and slaves for gold in Elmina. Sao Tome was developed into a sugar plantation. 4,000 Africans were brought to Sao Tome as slaves to work the sugar plantation every year.

It was the start of a system that later expanded across the Atlantic and thrived in the Americas.

The Portuguese were the uncontested masters of the slave trade by 1620. European ships picked up slaves from West Africa, transported them to Brazil and the Caribbean and then returned to Europe with vessels full of produce for sale.

By 1789, 7.7 million Africans were deported to the Americas.

All of Europe joined Portugal to take control of African gold and slaves including Flemish, German, English, Genoese and Venetian merchants.
Episode II Episode I Note: this episode is no longer available for online viewing.

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Filmmakers: Daniel Cattier, Juan Gelas and Fanny Glissant At the end of the Middle Ages, Europe opened up to the world and discovered that it was at the margins of the world's main area for wealth generation: Africa. Portuguese explorers were the first to set out to conquer Africa's gold.

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Voir la vidéo
FRANCE 3

France 3 France Télévisions

C'est un cours d'histoire impeccablement scénarisé. Le président seul au Panthéon pour honorer les abolitionnistes et des collégiens pour symboliser le devoir de mémoire, 170 ans jour pour jour après le décret d'abolition de l'esclavage initié par Victor Schoelcher. Une première fois aboli à la révolution grâce à l'abbé Grégoire, l'esclavage disparaît donc définitivement en 1848. 400 ans de souffrance dénoncés au XXe siècle par les mots du poète Aimé Césaire qui lui aussi repose au Panthéon.

Un mémorial édifié aux Tuileries

Cette année, une fondation pour la mémoire de l'esclavage devrait voir le jour à l'hôtel de la Marine à Paris. Annoncée par François Hollande il y a deux ans, elle sera présidée par Jean-Marc Ayrault. "Nous voulons inscrire notre engagement dans une volonté de partager une mémoire commune, mais aussi pour être plus fort pour affronter les grands défis d'aujourd'hui qui restent ceux de l'égalité entre les êtres humains et la lutte contre toutes les formes d'esclavage", affirme l'ancien Premier ministre. Un mémorial sera édifié au Tuileries. En revanche, il ne devrait pas y avoir d'autres musées de l'esclavage que celui de Point-à-Pitre, en Guadeloupe.

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Emmanuel Macron annonce la création d'une "fondation pour la mémoire de l'esclavage"

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Le 27 avril 1848, Victor Schoelcher signait le décret abolissant la traite négrière. 170 ans plus tard, au Panthéon, le chef de l'État présidait une cérémonie commémorative. Emmanuel Macron a annoncé une fondation et un mémorial pour honorer la mémoire des victimes de l'esclavage.

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Haut lieu de la mémoire, le site de l'anse Cafard a été créé en hommage aux victimes d'un naufrage de navire négrier, dans la nuit du 8 avril 1830. Dans ce mémorial, des photos d'une femme nue circulent depuis quelques jours sur les réseaux sociaux. " C'est un lieu, d'histoire tragique et d'espace de recueillement. C'est une offense qui est faite aux Martiniquais" déclare le maire de la commune, Gilbert Eustache. Il annonce qu'il déposera une plainte dans les prochaines heures.

"C'est notre identité que l'on blesse"

Le maire du Diamant signale qu'il s'agit de " photos qui datent de plus de 5 ans, et qui reviennent sur le devant de la scène par le truchement des réseaux sociaux. Il faut avertir tous les jeunes mais aussi la population. Ils ne sont pas suffisamment informés des conséquences mais aussi des diffamations et autres sanctions. Nous avons souvent à faire face à des personnes qui sont malades et qui font du n'importe quoi" , s'insurgeGilbert Eustache.

Des photos qui datent de cinq ans ?

" Le mémorial est entaché, souillé et perverti, c'est notre identité que l'on blesse" peut-on lire sur le site de la ville du Diamant. Le concepteur du mémorial du Cap 11O, Laurent Valère, artiste plasticien, pense aussi que ces photos ne sont pas récentes, elles apparaissent à intervalles réguliers, dit-il à Christine Cupit de notre rédaction radio.

Laurent Valère

Les discussions sur les réseaux sociaux font débat. Les effets pervers illustrés par ces photos font réagir. " Provocations, insultes, défis, délire de touristes, injure au peuple Martiniquais"... chacun y va de son commentaire.

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Le maire du Diamant envisage de porter plainte pour profanation des statues des esclaves - Martinique la 1ère

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Les photos sont sur les réseaux sociaux depuis deux jours et alimentent les commentaires. Une femme s'est faite photographier nue devant le mémorial de l'anse Cafard au Diamant. "C'est une offense aux Martiniquais", s'insurge le maire du Diamant qui envisage de porter plainte.

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Le lieu rappelle qu'entre 1877 et 1950 près de 4 400 Afro-Américains furent pendus sous des prétextes de toutes sortes.

Le Monde | * Mis à jour le | Par Stéphanie Le Bars (Washington, correspondance)

Une des pages les plus sombres de l'histoire des Etats-Unis peut désormais se lire à ciel ouvert, dans l'Alabama. Un monument en mémoire des Noirs lynchés dans le pays entre 1877 et 1950 vient d'ouvrir à Montgomery, carrefour douloureux où, au fil des décennies, se sont croisés le pire de la ségrégation et les faits d'armes de la lutte pour les droits des Afro-Américains.

Ce lieu de mémoire est le premier du genre aux Etats-Unis, toujours en proie aux débats sur l'esclavage, les discriminations raciales et la survivance du suprématisme blanc. Inspiré du Mémorial de la Shoah, à Berlin, le Mémorial national pour la paix et la justice déploie 800 stèles d'acier de couleur sombre, dans des nuances de tons évoquant la couleur de peau des victimes. Chacune, gravé d'un nom et d'un lieu, est accrochée au plafond, comme un pendu se balançant au bout d'une corde.

Affronter ce morbide passé

A l'extérieur de ce sinistre déambulatoire, autant de stèles sont couchées dans l'herbe, cimetière de classiques pierres tombales. Chacune d'elles représente un des comtés où l'un de ces crimes a été commis. Equal Justice Initiative, l'association de défense des droits à l'origine du projet, espère que les villes concernées viendront bientôt s'en emparer pour créer à leur tour un lieu de mémoire local. Le succès ou non de cette proposition permettra d'identifier les communautés soucieuses d'affronter ce morbide passé... et les autres, assure l'organisation.

Les " crimes " qui sont imputés aux victimes donnent la dimension de l'arbitraire et de la rage de l'époque

Comme dans un dialogue symbolique entre le mémorial national et le reste du pays, une autre exposition présente plusieurs centaines de bocaux emplis de la terre des lieux où les victimes furent pendues, brûlées, lapidées, poignardées, découpées parfois. Un camaïeu d'ocres et de marrons, sur lequel, là encore, figurent une date et un nom.

D'une phrase, un destin tragique est résumé : David Walker, sa femme et leurs quatre enfants lynchés à Hickman, Kentucky, en 1908, après que M. Walker eut été accusé d'avoir utilisé un langage inapproprié envers une femme blanche ; Fred Rochelle, 16 ans, brûlé vif en public devant des milliers de personnes, en Floride, en 1901 ; Parks Banks, lynché dans le Mississippi en 1921 pour avoir détenu la photographie d'une femme blanche. Les " crimes " qui sont imputés aux victimes donnent la dimension de l'arbitraire et de la rage de l'époque. L'un des accusés aurait " bu dans le puits d'un Blanc ", un autre aurait " pris un manteau dans un hôtel " ; d'autres encore auraient " marché derrière la femme d'un employeur blanc ", " protesté contre des salaires trop bas " ou refusé de " céder [leurs] terres à des Blancs ".

Un régime de ségrégation sans limites

La majeure partie des quelque 4 400 cas de lynchages ou exécutions sommaires minutieusement répertoriés ont eu lieu dans les Etats du Sud, où prédominait l'esclavage jusqu'à son abolition en décembre 1865. Mais les recherches effectuées depuis 2010 par le créateur du mémorial, Bryan Stevenson, un avocat afro-américain spécialisé dans la défense des détenus injustement accusés, montrent aussi des crimes commis plus au nord du pays, au total dans une vingtaine d'Etats. Le rappel que la violence meurtrière et raciste permise par des institutions complices et un régime de ségrégation légalement organisé - les lois Jim Crow -, n'avait guère de limites.

A l'extérieur du mémorial, des statues d'esclaves de l'artiste Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, tout en douleur, complètent le triste tableau. Pour M. Stevenson, le lien avec l'esclavage, ancré dans les mentalités américaines durant des décennies, est naturel. " La raison pour laquelle personne ne s'est soucié de voir des milliers de Noirs pendus, noyés, battus, brûlés à mort sur la pelouse d'un tribunal, devant des milliers de spectateurs applaudissant, tient à cette idéologie de la suprématie blanche ", a-t-il déclaré dans la presse. Un sentiment qui, ces derniers mois, a refait surface de manière spectaculaire à l'occasion de manifestations défendant l'héritage de la Confédération (l'alliance des Etats esclavagistes) et de ses symboles, drapeaux ou statues.

Un miroir tourmenté de l'Amérique d'hier et d'aujourd'hui

Le jour de l'inauguration du mémorial, jeudi 26 avril, des petits-enfants de victimes de lynchages ont témoigné à la radio et dans les journaux américains du traumatisme toujours à fleur de peau dans leur famille. La terreur volontairement instillée par ces exécutions sommaires dans la population noire durant des décennies a provoqué l'exode de quelque 6 millions d'Afro-Américains des Etats du Sud vers les Etats du Nord, transformant la démographie de villes comme Chicago, Detroit ou New York. Un journal local, le Montgomery Advertiser, s'est aussi excusé pour sa couverture " honteuse " des violences envers les Afro-Américains entre les années 1870 et 1950, s'estimant " complice " de ces exactions restées impunies. Dans son éditorial, il a reconnu avoir " propagé une vision du monde ancrée dans le racisme et le mythe révoltant de la supériorité raciale ".

Mais pour les créateurs du mémorial et du musée adjacent, ce lieu ne constitue pas seulement une plongée douloureuse dans l'histoire du pays ; ancré dans le présent, il entend aussi dénoncer les discriminations raciales à l'œuvre dans le système judiciaire et policier américain. Comme le miroir tourmenté de l'Amérique d'hier et d'aujourd'hui.

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En Alabama, un mémorial rappelle les heures sombres du lynchage des Noirs

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Le lieu rappelle qu'entre 1877 et 1950 près de 4 400 Afro-Américains furent pendus sous des prétextes de toutes sortes. Le Monde | * Mis à jour le | Par Stéphanie Le Bars (Washington, correspondance) Ce lieu de mémoire est le premier du genre aux Etats-Unis, toujours en proie aux débats sur l'esclavage, les discriminations raciales et la survivance du suprématisme blanc.

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Troisième temps de notre série d'émissions consacrée aux histoires d'anonymes.

Aujourd'hui nous parlons des esclaves, hommes et femmes oubliés, avec deux historiens.

Quelles étaient les relations maître/esclave? A travers plusieurs textes nous essayons de raconter la richesse et la diversité du discours de certains esclaves, que se soit aux Antilles ou bien aux Mascareignes, nous pouvons comprendre le patrimoine matériel et immatériel qu'ils nous ont laissés.

Textes lus par Daniel Kenigsberg

Le 25 juin 1823, Déposition du nommé Fortuné, malgache, noir de pioche, âgé de 35 ans esclave de Marcelin, homme libre de couleur, habitant demeurant à Saint Denis (témoin du meurtre de Wilfried)
D/Quel est votre nom, votre âge, votre caste, votre profession et à qui appartenez-vous?

R/ Je m'appelle Fortuné, j'ai environ trente cinq ans, je suis malgache, je suis malgache et noir de pioche, j'appartiens à M Marcelin, libre.

Une émission co-animée par Séverine Liatard

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Paroles d'esclaves - Ép. 3/4 - Histoires d'anonymes

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Troisième temps de notre série d'émissions consacrée aux histoires d'anonymes. Aujourd'hui nous parlons des esclaves, hommes et femmes oubliés, avec deux historiens. Quelles étaient les relations maître/esclave? A travers plusieurs textes nous essayons de raconter la richesse et la diversité du discours de certains esclaves, que se soit aux Antilles ou bien aux Mascareignes, nous pouvons comprendre le patrimoine matériel et immatériel qu'ils nous ont laissés.

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In the Caribbean, the French island of Guadeloupe is celebrating this year the 170 th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. The former colony, however, is still struggling with unresolved social and economic grievances with France. A memorial for the slaves, inaugurated in 2015, has become a flashpoint for France's colonial legacy.

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A Memorial for Guadeloupe Slaves Becomes a Flashpoint for France's Colonial Legacy

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In the Caribbean, the French island of Guadeloupe is celebrating this year the 170 th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. The former colony, however, is still struggling with unresolved social and economic grievances with France. A memorial for the slaves, inaugurated in 2015, has become a flashpoint for France's colonial legacy.

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Aucun inventaire exhaustif ne peut rendre compte de l'abomination de l'esclavage et de l'horreur de la traite. Comme l'écrivait la directrice générale de l 'Unesco Irina Bokova, " l'histoire de la traite négrière et de l'esclavage a fait couler un flot de rage, de cruauté et d'amertume qui ne s'est pas encore tari. Elle est aussi une histoire de courage, de liberté et de fierté de la liberté reconquise... L'aboutissement de ce combat, mené par les esclaves eux-mêmes, est une source inépuisable d'inspiration pour lutter aujourd'hui contre toutes les formes de servitude, le racisme, les préjugés, les discriminations raciales et les injustices sociales hérités de l'esclavage. "

Spartacus, le héros antique

Nous ne savons rien de l'origine de l'esclavage. Certains disent que dans les premières sociétés humaines, l'homme ne songeait qu'à éliminer physiquement son ennemi et que ce n'est que bien plus tard, quand il fit des prisonniers, qu'il décida parfois d'en faire des esclaves à son service. " Les codes juridiques de Sumer prouvent que l'esclavage existait dès le IVe millénaire avant J.-C. Le symbole sumérien correspondant au terme "esclave" en écriture cunéiforme, signifie "étranger", ce qui indique une origine essentielle : les premiers esclaves étaient probablement des prisonniers de guerre ", dit le Larousse. Par contre, dans l'Égypte antique (comme plus tard dans l'Europe chrétienne), des hommes, des femmes ou des enfants se vendent ou sont vendus pour payer des dettes. Le roi de Babylone au XVIIIe avant J.-C. définit la valeur d'un esclave dans le Code d'Hammourabi et estime qu'elle équivaut à un âne, alors qu'en Asie occidentale, le code des Hittites (1800 à 1400 avant J.-C.) reconnaît que l'esclave est un être humain, mais d'une classe inférieure.

Une condition contre laquelle se sont certainement rebellés de nombreux hommes dont les récits ne nous sont pas parvenus. Durant l'Empire romain (entre 27 avant J.-C. et 476 après J.-C.) suite aux multiples conquêtes militaires, le nombre d'esclaves devient plus important que celui des hommes libres. Les esclaves sont soumis aux pires traitements et de nombreuses révoltes éclatent. Le héros le plus célèbre de cette époque fut l'esclave gladiateur Spartacus, qui leva une armée d'esclaves contre Rome pour se libérer. Son histoire inspirera de nombreux auteurs et de multiples luttes.

L'esclave, " une sorte de propriété animée "

Le phénomène de l'esclavage est quasi-universel. On en trouve des traces dans le passé de très nombreuses civilisations sur tous les continents, aussi bien dans les sociétés pastorales sédentaires du Moyen-Orient, que chez les pasteurs nomades d'Amérique du Nord, comme domestiques en Chine ou comme marins en Scandinavie... L'esclave est considéré comme une force de travail servile, on peut tout lui demander, il appartient totalement à un maître comme un bien ou une chose. Aristote (philosophe grec, 384 à 322 avant J.-C.) définissait l'esclave comme " une sorte de propriété animée ", son humanité a été réduite au statut de marchandise, sa vie ne lui appartient plus et il est soumis à son maître dans un rapport de domination fondée sur la violence.

L'économie de profit va largement utiliser l'esclavage dans tous les secteurs d'activité de grande pénibilité qui nécessitent une importante force de travail, comme dans le secteur des mines (les mines d'argent du Laurion, exploitées par Athènes au Ve siècle avant J.-C. ou les mines d'or des royaumes Ashanti dans le Ghana du XVIIIe siècle). Mais c'est surtout l'économie de plantation qui va provoquer les plus gros transferts de main-d'œuvre de toute l'histoire au détriment des peuples d'Afrique.

Guerres et traites

De l'Antiquité au Moyen-Âge, le nombre d'esclaves augmente dans des pays comme l'Espagne, le Portugal et l'Italie principalement à partir des grandes républiques maritimes de l'époque comme Gênes ou Venise où opèrent de nombreux marchands d'esclaves. Une période qui prendra fin au XVe siècle en Occident avec le servage (un système féodal où la personne, " le serf ", est attachée à une terre et dépend d'un seigneur) qui remplacera progressivement l'esclavage.

Dans le monde arabo-musulman, dès le VIIe siècle, l'esclavage est très ancré dans les mœurs. Des Slaves sont acheminés vers l'Espagne musulmane. Le Moyen-Orient et l'Afrique du Nord s'approvisionnent en Afrique qui fournit d'importants contingents d'esclaves, qui transitent par le Sahara, l'océan Indien et la mer Rouge (estimé par les historiens entre 5 000 et 10 000 esclaves par an). Les hommes sont utilisés principalement dans l'armée ou pour des travaux domestiques et les femmes servent d'esclaves sexuelles ou de concubines pour les harems. Une des plus importantes révoltes d'esclaves qui se déroula en Irak de 869 à 883 met fin à l'exploitation massive des Noirs dans le monde arabe. Mais cette pratique d'utiliser des esclaves, dans d'autres proportions, demeura longtemps. Au XIXe siècle, Zanzibar devient un important marché d'exportation d'esclaves à destination du golfe Persique : d'après le sultanat, près de 700 000 esclaves transiteront par l'île entre 1830 et 1872.

Le dernier marché aux esclaves sera fermé au Maroc en 1920. L'Arabie saoudite n'abolira l'esclavage qu'en 1962 et il faudra attendre 1981 pour qu'il soit officiellement aboli en Mauritanie. L'Organisation internationale du travail (OIT) révélera dans un rapport de 1992 que l'esclavage n'a pas disparu en Mauritanie ni au Soudan où des enfants sont encore vendus comme esclaves en 1993.

Depuis la plus haute antiquité, l'Afrique est en proie à de multiples systèmes de traite esclavagiste. De l'Égypte pharaonique, au trafic transsaharien, à la traite négrière transatlantique, l'Afrique est déchirée par de nombreux trafics alimentés par des guerres internes, pourvoyeuses de prisonniers soumis à l'esclavage. Les grands Empires du Ghana (IXe - XIe siècle), du Mali (XIIIe - XVe siècle) ou Songhaï (XVe - XVIe siècle) ont tous pratiqué l'esclavage à des degrés divers. Le premier empereur de l'Empire du Mali, Soundiata Keïta prescrit à Kouroukan Fouga au début du XIIIe siècle, sa charte du Mandén (une des plus vieilles Constitutions du monde) qui prône la paix sociale dans la diversité, l'inviolabilité de la personne humaine, l'éducation, l'intégrité de la patrie, la sécurité alimentaire, la liberté d'expression et d'entreprise, l'abolition de l'esclavage par razzia et l'interdiction de maltraitance des esclaves. Mais la charte sera remise en question après sa mort et ses commandements seront ensuite oubliés. L'effondrement de l'Empire des Songhaï, qui domina l'Afrique de l'Ouest jusqu'au XVIe siècle, et les guerres intestines entre clans et royautés d'Afrique subsaharienne alimenteront la traite transatlantique alors en devenir.

Le plus grand mouvement de déportation de l'Histoire

La traite négrière transatlantique et la traite dans l'océan Indien perpétrée par les Européens à partir du XVe siècle, aux Amériques, dans les Caraïbes et dans l'océan Indien, contre les populations africaines, amérindiennes, Malgaches et Indiennes, reconnues comme crime contre l'humanité, fut, comme le résumé l'historien Jean-Michel Deveau, " la plus gigantesque tragédie de l'histoire humaine par l'ampleur et la durée ".

Pendant environ quatre siècles, la traite négrière a été légitimée intellectuellement par la construction d'une idéologie raciste, anti-noire et juridiquement par un texte assassin, " le code noir " de 1685. Son commerce triangulaire entre l'Europe, l'Afrique et les Amériques fut le plus grand mouvement organisé de déportation de l'Histoire. Des millions d'Africains ont été arrachés à leurs foyers pour être déportés vers le Nouveau Monde sans possibilité de retour (de 11 à 16 millions de personnes selon les sources).

Près de 11% en moyenne mouraient pendant le voyage sur les bateaux. Les Africains, jugés plus résistants que les Amérindiens, étaient ensuite vendus pour travailler dans les plantations ou comme domestiques dans les propriétés. Les familles étaient souvent disséminées, les femmes étaient en permanence exposées aux viols des propriétaires et tous subissaient des mauvais traitements, l'enchaînement, parfois la torture et le meurtre. Aujourd'hui, les Afro-Américains et les descendants d'esclaves des îles restent encore profondément marqués par ce passé douloureux.

Les résistances et les luttes

Il y eut des révoltes qui réussirent. La plupart se réalisaient sur les côtes africaines, car une fois embarqués en haute mer, c'était extrêmement rare. On raconte qu'en 1539, quelque 109 esclaves prirent le contrôle d'un navire portugais, le Misericordia, mais on n'entendit plus jamais parler du navire. D'après les documents de la compagnie d'assurance maritime britannique, la Lloyd's, 1053 navires furent coulés en face de l'Afrique dont 17% pour faits de révoltes, de pillages ou d'insurrections, entre 1689 et 1803.

Dans les Amériques et les îles, de nombreuses révoltes marquèrent ces quatre siècles de domination. Certains arrivèrent à s'enfuir (on les appelait les marrons) et recréèrent des sociétés à l'image de leur terre d'origine dans des lieux isolés (Amazonie, les Hauts de la Réunion). D'autres affrontèrent leurs oppresseurs. La principale source d'opposition à l'esclavage viendra des esclaves eux-mêmes. En 1791 commença en Haïti une révolte d'esclaves que les Blancs ne parvinrent pas à mater. Elle aboutira le 29 août 1793 par la suppression de l'esclavage dans l'île proclamée par les commissaires de la République Sonthonax, membre de la Société des amis des Noirs, et Polverel, tous deux munis de pouvoirs extraordinaires.

Le 4 février 1794, la mesure des deux commissaires est ratifiée par la Convention qui l'étend à toutes les colonies françaises. Cependant, en 1799, sous la pression des commerçants du sucre, l'esclavage est rétabli en 1802 par le Premier consul Bonaparte. La révolte des Noirs qui s'en suivra à travers les Antilles conduira le 1er janvier 1804 à l'indépendance d'Haïti qui sera dirigée par Jean-Jacques Dessalines, un ancien esclave de Saint-Domingue, compagnon d'armes de Toussaint Louverture, descendant d'esclaves noirs, qui deviendra une des grandes figures de Haïti, des mouvements anticolonialiste et abolitionniste.

Les abolitionnistes

Dès le XVIIIe siècle, les excès des esclavagistes provoquent des réactions abolitionnistes portées par de nombreux écrivains (Montaigne, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Marivaux ...) et des économistes (Adam Smith, Rossi) qui s'en prennent au principe même de l'esclavage. Sa suppression en Angleterre et en France interviendra en deux temps. Ce sera d'abord l'interdiction de la traite (1807 pour l'Angleterre, 1815 pour la France) puis l'émancipation des esclaves (1833 pour l'Angleterre et 1848 pour la France sur l'initiative de Victor Schœlcher qui se rendra aux Antilles pour proclamer définitivement l'abolition de l'esclavage décrétée le 4 mars 1848).

Aux États-Unis, le sentiment anti-esclavagiste s'intensifie en 1831 avec la publication d'un journal abolitionniste The Liberator et par des révoltes d'esclaves menées par Nat Turner qui dureront jusqu'en 1840, date à laquelle de nombreux esclaves s'échappèrent vers les Etats du Nord pour y gagner la liberté. Après la guerre de Sécession et après que le Danemark et les Pays-Bas ont aboli l'esclavage en 1860, les États-Unis intègrent cette abolition au 13e amendement de leur Constitution le 31 janvier 1865.

Dans cette mouvance, les condamnations internationales se multiplient pour affirmer la fin de l'esclavage. La Conférence coloniale de Bruxelles, la Société des Nations (SDN), la Convention de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, la Convention de Genève sur l'esclavage et la Déclaration universelle des droits de l'Homme de l'ONU du 10 décembre 1948 stipule dans son article 4 : " Nul ne sera tenu en esclavage ni en servitude; l'esclavage et la traite des esclaves sont interdits sous toutes leurs formes. "

À toutes les époques, des hommes se sont battus contre leur condition d'esclave et d'autres ont lutté pour leurs libertés. Cette journée internationale du souvenir de la traite négrière et de son abolition leur rend hommage.

En savoirs plus :
- Pour R. Diallo, " l'esclavage français est peu présent dans les mémoires "

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Esclavages, traites et combattants de la liberté

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Depuis 1998, tous les 23 août, la communauté internationale célèbre la " journée internationale du souvenir de la traite négrière et de son abolition ". Une date qui fait référence à la nuit du 22 au 23 août 1791 à Saint-Domingue (aujourd'hui Haïti et République Dominicaine) d'où est partie une insurrection qui jouera un rôle déterminant dans l'abolition de la traite négrière transatlantique.

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La Guadeloupe fête cette année les 170 ans de l'abolition de l'esclavage, mais l'île n'a pas encore fait la paix avec son passé, ni avec la Métropole. " Comme Porto Rico pour l'Amérique, ou Anguilla pour la Grande Bretagne, la Guadeloupe est le problème colonial moderne de la France ", observe . Colonisé au XVII e siècle, ce territoire des Caraïbes, où l'esclavage n'a cessé qu'en 1848, a été une plaque tournante de la culture de canne à sucre.

Le musée caribéen de l'esclavage , inauguré en 2015, est le symbole des tensions qui persistent dans ce département. Malgré ses 300 000 visiteurs annuels et sa devise " la mémoire inspire l'avenir ", les activistes locaux voient dans ce mémorial une réécriture enjolivée de l'histoire coloniale et " un moyen pour la France de s'exonérer de l'héritage sanglant de 200 ans de commerce d'esclaves ".

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Le mémorial contre l'esclavage en Guadeloupe, symbole des tensions avec la Métropole

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La Guadeloupe fête cette année les 170 ans de l'abolition de l'esclavage, mais l'île n'a pas encore fait la paix avec son passé, ni avec la Métropole. " Comme Porto Rico pour l'Amérique, ou Anguilla pour la Grande Bretagne, la Guadeloupe est le problème colonial moderne de la France ", observe .

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Le mot "Noir" forme avec le mot "Blanc" le revers d'une même médaille coloniale. Voici l'histoire de ce terme, depuis l'Antiquité jusqu'à Aimé Césaire, en cette journée des mémoires de l'esclavage.

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C'est un chapitre douloureux -et tabou- de l'histoire africaine. Le chercheur Tidiane N'Diaye nous parle de l'esclavage arabo-musulman en Afrique.

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RDV TÉLÉ] Cela fait 170 ans que l'esclavage a été aboli en Martinique. Que nous reste-t-il ? Quel rapport aujourd'hui entre descendants d'esclaves et descendants de maîtres ? On en parle dans...

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C'est un chapitre douloureux -et tabou- de l'histoire africaine. Le chercheur Tidiane N'Diaye nous parle de l'esclavage arabo-musulman en Afrique.

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Le 22 mai c'est l'occasion de revisiter l'histoire de l'abolition. Entre la signature du décret du 27 avril 1848 et la fin de l'esclavage, un mois plus tard, il y a un homme que la mémoire n'a pas...

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La France rend aujourd'hui hommage aux victimes de l'esclavage colonial. Au Sénégal, les restes de cette traite sont encore bien visibles ⬇️

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Même si l'esclavage a été aboli effectivement le 23 mai, c'est le 22 mai qui est retenu par la conscience collective pour célébrer l'événement. C'est l'un des nombreux exemples de raccourcis et d'inexactitudes à relever à propos de cet événement historique.

Quelle importance, après tout, à un jour près ? Les peuples choisissent librement leurs légendes et leurs héros.
Il vaut mieux célébrer le combat des esclaves, même au prix d'approximations, qu'oublier les sacrifices de nos ancêtres. Il n'empêche, il vaut mieux donner à nos descendants les informations les plus précises possibles, à mesure qu'elles sont révélées par les historiens.

Les chercheurs ont produit des centaines d'articles, de livres, de colloques, de congrès, de conférences sur le sujet. Des travaux accessibles au plus grand nombre.
Nous pourrons y apprendre que les historiens sont partagés sur la nature de l'insurrection finale ayant abouti les 22 et 23 mai.
Pour les uns, avec Armand Nicolas, il s'agit d'une révolution. Pour d'autres, il convient de parler d'une révolte. Jeu de mots ? Pas vraiment. La révolution suppose le changement en profondeur de la société, de son économie, de ses rapports entre les classes sociales. Ce qui n'a pas été le cas.

Le débat est ouvert. Idem pour celui concernant le sens de la revendication des esclaves et de leurs alliés, les libres de couleur. Ils exigeaient la liberté, et non pas l'indépendance. Leur combat n'était pas tourné vers la souveraineté, comme cela s'est passé pour Haïti. Là encore, les mots ont un sens. Les idéaux républicains avaient traversé l'océan et trouvé écho dans la colonie. Le souhait d'émancipation s'accompagnait du souhait de l'assimilation à la France.
L'historien Edouard est clair à ce sujet : " Ce serait une erreur, doublée d'une injustice, de nier ou de minimiser la contribution des décrets d'avril 1848 à l'abolition de l'esclavage à la Martinique ". Manière de mieux comprendre ce formidable combat pour la liberté mené par nos ancêtres.

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Abolition de l'esclavage : quand la mémoire s'écarte de l'histoire - Martinique la 1ère

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La diversité des célébrations de l'abolition de l'esclavage se sont déroulées parfois au prix de quelques libertés prises avec l'exactitude historique. Les chercheurs ont encore du pain sur la planche, en dépit d'une somme faramineuse de connaissances sur le sujet.

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CD évenement, The Emidy Project, annonce, Le 8 juin 2018, paraît le cd du spectacle et du cycle musical The Emidy Project. Peu de spectacle sur la question délicate de l'esclavage ont à ce point exprimer avec justesse et surtout poésie l'horreur comme l'espérance... d'un volet particulièrement honteux de l'histoire humaine. " ... A travers 6 épisodes parfaitement enchaînés, les musiciens réunis autour de Diana Baroni (chant et flûtes) et Tunde Jegede (qui a composé les nouvelles musiques et qui joue aussi de la cora et du violoncelle) ressuscitent le parcours d'une vie trahie, humiliée : celle du jeune esclave guinéen Emidy ; celle d'une enfance sacrifiée, d'un être artiste inféodé, contraint, soumis sur l'autel du négoce le plus abject, obligé (entre autres) à servir de violoniste sur les bateaux de la flotte anglaise en guerre contre Bonaparte... Au terme d'un voyage infernal et inouï, qui relie l'Afrique à l'Europe, part de la Guinée natale jusqu'au Brésil et au Portugal, avant de se fixer, libéré, en Cornouailles, s'élève alors le plus déchirant des appels à la pleine conscience, à la mémoire, et certainement à la réconciliation : chant cri et plainte universelle pour les crimes commis au nom du racisme et de la barbarie institués en système. Qu'il s'agisse de soumettre et humilier des hommes pour en enrichir d'autres, tout cela est à vomir ; mais l'espérance d'Emidy se dresse face à toutes les souillures vécues, éprouvées, absorbées ; et c'est la voix d'un indéfectible certitude qui chante alors sa croyance absolue dans l'humanité (ici celle de Diana Baroni, comme celle du danseur lui-même ivoirien, Lassina Toure). Soit la figure immortelle d'un être d'exception, qui continue de croire. Pas dans les hommes. Mais en l'humanité : une valeur supérieure qu'il faut encore et toujours redéfinir, restaurer, défendre. Comment préserver notre part d'humanité malgré les horreurs que commettent les hommes ?
Question ouverte, à l'actualité permanente... à laquelle répond à sa façon le spectacle The Emidy Project car il réalise une évocation à la superbe, musicale et poétique, à la frontière des disciplines (vidéo, danse, musique, chant...), inclassable et universellle à la fois. Les musiques du nigérian Tunde Jegede, la voix de Diana Baroni font le sel et le sang, la magie et le déroulement d'un cycle musical enchanteur, souvent bouleversant, qui est aussi un spectacle à découvrir d'urgence... " extrait de la critique du cd par notre rédacteur Adrien de Vries. Parution : le 8 juin 2018. Soirée de lancement et spectacle à La Marbrerie de Montreuil, le 6 juin 2018. CD événement, élu " CLIC " de CLASSIQUENEWS. Prochaine grande critique du cd The EMIDY PROJECT (1 cd Papilio collection), dans le mag cd dvd livres de classiquenews. En LIRE +

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Les 5 artistes du spectacle et du cd The EMIDY Project : bouleversants, poétiques...

Crédit : © Sunara Begum

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CD évenement, The Emidy Project, annonce. Diana Baroni et Tunde Jegede. Le 8 juin 2018

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CD évenement, The Emidy Project, annonce, Le 8 juin 2018, paraît le cd du spectacle et du cycle musical The Emidy Project. Peu de spectacle sur la question délicate de l'esclavage ont à ce point exprimer avec justesse et surtout poésie l'horreur comme l'espérance... d'un volet particulièrement honteux de l'histoire humaine.

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Black Slavery, or the Happy Shipwreck (English Translation, Maryann DeJulio)

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En 1761, des esclaves malgaches furent abandonnés sur l'île de Tromelin, après le naufrage d'une embarcation de la Compagnie française des Indes orientales. Ils ont survécu pendant 15 ans en recréant une micro-société. Mais comment ont-ils pu survivre sur un minuscule îlot où il n'y a rien ?

La survie d'un groupe humain dans un endroit aussi ingrat paraît inimaginable. Et de fait, on n'avait jamais très bien compris comment les infortunés esclaves s'y étaient pris. Max Guérout a dirigé l'expédition "Esclaves oubliés", à caractère historique et archéologique, qui fait la lumière sur l'organisation qu'il a fallu mettre en place pour se donner des chances de surmonter les périls. L'ordre, la méthode, la chance semblent avoir été, ici encore, les piliers d'un improbable succès.

Un entretien réalisé en décembre 2013 par universcience.tv

Max Guérout, commandant, archéologue, président du Gran (Groupe de Recherche en Archéologie Navale).

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Les esclaves oubliés de l'île de Tromelin

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En 1761, des esclaves malgaches furent abandonnés sur l'île de Tromelin, après le naufrage d'une embarcation de la Compagnie française des Indes orientales. Ils ont survécu pendant 15 ans en recréant une micro-société. Mais comment ont-ils pu survivre sur un minuscule îlot où il n'y a rien ?

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"Like everyone else," John Cummings said a few days earlier, "you're probably wondering what the rich white boy has been up to out here."

He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans, Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his plantation. He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager. His disposition is exceedingly proper - the portly carriage, the trimmed white beard, the florid drawl - but he dresses in a rumpled manner that suggests a morning habit of mistaking the laundry hamper for the dresser. As someone who had to hitchhike to high school and remains bitter about not being able to afford his class ring, he embodies the scrappiness of the Irish Catholics who flooded New Orleans in the 19th century. But as a trial lawyer who has helped win more than $5 billion in class-action settlements and a real estate magnate whose holdings have multiplied his wealth many times over, Cummings personifies the affluence and power held by an elite and mostly white sliver of a city with a majority black population.

"I suppose it is a suspicious thing, what I've gone and done with the joint," he continued, acknowledging that his decision to "spend millions I have no interest in getting back" on the museum has long been a source of local confusion. More than a few of the 670 residents of Wallace - 90 percent of whom are black, many the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers who worked the region's land - have voiced their bewilderment over the years. So, too, have the owners of other tourist-oriented plantations, all of whom are white. Members of Cummings's close-knit family (he has eight children by two wives) also struggle to clarify their patriarch's motivations, resorting to the shoulder-shrugging logic of "John being John," as if explaining a stubborn refusal to throw away old newspapers rather than a consuming, heterodox and very expensive attempt to confront the darkest period of American history. "Challenge me, fight me on it," he said. "I've been asked all the questions. About white guilt this and that. About the honky trying to profit off of slavery. But here's the thing: Don't you think the story of slavery is important?" With that, Cummings went silent, something he does with unsettling frequency in conversation.

"Well, I checked into it, and I heard you weren't telling it," he finally resumed, "so I figured I might as well get started."

This was a practiced line, but also an earnest form of self-indictment: Cummings's way of admitting his own ignorance on the subject of slavery and its legacy, and by extension encouraging visitors to confront their own. As with the rest of his real estate portfolio, which includes miles of raw countryside and swampland, a 12-story luxury hotel near the French Quarter, a cattle farm in rural Mississippi and a 1,200-acre ranch in West Texas that he has never set foot on, he initially gravitated toward the Whitney simply because it was for sale. ("Whatever Uncle Sam and the bartender let me keep," he likes to note, "I bought real estate with it.") Originally built by the Haydel family, a prosperous clan of German immigrants who ran the property from 1752 to 1867, the grounds had been uninhabited for a quarter century. "I knew I wasn't going to live here," Cummings said as he drove past the blacksmith's shop that he spent $300,000 rebuilding, where a plaque noted that a slave named Robin worked on the plantation for 40 years and where the actor Jamie Foxx, playing a slave in "Django Unchained," was filmed being branded. "But aside from that, I didn't know what I would do with the place."

It takes just a few minutes of conversation with Cummings, however, to understand that he would never have been keen on restoring the Whitney in the mold of neighboring plantations, which rely on weddings and sorority reunions to supplement the income brought in by picnicking tourists. Pet projects he has taken up in recent years include outlining for the Vatican a list of wrongs the Catholic Church should formally apologize for and - to the chagrin of, in his words, "my friends who have all had political sex changes in the past 15 years" - exploring ways to curb the influence of conservative "super PACs." Decades ago, his interest in abuses of power led to his involvement in the civil rights movement; in 1968, he worked alongside African-American activists to get the Audubon Park swimming pool in New Orleans opened to blacks. "If someone is going to deny someone rights simply because they have the power to do it - well, I'm interested," he explained. "I'm coming, and I'm going to bring the cannons."

Still, his plans for the Whitney might have gone in an entirely different direction, if not for the existence of an unlikely document. The property's previous owner was Formosa, a plastics and petrochemical giant, which in 1991 planned to build a $700 million plant for manufacturing rayon on its nearly 2,000 acres. Preservationists and environmentalists balked. Looking for avenues of appeasement, Formosa commissioned an exhaustive survey of the grounds, with the idea that the most historic sections would be turned into a token museum of Creole culture while a majority of the rest would be razed to make way for the factory. In the end, it was wasted money and effort: The opposition remained vigilant, rayon was going out of fashion, the Whitney went back on the market and Cummings inherited the eight-volume study with the purchase. "Thanks to Formosa, I knew more about my plantation than anyone else around here - maybe more than any plantation in America outside of Monticello," said Cummings, a litigator accustomed to teasing secrets from dense paperwork. "A lot of what was in there was about the architecture and artifacts, but you started to see the story of slavery. You saw it in terms of who built what."

After digesting the study, Cummings began reading "any book I could find" about slavery. Particularly influential was "Africans in Colonial Louisiana," by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a professor at Rutgers. Certain details startled Cummings, like the fact that 38 percent of slaves shipped from Africa ended up in Brazil. No wonder, he thought, that the women he watched on television celebrating Carnival in Rio de Janeiro so closely resembled those he saw dancing in the Mardi Gras parades that surrounded him as a youth. "I started to see slavery and the hangover from slavery everywhere I looked," he said. As a descendant of Irish laborers, he has no direct ties to slaveholders; still, in a departure from the views held by many Southern whites, Cummings considered the issue a personal one. "If 'guilt' is the best word to use, then yes, I feel guilt," he said. "I mean, you start understanding that the wealth of this part of the world - wealth that has benefited me - was created by some half a million black people who just passed us by. How is it that we don't acknowledge this?"

Cummings steered the vehicle past the yellowing fronds of banana trees and pulled to a stop in front of a sculpture, a black angel embracing a dead infant, the centerpiece of a memorial honoring the 2,200 enslaved children who died in the parish in the 40 years leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. At traditional museums, such memorials come to fruition only after a lengthy process - proposals by artists, debates among the board members, the securing of funds. This statue, though, like everything on the property, began as a vision in Cummings's mind and became a reality shortly after he pulled out his checkbook. Perhaps most remarkable is that this unconventional model has yielded conventionally effective results: at once chastening and challenging, beautiful and haunting. "Everything about the way the place came together says that it shouldn't work," says Laura Rosanne Adderley, a Tulane history professor specializing in slavery who has visited the Whitney twice since it opened. "And yet for the most part it does, superbly and even radically. Like Maya Lin's memorial, the Whitney has figured out a way to mourn those we as a society are often reluctant to mourn."

Before leaving the grounds, Cummings stopped at the edge of the property's small lagoon. It was here that the Whitney's most provocative memorial would soon be completed, one dedicated to the victims of the German Coast Uprising, an event rarely mentioned in American history books. In January 1811, at least 125 slaves walked off their plantations and, dressed in makeshift military garb, began marching in revolt along River Road toward New Orleans. (The area was then called the German Coast for the high number of German immigrants, like the Haydels.) The slaves were suppressed by militias after two days, with about 95 killed, some during fighting and some after the show trials that followed. As a warning to other slaves, dozens were decapitated, their heads placed on spikes along River Road and in what is now Jackson Square in the French Quarter.

"It'll be optional, O.K.? Not for the kids," said Cummings, who commissioned Woodrow Nash, an African-American sculptor he met at Jazz Fest, to make 60 heads out of ceramic, which will be set atop stainless-steel rods on the lagoon's small island. "But just in case you're worried about people getting distracted by the pretty house over there, the last thing you'll see before leaving here will be 60 beheaded slaves."

The memorial had lately become a source of controversy among locals, who were concerned that it would be too disturbing.

"It is disturbing," Cummings said as he pulled out past Whitney's gate. "But you know what else? It happened. It happened right here on this road."

A nation builds museums to understand its own history and to have its history understood by others, to create a common space and language to address collectively what is too difficult to process individually. Forty-eight years after World War II, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington. A museum dedicated to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks opened its doors in Lower Manhattan less than 13 years after they occurred. One hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, however, no federally funded museum dedicated to slavery exists, no monument honoring America's slaves. "It's something I bring up all the time in my lectures," says Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery." "If the Germans built a museum dedicated to American slavery before one about their own Holocaust, you'd think they were trying to hide something. As Americans, we haven't yet figured out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it's ancient history. To others, it's history that isn't quite history."

These competing perceptions converge with baroque vividness in the South. The State of Mississippi did not acknowledge the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery until 1995 and formally ratified it only in 2013, when a resident was moved to galvanize lawmakers after watching Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln." While some Southern states have passed resolutions apologizing for slavery in the last decade, a majority, Louisiana among them, have not. In 1996, when Representative Steve Scalise, now the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, was serving in the Louisiana State Legislature, he voted against such a bill. "Why are you asking me to apologize for something I didn't do and had no part of?" he remarked at the time. This episode recently came to light amid the revelation that in 2002 he addressed a gathering of white supremacists at a conference organized by David Duke, formerly the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization founded the year the Civil War ended.

Slavery is by no means unmemorialized in American museums, though the subject tends to be lumped in more broadly with African-American history. In 2004, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened in Cincinnati with the mission of showcasing "freedom's heroes." Since 2007, the Old Slave Mart in Charleston, S.C., has operated as a small museum focusing on the early slave trade, on a site where slaves were sold at public auctions until 1863. The National Civil Rights Museum, which opened in Memphis in 1991 and was built around the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, offers a brief section devoted to slavery. Next year, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is scheduled to be dedicated in Washington as part of the Smithsonian Institution, a project supported by $250 million in federal funding; exhibits on slavery will stand alongside those containing a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong and boxing gloves worn by Muhammad Ali. "It has to be said that the end note in most of these museums is that civil rights triumphs and America is wonderful," says Paul Finkelman, a historian who focuses on slavery and the law. "We are a nation that has always readily embraced the good of the past and discarded the bad. This does not always lead to the most productive of dialogues on matters that deserve and require them."

What makes slavery so difficult to think about, from the vantage point of history, is that it was both at odds with America's founding values - freedom, liberty, democracy - and critical to how they flourished. The Declaration of Independence proclaiming that "all men are created equal" was drafted by men who were afforded the time to debate its language because the land that enriched many of them was tended to by slaves. The White House and the Capitol were built, in part, by slaves. The economy of early America, responsible for the nation's swift rise and sustained power, would not have been possible without slavery. But the country's longstanding culture of racism and racial tensions - from the lynchings of the Jim Crow-era South to the discriminatory housing policies of the North to the treatment of blacks by the police today - is deeply rooted in slavery as well. "Slavery gets understood as a kind of prehistory to freedom rather than what it really is: the foundation for a country where white supremacy was predicated upon African-American exploitation," says Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor. "This is still, in many respects, the America of 2015."

In 2001, Douglas Wilder, a former governor of Virginia and the first elected black governor in the nation, announced his intention to build a museum that would be the first to give slavery its proper due - not as a piece of Southern or African-American history but as essential to understanding American history in general. Christened the United States National Slavery Museum, it was to be built on 38 acres along the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Va. Wilder, the grandson of slaves, commissioned C. C. Pei, a son of I. M. Pei, to design the main building, which would be complemented by a full-scale replica of a slave ship. A number of prominent African-Americans, including Bill Cosby, pledged millions of dollars in support at black-tie fund-raisers. The ambition that surrounded the project's inception, however, was soon eclipsed by years of pitfalls. By 2008, there were not enough donations to pay property taxes, let alone begin construction; in 2011, the nonprofit organization in charge of the project filed for bankruptcy protection. As it happens, it was during the same period Wilder's project unraveled that John Cummings, unburdened by any bureaucracies, was well on his way to completing a slavery museum of his own.

For much of the last 13 years, Cummings has been joined on the Whitney's grounds by a Senegalese scholar named Ibrahima Seck. A 54-year-old of imposing height, Seck first met Cummings in 2000, when Seck, who has made regular trips to the South since winning a Fulbright in 1995, attended a talk at Tulane with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, the Rutgers professor. Cummings put up Seck at the International House, the hotel he owns in downtown New Orleans, and invited him to see the Whitney. Though at that point it was little more than a series of decrepit buildings entangled in feral vegetation, Seck was impressed that Cummings was thinking about it exclusively within the context of slavery. As someone from the region of Africa that provided more than 60 percent of Louisiana's slaves, he was disturbed by the way other plantations romanticized the lives of the white owners, with scant mention of the enslaved blacks who harvested the land and built the grand homes fawned over by tourists. After walking the property with Seck for a few hours, Cummings invited him to return to New Orleans the next year to help crystallize the Whitney's mission. Seck took him up on the offer, and for the next decade, Cummings flew Seck in from Africa each year during the scholar's summer vacation.

Since 2012, Seck has lived full time in New Orleans to serve as the director of research for the Whitney. "As historians, we do the research and we write dissertations and we go to conferences, but very little of the knowledge gets out," Seck said one afternoon in his French-inflected baritone while seated on the antique upholstered sofa in the parlor of the property's Big House. "That's why a place like this is so important. Not everyone is willing to read nowadays, but this is an open book." He took a moment to glance around the lavish room, its hand-painted ceiling now meticulously restored. "Every day I think about how remarkable this is," Seck said. "One hundred and fifty years ago, I would not be able to do what I'm doing here now. I would have been a slave."

The alliance between the two men has been an auspicious one, with Seck's patience and expertise serving as a counterbalance to the instinctual eccentricity of Cummings. While Seck researched the Whitney's history, Cummings became something of a hoarder, buying anything he thought might one day be relevant to the project. When he learned about a dilapidated Baptist church in a neighboring parish that was founded by freed slaves in 1867, for example, he brought it across the Mississippi and had it restored on the grounds at a cost of $300,000. When recordings of interviews with former slaves that were made in the 1930s as part of the W.P.A.'s Federal Writers' Project were acquired, Cummings hired a son-in-law who works as a sound engineer in Hollywood to clean them up; he plans to install a speaker system near the slave cabins, where the recordings will play on a loop, allowing visitors to hear the voices of former slaves while staring into the type of homes in which they once lived. After Seck unearthed in old court documents the names of 354 slaves who worked on the land before emancipation, Cummings bought an engraving machine so they could be etched in Italian granite in a memorial he christened the "Wall of Honor."

"By 2005, it was clear to me that we were building a museum, but I'm not sure John was thinking about it in those terms," Seck said. "If John feels something, he just goes ahead and does it. His stubbornness can be frustrating, but who in the world is willing to put so many millions of dollars into a project like this? If you find one, you have to support it."

In his years of working on the Whitney, Seck has come to see the museum as both a memorializing of history and a slyly radical gesture: Cummings's desire to shift the consciousness of others as his own has been altered, and in the process try to make amends of a kind that have been a source of debate since emancipation.

"If one word comes to mind to summarize what is in John's head in doing this," Seck said, "that word would be 'reparations.' Real reparations. He feels there is something to be done in this country to make changes."

In 1835, a biracial child named Victor was born on the grounds of the Whitney, the son of a slave named Anna and Antoine Haydel, the brother of Marie Azelie Haydel, the slaveholder who ran the plantation at the time. One hundred and seventy-nine years later, a group of both the black and white descendants of the Haydels made their way to the Whitney's opening in December. Many were meeting for the first time, and the sight of them embracing and marveling at the similarities in their appearances was as powerful as any memorial on the plantation. Among the black Haydels in attendance was one of Victor's great-grandchildren, Sybil Haydel Morial, a well-known local activist who is the widow of Ernest Morial, the first black mayor of New Orleans, and the mother of Marc Morial, a subsequent mayor. "I was with John when he helped get the pool in Audubon Park opened to blacks," she said in a later conversation. "Now, with the Whitney, he has given us a place where we can come and clear the air. If my slave great-grandfather had lived eight more years, I would have known him. Yet growing up, whenever my elders talked about slavery, they'd always get quiet when we kids were near." Morial added that she hoped "some people around here may find their views changing" after visiting the Whitney, which seemed to be the case with some of her white relatives at the opening.

"I have to say, I was a little offended when I heard that slavery, of all the stories, was going to be the focus," Glynne Couvillion, a white Haydel, said while standing inside the Baptist church, surrounded by dozens of ghostly sculptures of child slaves that Cummings commissioned to represent those interviewed by the Federal Writers' Project as they would have looked when enslaved. "But after today, I'm just in awe and proud to be connected to this place."

For all the time and money Cummings has dedicated to the Whitney - and he is by no means finished, with plans to build an adjacent institute for the study of slavery - the museum was built on a shoestring budget compared with traditionally financed institutions. (The Holocaust Memorial Museum cost about $168 million.) Besides Seck, there were only two full-time staff members, an energetic young woman named Ashley Rogers, who serves as the director, and her deputy, Monique Johnson, a descendant of sharecroppers from the area, and it was evident that they were still finding their footing. Like the other plantations along River Road, the Whitney can be seen only through a guided tour - the cost is $22 - and a number of the docents struggled to find the proper tone. ("Time to depress you a little more," one could be heard saying at various points.) Others struggled to answer questions about how, exactly, sugar cane was harvested by slaves, responding instead with generalities intended to incite emotion rather than educate: "It was the hardest, most grueling slave work imaginable."

Yet this awkwardness might well serve as one of the Whitney's strengths. Talking about slavery and race is awkward, and the museum stands a chance of becoming the rare place where this discomfort can be embraced, and where the dynamic among the mainly mixed-race tours can offer an ancillary form of education. A man who grew up in a "maroon community," as bayou enclaves founded by runaway slaves are known, was so moved during his tour that he volunteered to work as a guide. A young black woman mentioned that she avoided tours at another nearby plantation because an ancestor was lynched on the grounds. Among the Whitney's first visitors was a black man named Paul Brown, whose father was a field hand and who arrived dressed in a sharp blazer and a fedora on opening day "to shake the man's hand who made this place possible." During his tour, he offered personal anecdotes that served to buttress the white guide's skittishness - bringing the past into the present, for instance, by pointing out how the images of slaves etched in one memorial were reminiscent of portraits of his ancestors. "I wish some of my white co-workers would come to this place," he said afterward. "They'd understand me in ways they've failed for 30 years."

Jonathan Holloway, dean of Yale College and a professor of African-American studies, arrived for a tour in late January. He was in the area to give a talk at Louisiana State University about the ways the horrors of slavery are confronted and avoided in heritage tourism, and he found the Whitney to be a "genius step" in a long-overdue direction. "People have tried to do a museum like this for years, and I'm still stunned that this guy made it happen," he said afterward. "There I was, coming down to talk about how in trying to tell the story, it's often one step forward and two steps back, and boom, here's the Whitney." Holloway was particularly taken by the museum's subversive approach. "Having been on a number of tours where the entire focus is on the Big House, the way they've turned the script inside out is a brilliant slipping of the skirt," he said. "The mad genius of the whole thing is really resonant. Is it an art gallery? A plantation tour? A museum? It's almost this astonishing piece of performance art, and as great art does, it makes you stop and wonder."

Cummings, for his part, has been on the grounds every day since the Whitney opened, where he is in the habit of approaching visitors as they enter and telling them how they should feel afterward: "You're not going to be the same person when you leave here" - a line that some found more grating than endearing. Inwardly, though, he was constantly making notes on what could be done to improve the experience.

"Look, we're not perfect, and we've made a lot of mistakes, and we'll make more," he said one afternoon as the sun set across the sugar-cane fields that surround the plantation in much the form they did when slaves worked them 200 years ago. "We need all the help we can get - not financial, but we need brains." With this in mind, he recently started reaching out to prominent African-American academics, hoping to create a board of directors - typically the first step for a museum, not one taken six weeks after opening day. "I'm firing before I'm aiming, O.K.?" he said. "I'm smart enough to know I don't have the answers, but so far it looks like it's the right thing."

Correction: March 1, 2015

Correction: April 5, 2015

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Building the First Slavery Museum in America

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"Like everyone else," John Cummings said a few days earlier, "you're probably wondering what the rich white boy has been up to out here." He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public.

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SÉRIE] "The Book of Negroes", la nouvelle série événement à découvrir très bientôt.., sur #Martinique1ère !

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Post by martiniquela1ere.

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Du 15ème au 19ème siècle, près de 12 millions d'hommes, de femmes et d'enfants sont vendus comme esclave sur les côtes africaines, direction l'Europe et l'Amérique. "Bois d'ébène" ce soir à 20.55 un...

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Post by france2.

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- The archaeologist rose in the bow of the speedboat, pointing to the choppy waters where the 18th-century slave ship had gone down.

"It's somewhere over there," Ibrahima Thiaw said.

Off the western tip of mainland Africa lie some of the most important vestiges of the transatlantic slave trade: the wreckage of ships that sank, carrying thousands of African men, women and children to the Americas. But despite historians' immense interest in that period, no one has ever tried to excavate them. Until now.

For years, the wrecks were considered too hard to find. The work was too expensive. And few African researchers were willing to take on the project in countries where the slave trade is often considered a source of shame - not a subject worthy of study.

Thiaw, a tall 50-year-old archaeologist from rural Senegal, is one of the pioneers trying to find the wrecks. There has been only one known excavation of a ship that went down off the African coast while carrying slaves - the São José, found thousands of miles away, off South Africa. Artifacts from the vessel will be displayed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, opening next month. Thiaw hopes his discoveries will eventually be featured by the museum, too.

"The stories that will help us understand the slave trade, this crucial moment in human history, are down there," Thiaw said, gazing from the boat into the Atlantic Ocean as he began the search on a bright day in May. But as he would discover over the following months, it wouldn't be easy.

[Haunting relics from a slave ship are headed for African American museum]

Senegal was a major exporter of slaves for about 400 years. When Thiaw was in school, though, that history was barely discussed. As a boy, he visited Goree Island, just off the coast of Dakar, where a tour guide told him about the slaves waiting, shackled, for boats headed for the Americas. "After listening to him," he recalled, "I screamed."

It was the beginning of an obsession. His parents were farmers, but Thiaw decided to be an archaeologist, studying at the University of Dakar and then earning a PhD at Rice University in Houston. Some of his friends and family joked that he was "searching for garbage."

Senegal had became known worldwide for its landmarks of the slave trade, particularly on Gorée, a major entrepot, or trading center. But the scholarship turned out to be shaky. In the 1990s, American researchers claimed that those sites had been misidentified. The famed "Door of No Return" was not in fact a final departure point for slaves, they said, but probably just a door in a private residence. For Thiaw, the controversy reinforced his commitment to archaeological research.

"I decided I would find my own true stories," he recalled.

[What Obama really saw at the 'Door of No Return']

In 2000, Thiaw did some research on Goree Island that helped explain how and where slaves lived, and supported the idea that the island was probably a major employer of domestic slaves, not just an exporter. He found a shackle that he keeps in a box in his office. But many of the island's relics had been worn down by tourism or buried under construction. He came to realize that some of the most meaningful artifacts of the slave trade were elsewhere. More than 1,000 slave ships had sunk around the world, according to archival records. Archaeologists had barely scratched the surface of what they held.

Thiaw had one logistical problem, though: He didn't know how to swim.

So two years ago, an instructor taught him to paddle. A few months later, he was enrolled in a scuba-diving course. A few months after that, he helped teach his graduate students at Cheikh Anta Diop University to dive, too.

His timing was perfect. The Smithsonian had just announced funding for research on the slave trade, as part of the international Slave Wrecks Project. Suddenly, Thiaw had a benefactor, at least for the first phase of the work, which cost about $35,000.

"We needed a committed archaeologist who wanted to bring his work underwater," said Paul Gardullo, curator of the new African American History Museum. "That's Ibrahima."

In May, Thiaw and six of his graduate students boarded a boat off a Dakar beach and sped into the Atlantic chop for their first research voyage. The archaeologist handed out typewritten pages to his students with the names of boats.

There were two French vessels, the Nanette and the Bonne Amitie, that had disappeared in 1774 and 1790. There was a British sloop called Racehorse that had vanished in November 1780. All were thought to have sunk just miles off the coast. And there were hints of many others.

"There's so much down there," Thiaw said eagerly.

He and his team dragged a torpedo-shaped device along the ocean floor that held a magnetometer, which can detect buried metal. The data from the device would be sent for analysis to South Africa. Once enough evidence emerged that a wreck had been found, the team would start intensive diving.

No one on the team wanted to think about how long their quest might last, or whether their funding would be sufficient. It took researchers more than a decade to locate and document the remains of the São José off Cape Town, South Africa. That discovery was announced only last year.

But for Thiaw, the physical difficulty of finding the wrecks was only part of the challenge.

'A bad part of our history'

In Senegal, where President Obama traveled in 2013 to see the remains of the slave trade's prisons and ports, slavery is rarely a subject of academic interest.

"We've turned to contemporary issues, to discussing about the future," former Senegalese prime minister Aminata Touré said in an interview. "Why focus on such a bad part of our history?"

During the last presidential election, in 2012, then-President Abdoulaye Wade argued that his opponent, Macky Sall, couldn't be elected because he was "the descendant of slaves." Sall won the election, but only after rejecting that claim and citing his "non-slave" lineage.

That bias is even embedded in the local language, Wolof. If someone is acting badly, Senegalese will often call him a "jaam" - a slave.

"It's like it's something in your blood, in your genes, with all the dishonor and everything that goes with it," Thiaw said in an interview in his office. "It's not something people want to delve into, or learn more about."

He paused.

"I feel like we haven't abolished it yet."

The reluctance to research or teach about slavery exists across much of West Africa, where, in the 20th century, nations emerging from colonial rule encouraged historians to study themes that might build a sense of national identity.

Part of the sensitivity regarding slavery comes from the complicity of some Africans in the trade - merchants who profited from the sale of men and women, and sometimes owned slaves themselves.

Thiaw wanted to tell the story of the lives of slaves - what they brought with them on their journeys, what they scrawled on the walls of the boat. The more intimate the details, he thought, the harder it would be for his countrymen to brush off the past.

As he put it: "Finding a good wreck could help us disentangle this - to show that the slave is the victim."

For many years, what was known about the slaves' "middle passage" across the Atlantic came largely from the documents of slave traders, things like tax records, receipts and diaries. It was useful information, but difficult to verify and clinical in its description of the inhumanity shown to slaves.

Finding untouched artifacts, Gardullo said, meant "a chance to fill the silences in the written record."

But, as Thiaw found, the quest could be frustrating. In the first few weeks of searching, he and his team made a few preliminary dives, but they discovered only sunken fishing boats. Thiaw sent one of his students to the country's national archives to look for more leads. Three months after their first voyage, they are still waiting for analysis of the data they gathered underwater and sent to South Africa.

Now Thiaw is worrying about lining up additional funding, and keeping his graduate students involved, because some will graduate soon.

"If I can't keep them focused on this program, maybe they will move on," Thiaw said. "I'm getting nervous."

It was hardly the first time he'd grown anxious over his research. But this time the stakes felt higher. He could almost see the Atlantic from his office window, with all the wreckage buried underneath.

Read more

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A first look inside the Smithsonian's African American museum

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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The incredible quest to find the African slave ships that sank in the Atlantic

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The archaeologist rose in the bow of the speedboat, pointing to the choppy waters where the 18th-century slave ship had gone down. "It's somewhere over there," Ibrahima Thiaw said. Off the western tip of mainland Africa lie some of the most important vestiges of the transatlantic slave trade: the wreckage of ships that sank, carrying thousands of African men, women and children to the Americas.

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6 - L'Afrique dans le nouveau système géoéconomique mondial (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle)

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Les traites négrières et le pari de l'autonomie africaine : civilisation florissante jusqu'à l'arrivée des Portugais au XVe siècle, le royaume du Kongo est dépecé et sa population mise en esclavage par les nouveaux arrivants. L'archéologie a révélé un passé millénaire de cet État qui entre dans la mondialisation par la déportation en Amérique d'une partie de ses habitants.

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When You Kill Ten Million Africans You Aren't Called 'Hitler'

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Take a look at this picture. Do you know who it is? Most people haven't heard of him.

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"Like everyone else," John Cummings said a few days earlier, "you're probably wondering what the rich white boy has been up to out here."

He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans, Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his plantation. He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager. His disposition is exceedingly proper - the portly carriage, the trimmed white beard, the florid drawl - but he dresses in a rumpled manner that suggests a morning habit of mistaking the laundry hamper for the dresser. As someone who had to hitchhike to high school and remains bitter about not being able to afford his class ring, he embodies the scrappiness of the Irish Catholics who flooded New Orleans in the 19th century. But as a trial lawyer who has helped win more than $5 billion in class-action settlements and a real estate magnate whose holdings have multiplied his wealth many times over, Cummings personifies the affluence and power held by an elite and mostly white sliver of a city with a majority black population.

"I suppose it is a suspicious thing, what I've gone and done with the joint," he continued, acknowledging that his decision to "spend millions I have no interest in getting back" on the museum has long been a source of local confusion. More than a few of the 670 residents of Wallace - 90 percent of whom are black, many the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers who worked the region's land - have voiced their bewilderment over the years. So, too, have the owners of other tourist-oriented plantations, all of whom are white. Members of Cummings's close-knit family (he has eight children by two wives) also struggle to clarify their patriarch's motivations, resorting to the shoulder-shrugging logic of "John being John," as if explaining a stubborn refusal to throw away old newspapers rather than a consuming, heterodox and very expensive attempt to confront the darkest period of American history. "Challenge me, fight me on it," he said. "I've been asked all the questions. About white guilt this and that. About the honky trying to profit off of slavery. But here's the thing: Don't you think the story of slavery is important?" With that, Cummings went silent, something he does with unsettling frequency in conversation.

"Well, I checked into it, and I heard you weren't telling it," he finally resumed, "so I figured I might as well get started."

This was a practiced line, but also an earnest form of self-indictment: Cummings's way of admitting his own ignorance on the subject of slavery and its legacy, and by extension encouraging visitors to confront their own. As with the rest of his real estate portfolio, which includes miles of raw countryside and swampland, a 12-story luxury hotel near the French Quarter, a cattle farm in rural Mississippi and a 1,200-acre ranch in West Texas that he has never set foot on, he initially gravitated toward the Whitney simply because it was for sale. ("Whatever Uncle Sam and the bartender let me keep," he likes to note, "I bought real estate with it.") Originally built by the Haydel family, a prosperous clan of German immigrants who ran the property from 1752 to 1867, the grounds had been uninhabited for a quarter century. "I knew I wasn't going to live here," Cummings said as he drove past the blacksmith's shop that he spent $300,000 rebuilding, where a plaque noted that a slave named Robin worked on the plantation for 40 years and where the actor Jamie Foxx, playing a slave in "Django Unchained," was filmed being branded. "But aside from that, I didn't know what I would do with the place."

It takes just a few minutes of conversation with Cummings, however, to understand that he would never have been keen on restoring the Whitney in the mold of neighboring plantations, which rely on weddings and sorority reunions to supplement the income brought in by picnicking tourists. Pet projects he has taken up in recent years include outlining for the Vatican a list of wrongs the Catholic Church should formally apologize for and - to the chagrin of, in his words, "my friends who have all had political sex changes in the past 15 years" - exploring ways to curb the influence of conservative "super PACs." Decades ago, his interest in abuses of power led to his involvement in the civil rights movement; in 1968, he worked alongside African-American activists to get the Audubon Park swimming pool in New Orleans opened to blacks. "If someone is going to deny someone rights simply because they have the power to do it - well, I'm interested," he explained. "I'm coming, and I'm going to bring the cannons."

Still, his plans for the Whitney might have gone in an entirely different direction, if not for the existence of an unlikely document. The property's previous owner was Formosa, a plastics and petrochemical giant, which in 1991 planned to build a $700 million plant for manufacturing rayon on its nearly 2,000 acres. Preservationists and environmentalists balked. Looking for avenues of appeasement, Formosa commissioned an exhaustive survey of the grounds, with the idea that the most historic sections would be turned into a token museum of Creole culture while a majority of the rest would be razed to make way for the factory. In the end, it was wasted money and effort: The opposition remained vigilant, rayon was going out of fashion, the Whitney went back on the market and Cummings inherited the eight-volume study with the purchase. "Thanks to Formosa, I knew more about my plantation than anyone else around here - maybe more than any plantation in America outside of Monticello," said Cummings, a litigator accustomed to teasing secrets from dense paperwork. "A lot of what was in there was about the architecture and artifacts, but you started to see the story of slavery. You saw it in terms of who built what."

After digesting the study, Cummings began reading "any book I could find" about slavery. Particularly influential was "Africans in Colonial Louisiana," by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a professor at Rutgers. Certain details startled Cummings, like the fact that 38 percent of slaves shipped from Africa ended up in Brazil. No wonder, he thought, that the women he watched on television celebrating Carnival in Rio de Janeiro so closely resembled those he saw dancing in the Mardi Gras parades that surrounded him as a youth. "I started to see slavery and the hangover from slavery everywhere I looked," he said. As a descendant of Irish laborers, he has no direct ties to slaveholders; still, in a departure from the views held by many Southern whites, Cummings considered the issue a personal one. "If 'guilt' is the best word to use, then yes, I feel guilt," he said. "I mean, you start understanding that the wealth of this part of the world - wealth that has benefited me - was created by some half a million black people who just passed us by. How is it that we don't acknowledge this?"

Cummings steered the vehicle past the yellowing fronds of banana trees and pulled to a stop in front of a sculpture, a black angel embracing a dead infant, the centerpiece of a memorial honoring the 2,200 enslaved children who died in the parish in the 40 years leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. At traditional museums, such memorials come to fruition only after a lengthy process - proposals by artists, debates among the board members, the securing of funds. This statue, though, like everything on the property, began as a vision in Cummings's mind and became a reality shortly after he pulled out his checkbook. Perhaps most remarkable is that this unconventional model has yielded conventionally effective results: at once chastening and challenging, beautiful and haunting. "Everything about the way the place came together says that it shouldn't work," says Laura Rosanne Adderley, a Tulane history professor specializing in slavery who has visited the Whitney twice since it opened. "And yet for the most part it does, superbly and even radically. Like Maya Lin's memorial, the Whitney has figured out a way to mourn those we as a society are often reluctant to mourn."

Before leaving the grounds, Cummings stopped at the edge of the property's small lagoon. It was here that the Whitney's most provocative memorial would soon be completed, one dedicated to the victims of the German Coast Uprising, an event rarely mentioned in American history books. In January 1811, at least 125 slaves walked off their plantations and, dressed in makeshift military garb, began marching in revolt along River Road toward New Orleans. (The area was then called the German Coast for the high number of German immigrants, like the Haydels.) The slaves were suppressed by militias after two days, with about 95 killed, some during fighting and some after the show trials that followed. As a warning to other slaves, dozens were decapitated, their heads placed on spikes along River Road and in what is now Jackson Square in the French Quarter.

"It'll be optional, O.K.? Not for the kids," said Cummings, who commissioned Woodrow Nash, an African-American sculptor he met at Jazz Fest, to make 60 heads out of ceramic, which will be set atop stainless-steel rods on the lagoon's small island. "But just in case you're worried about people getting distracted by the pretty house over there, the last thing you'll see before leaving here will be 60 beheaded slaves."

The memorial had lately become a source of controversy among locals, who were concerned that it would be too disturbing.

"It is disturbing," Cummings said as he pulled out past Whitney's gate. "But you know what else? It happened. It happened right here on this road."

A nation builds museums to understand its own history and to have its history understood by others, to create a common space and language to address collectively what is too difficult to process individually. Forty-eight years after World War II, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington. A museum dedicated to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks opened its doors in Lower Manhattan less than 13 years after they occurred. One hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, however, no federally funded museum dedicated to slavery exists, no monument honoring America's slaves. "It's something I bring up all the time in my lectures," says Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery." "If the Germans built a museum dedicated to American slavery before one about their own Holocaust, you'd think they were trying to hide something. As Americans, we haven't yet figured out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it's ancient history. To others, it's history that isn't quite history."

These competing perceptions converge with baroque vividness in the South. The State of Mississippi did not acknowledge the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery until 1995 and formally ratified it only in 2013, when a resident was moved to galvanize lawmakers after watching Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln." While some Southern states have passed resolutions apologizing for slavery in the last decade, a majority, Louisiana among them, have not. In 1996, when Representative Steve Scalise, now the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, was serving in the Louisiana State Legislature, he voted against such a bill. "Why are you asking me to apologize for something I didn't do and had no part of?" he remarked at the time. This episode recently came to light amid the revelation that in 2002 he addressed a gathering of white supremacists at a conference organized by David Duke, formerly the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization founded the year the Civil War ended.

Slavery is by no means unmemorialized in American museums, though the subject tends to be lumped in more broadly with African-American history. In 2004, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened in Cincinnati with the mission of showcasing "freedom's heroes." Since 2007, the Old Slave Mart in Charleston, S.C., has operated as a small museum focusing on the early slave trade, on a site where slaves were sold at public auctions until 1863. The National Civil Rights Museum, which opened in Memphis in 1991 and was built around the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, offers a brief section devoted to slavery. Next year, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is scheduled to be dedicated in Washington as part of the Smithsonian Institution, a project supported by $250 million in federal funding; exhibits on slavery will stand alongside those containing a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong and boxing gloves worn by Muhammad Ali. "It has to be said that the end note in most of these museums is that civil rights triumphs and America is wonderful," says Paul Finkelman, a historian who focuses on slavery and the law. "We are a nation that has always readily embraced the good of the past and discarded the bad. This does not always lead to the most productive of dialogues on matters that deserve and require them."

What makes slavery so difficult to think about, from the vantage point of history, is that it was both at odds with America's founding values - freedom, liberty, democracy - and critical to how they flourished. The Declaration of Independence proclaiming that "all men are created equal" was drafted by men who were afforded the time to debate its language because the land that enriched many of them was tended to by slaves. The White House and the Capitol were built, in part, by slaves. The economy of early America, responsible for the nation's swift rise and sustained power, would not have been possible without slavery. But the country's longstanding culture of racism and racial tensions - from the lynchings of the Jim Crow-era South to the discriminatory housing policies of the North to the treatment of blacks by the police today - is deeply rooted in slavery as well. "Slavery gets understood as a kind of prehistory to freedom rather than what it really is: the foundation for a country where white supremacy was predicated upon African-American exploitation," says Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor. "This is still, in many respects, the America of 2015."

In 2001, Douglas Wilder, a former governor of Virginia and the first elected black governor in the nation, announced his intention to build a museum that would be the first to give slavery its proper due - not as a piece of Southern or African-American history but as essential to understanding American history in general. Christened the United States National Slavery Museum, it was to be built on 38 acres along the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Va. Wilder, the grandson of slaves, commissioned C. C. Pei, a son of I. M. Pei, to design the main building, which would be complemented by a full-scale replica of a slave ship. A number of prominent African-Americans, including Bill Cosby, pledged millions of dollars in support at black-tie fund-raisers. The ambition that surrounded the project's inception, however, was soon eclipsed by years of pitfalls. By 2008, there were not enough donations to pay property taxes, let alone begin construction; in 2011, the nonprofit organization in charge of the project filed for bankruptcy protection. As it happens, it was during the same period Wilder's project unraveled that John Cummings, unburdened by any bureaucracies, was well on his way to completing a slavery museum of his own.

For much of the last 13 years, Cummings has been joined on the Whitney's grounds by a Senegalese scholar named Ibrahima Seck. A 54-year-old of imposing height, Seck first met Cummings in 2000, when Seck, who has made regular trips to the South since winning a Fulbright in 1995, attended a talk at Tulane with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, the Rutgers professor. Cummings put up Seck at the International House, the hotel he owns in downtown New Orleans, and invited him to see the Whitney. Though at that point it was little more than a series of decrepit buildings entangled in feral vegetation, Seck was impressed that Cummings was thinking about it exclusively within the context of slavery. As someone from the region of Africa that provided more than 60 percent of Louisiana's slaves, he was disturbed by the way other plantations romanticized the lives of the white owners, with scant mention of the enslaved blacks who harvested the land and built the grand homes fawned over by tourists. After walking the property with Seck for a few hours, Cummings invited him to return to New Orleans the next year to help crystallize the Whitney's mission. Seck took him up on the offer, and for the next decade, Cummings flew Seck in from Africa each year during the scholar's summer vacation.

Since 2012, Seck has lived full time in New Orleans to serve as the director of research for the Whitney. "As historians, we do the research and we write dissertations and we go to conferences, but very little of the knowledge gets out," Seck said one afternoon in his French-inflected baritone while seated on the antique upholstered sofa in the parlor of the property's Big House. "That's why a place like this is so important. Not everyone is willing to read nowadays, but this is an open book." He took a moment to glance around the lavish room, its hand-painted ceiling now meticulously restored. "Every day I think about how remarkable this is," Seck said. "One hundred and fifty years ago, I would not be able to do what I'm doing here now. I would have been a slave."

The alliance between the two men has been an auspicious one, with Seck's patience and expertise serving as a counterbalance to the instinctual eccentricity of Cummings. While Seck researched the Whitney's history, Cummings became something of a hoarder, buying anything he thought might one day be relevant to the project. When he learned about a dilapidated Baptist church in a neighboring parish that was founded by freed slaves in 1867, for example, he brought it across the Mississippi and had it restored on the grounds at a cost of $300,000. When recordings of interviews with former slaves that were made in the 1930s as part of the W.P.A.'s Federal Writers' Project were acquired, Cummings hired a son-in-law who works as a sound engineer in Hollywood to clean them up; he plans to install a speaker system near the slave cabins, where the recordings will play on a loop, allowing visitors to hear the voices of former slaves while staring into the type of homes in which they once lived. After Seck unearthed in old court documents the names of 354 slaves who worked on the land before emancipation, Cummings bought an engraving machine so they could be etched in Italian granite in a memorial he christened the "Wall of Honor."

"By 2005, it was clear to me that we were building a museum, but I'm not sure John was thinking about it in those terms," Seck said. "If John feels something, he just goes ahead and does it. His stubbornness can be frustrating, but who in the world is willing to put so many millions of dollars into a project like this? If you find one, you have to support it."

In his years of working on the Whitney, Seck has come to see the museum as both a memorializing of history and a slyly radical gesture: Cummings's desire to shift the consciousness of others as his own has been altered, and in the process try to make amends of a kind that have been a source of debate since emancipation.

"If one word comes to mind to summarize what is in John's head in doing this," Seck said, "that word would be 'reparations.' Real reparations. He feels there is something to be done in this country to make changes."

In 1835, a biracial child named Victor was born on the grounds of the Whitney, the son of a slave named Anna and Antoine Haydel, the brother of Marie Azelie Haydel, the slaveholder who ran the plantation at the time. One hundred and seventy-nine years later, a group of both the black and white descendants of the Haydels made their way to the Whitney's opening in December. Many were meeting for the first time, and the sight of them embracing and marveling at the similarities in their appearances was as powerful as any memorial on the plantation. Among the black Haydels in attendance was one of Victor's great-grandchildren, Sybil Haydel Morial, a well-known local activist who is the widow of Ernest Morial, the first black mayor of New Orleans, and the mother of Marc Morial, a subsequent mayor. "I was with John when he helped get the pool in Audubon Park opened to blacks," she said in a later conversation. "Now, with the Whitney, he has given us a place where we can come and clear the air. If my slave great-grandfather had lived eight more years, I would have known him. Yet growing up, whenever my elders talked about slavery, they'd always get quiet when we kids were near." Morial added that she hoped "some people around here may find their views changing" after visiting the Whitney, which seemed to be the case with some of her white relatives at the opening.

"I have to say, I was a little offended when I heard that slavery, of all the stories, was going to be the focus," Glynne Couvillion, a white Haydel, said while standing inside the Baptist church, surrounded by dozens of ghostly sculptures of child slaves that Cummings commissioned to represent those interviewed by the Federal Writers' Project as they would have looked when enslaved. "But after today, I'm just in awe and proud to be connected to this place."

For all the time and money Cummings has dedicated to the Whitney - and he is by no means finished, with plans to build an adjacent institute for the study of slavery - the museum was built on a shoestring budget compared with traditionally financed institutions. (The Holocaust Memorial Museum cost about $168 million.) Besides Seck, there were only two full-time staff members, an energetic young woman named Ashley Rogers, who serves as the director, and her deputy, Monique Johnson, a descendant of sharecroppers from the area, and it was evident that they were still finding their footing. Like the other plantations along River Road, the Whitney can be seen only through a guided tour - the cost is $22 - and a number of the docents struggled to find the proper tone. ("Time to depress you a little more," one could be heard saying at various points.) Others struggled to answer questions about how, exactly, sugar cane was harvested by slaves, responding instead with generalities intended to incite emotion rather than educate: "It was the hardest, most grueling slave work imaginable."

Yet this awkwardness might well serve as one of the Whitney's strengths. Talking about slavery and race is awkward, and the museum stands a chance of becoming the rare place where this discomfort can be embraced, and where the dynamic among the mainly mixed-race tours can offer an ancillary form of education. A man who grew up in a "maroon community," as bayou enclaves founded by runaway slaves are known, was so moved during his tour that he volunteered to work as a guide. A young black woman mentioned that she avoided tours at another nearby plantation because an ancestor was lynched on the grounds. Among the Whitney's first visitors was a black man named Paul Brown, whose father was a field hand and who arrived dressed in a sharp blazer and a fedora on opening day "to shake the man's hand who made this place possible." During his tour, he offered personal anecdotes that served to buttress the white guide's skittishness - bringing the past into the present, for instance, by pointing out how the images of slaves etched in one memorial were reminiscent of portraits of his ancestors. "I wish some of my white co-workers would come to this place," he said afterward. "They'd understand me in ways they've failed for 30 years."

Jonathan Holloway, dean of Yale College and a professor of African-American studies, arrived for a tour in late January. He was in the area to give a talk at Louisiana State University about the ways the horrors of slavery are confronted and avoided in heritage tourism, and he found the Whitney to be a "genius step" in a long-overdue direction. "People have tried to do a museum like this for years, and I'm still stunned that this guy made it happen," he said afterward. "There I was, coming down to talk about how in trying to tell the story, it's often one step forward and two steps back, and boom, here's the Whitney." Holloway was particularly taken by the museum's subversive approach. "Having been on a number of tours where the entire focus is on the Big House, the way they've turned the script inside out is a brilliant slipping of the skirt," he said. "The mad genius of the whole thing is really resonant. Is it an art gallery? A plantation tour? A museum? It's almost this astonishing piece of performance art, and as great art does, it makes you stop and wonder."

Cummings, for his part, has been on the grounds every day since the Whitney opened, where he is in the habit of approaching visitors as they enter and telling them how they should feel afterward: "You're not going to be the same person when you leave here" - a line that some found more grating than endearing. Inwardly, though, he was constantly making notes on what could be done to improve the experience.

"Look, we're not perfect, and we've made a lot of mistakes, and we'll make more," he said one afternoon as the sun set across the sugar-cane fields that surround the plantation in much the form they did when slaves worked them 200 years ago. "We need all the help we can get - not financial, but we need brains." With this in mind, he recently started reaching out to prominent African-American academics, hoping to create a board of directors - typically the first step for a museum, not one taken six weeks after opening day. "I'm firing before I'm aiming, O.K.?" he said. "I'm smart enough to know I don't have the answers, but so far it looks like it's the right thing."

Correction: March 1, 2015

Correction: April 5, 2015

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Building the First Slavery Museum in America

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"Like everyone else," John Cummings said a few days earlier, "you're probably wondering what the rich white boy has been up to out here." He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public.