THE Unesco  International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition is marked on August 23 each year. The date was chosen to link to the Haiti uprisings which subsequently led to abolition of the enslavement of African people.

The tumultuous history that Haiti has had to face had continued to the present day with the devastating impacts of the recent earthquake leaving hundreds dead yet again — and the Haitian people who have survived crying out in response to the absence of support.

I work within Unesco as a member of the Unesco Coalition of Artists for the General History of Africa. Unesco published 13 volumes of the history of Africa which were little known. They established the coalition as a way for multi-genre artists to use their platforms to promote the volumes as they felt that if young black people on the continent and across the diaspora understood their history, the great empires and achievements of the continent, this would go some way towards countering the racism and injustice they face today.

As part of the International Day and all year round, education is crucial — especially here in Britain. Because we have been written out of the history books, we have had to fight to defend the display, promotion and honouring of black historical figures, movements and histories.

The legacies of enslavement are starkly exposed at times of crisis, such as now in Haiti, but are present and impacting on the African diaspora globally at all times, including here in Britain.

Last year in the midst of a summer where the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets in protest at George Floyd’s murder but also the onslaught of discrimination and human rights abuses faced by black communities in every aspect of life, I had the honour of giving the International Slavery Museum’s Dorothy Kuya memorial lecture, available online at www.mstar.link/zita. The issues I spoke about then are 100 per cent relevant today, a year later.

The legacies of enslavement of African people exist not just in the display and glorification of statues of those who profited from our ancestors’ torture and murder, but also in the systems,  policies and laws of these lands.

Ten years of austerity amplified by the pandemic on top of institutional racism in employment, has meant that black people are more like to contract and die of Covid and also more likely to be in low-paid precarious  jobs and more likely to lose their job as a result.

The so-called hostile environment and Britain’s immigration laws and policies see us in the midst of a summer of suffering and mass-deportation flights. Already there have been weekly deportation flights to Zimbabwe, Vietnam and Jamaica — and on August 25 there will be a second summer deportation flight to Zimbabwe.

When we say “black lives matter” it isn’t just a hashtag but a rallying call for change, justice and equality. Yet off the back of protests last summer, we have seen institutions fast to brandish these three words as a slogan to confirm their anti-racist credentials but little action to address systemic racism. When they fail to be part of the solution, they are part of the problem.

Anti-racism and tackling the legacies that have led to the discrimination and injustice we face today cannot be achieved through tick box lip service or self-congratulatory slogans. Organisations and governments  must engage with and listen to those with lived experience  of racism and of tackling it.

On Saturday August 14 I was one of the unofficial tour guides and speakers at the “BP not BP” organised protest tour of the British Museum. One aspect of the tour was to highlight the colonial era-pillaged and stolen artefacts housed by the museum which Britain  refuses to return.

Not only did the museum close the Africa Galleries because we were coming but they like other institutions issued a statement last year in support of Black Lives Matter and black communities in which they declared they connected with us spirit and soul.

The souls of our ancestors linger in the galleries of the museum and the legacies of colonialism are evident in the way in which migrant and black and brown workers find themselves on the bottom rung of a three-tier workforce with lower pay and worse terms and conditions.

Institutions cannot speak about connecting with our struggles and trauma because of racism if they are content to profit off the blood of our ancestors and the pain of our lived experience today.

Some of those people targeted for mass deportations this summer are the victims of slavery today — including women who have survived human trafficking and young black people who are the victims of modern-day slavery due to county lines.

So, in marking this annual event we must remember those who passed, recognise the legacies of the African Maafa and how they pass to future generations impacting on life chances, acknowledge the brave actions of those subjected to enslavement who resisted such as Toussaint L’Overture and work for race equality in our lifetime and opposition to modern-day slavery.

When we talk about reparations for enslavement of African people, people often mistake this as being purely about individual financial compensation.

Financial compensation is a factor and we should not forget that upon abolition of the trading of enslaved African people  and the transatlantic slave trade, it was those doing the enslaving that were compensated — the equivalent to millions in today’s money which saw successive generations of descendants of those doing the enslaving financially secure to this day.

However, reparations are also about education, healing, equity and an end to the onslaught of disadvantage, discrimination and injustice and making reparations for those past atrocities in varied ways, like the British Museum returning the Benin Bronzes.

Zita Holbourne is national vice-president of the PCS, national chair of Barac UK and joint national chair of the Artists Union England.