The slave trade, lasting nearly five long centuries, cost the life of million men, women and children, captured and then embarked upon the Atlantic Ocean to be sold as slaves. The triangular trade between Europe, Africa and America allowed the enrichment of not only many European port cities, (one being Nantes, the first slave trade port in France and the second port in the world), but also of a big part of the American colonies. This forced migration had enormous effects on the course of history by the generalization of constraint and racial discrimination, those in which are the exchanges between civilizations, by devoting a model of deculturation and acculturation, and on the development of the concerned areas.

To revive the forgotten memories…

However, this most tragic chapter in the history of humanity mainly remained occulted, even if, especially since the last ten years, the demonstrations intended to revive the memory multiplied under the impulse of a single passion to planetary scales. The memory of it does not remain less than the work of it, and it should not be undertaken from the point of view of settling score memorials, not as a competition of the victims, no, and even less by flaunting the sceptre of wars and unpardonable memories.

So that history does not repeat itself…

Beyond the construction of a statue, a monument or a right of access to the files, it is rather a question of imagining a way of managing a past, seized like a human inheritance, to take on together. A strong testimony about slavery remains to build by opening a space which encompasses the memory lapse and incomprehension in a spirit of openness and objectivity. It should make it possible for everyone to make it their duty to remember, to mourn a history that nobody can rewrite, and to more importantly, contribute to educate present generations so that history is not repeated.

The Brotherhood Boat is a tool to break silence

Our Brotherhood Boat is the counterpart of an 18th century slave trade ship. It is conceived as a teaching tool and an education that responds to the task of memory and of essential education for today and tomorrow on a planetary scale, and equal to what the slave trade was and to the handling of the slaves. A true cultural platform, international and touring, it will help to break the silence so that, by learning about the past, the young generations can better include/understand the present and prepare their future in the full conscience of their history.

To give direction to the past and to better build the future

State, NGO, community, association, university, high school, grade school, socio-cultural center, enterprise citizen, ordinary citizen…, each one can with their way of working give direction to the important duty to remember, which is essential. The challenge of the Brotherhood Boat is to highlight the undeniable complementary of the relations between history and memory as a means of appropriation of the past, but more especially to promote the education of the generations of today, to prohibit forever the reproduction of diagrams which standardize modern slavery and discriminations of all kinds.

While subscribing to the online charter of the Brotherhood Boat you also become an actor of a unique initiative, fundamental and citizen.