2007 is a banner year in the UK. I'd be surprised if any of you could guess exactly why. It could be so many things- it's a country with a long history. In fact their history is our history, and that's precisely why this anniversary is so very important. In fact, 2007 is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain. Although that act was passed in 1807, a lot of things had been leading up to it. If you want a good short history you can check Wikipedia :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism.
When I was in 2nd grade I had a teacher whose name was Miss L'Esperance. One day I came to school (on the army base in Germany) and she told us that that week we'd be studying about Africa and slavery. She started out by telling us that a few hundred years ago people who lived in Africa were sometimes purchase at markets, sometimes kidnapped, to be sold as slaves in the Americas. I just couldn't believe her- after all, what kind of story is that to make up? It sounded like nonsense- even I could see that. Why would anyone want to do something like that? It just didn't make sense to me, and I remember going home that day after we'd made our 2nd grade versions of African masks and things and telling my mom what Miss L'Esperance had said. I remember saying something like, "Mom, you won't believe what our teacher tried to tell us today. She said that black people from Africa were kidnapped and sold as slaves in America!" And my mom told me that it was true....I just couldn't wrap my 7 year old brain around the idea that people would kidnap other people and sell them as slaves. Why? Why would anyone do that? I've never forgotten that day that we learned about slavery- when you are a child things just make sense or they don't, and it seems so clear and so simple that stealing people from their homes and selling them isn't right, and that no one would do that. But unfortunately it was the truth, a horrible truth that affects our country, and others, even though it seems like so long ago.
I was reminded of all of this yesterday when we took G's mom to see Ely Cathedral. It was a school day event, so there were 300 children in the cathedral learning not only about slavery in the past, but about slavery now. Slavery exists in many forms, and in the UK and the US still. It looks different, and may be under the surface, but it's there. Not to mention the world wide capture, abduction, and selling of women and girls for the sex trade, even here in the UK. It's absolutely horrible.
We took the Octogon Tower tour as we usually do when we bring visitors, and they start you out with a short tour of the cathedral. But as our tour started the British African woman was teaching a beautiful slave song called "Freedom" to the children who were assembled there. It was so beautiful that I stopped listening to the tour guy, and listened to her singing and the children singing with her and I have to say that I was deeply moved by it. There in front of mostly white little faces was the descendant of slaves, sharing her song with them, and engaging their concern for slavery which is still going on all over the world. I thought back to my experience as a child and wondered what those little children would tell their parents when they got home. Would they tell them about how many people are still slaves all over the world? Would they remember the facts that they learned in the hide and seek games around the cathedral? Would the evil and yet the reality of slavery stick in their minds as it did in mine? I hope that it does.
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