While statues of slave traders or former settlers are unbolted in Bristol, Boston or Miami, Bordeaux prefers "memorial pedagogy". This former slave port, one of the largest in Europe, affixed, on June 11, explanatory plaques on five streets in the name of slave traffickers. 

For the rue David-Gradis (1665-1751), a plaque explains that he armed ten ships for the slave trade but that he also bought land which became the first Jewish cemetery in the city. "It is for this reason and because his descendants were also Bordeaux notables that his name was given to this street."

"Racism was born out of the slave trade," said Marik Fetouh, deputy mayor responsible for equality and the fight against discrimination. "Racism is there to justify the human trade and the classification between superior and inferior."

Like Nantes or La Rochelle, the Girondine capital prospered on the slave trade, with 508 slave expeditions, but also the lucrative trade in colonial commodities produced by slaves. From 1672 to 1837, 120,000 to 150,000 African slaves were deported to the Americas by shipowners from Bordeaux.

An effort to remember started ten years ago 

These five plaques are part of an effort to remember that began a decade ago, after a "memorial journey" within the city, rooms dedicated to slavery at the Musée d'Aquitaine or the installation of 'a statue of Modeste Testas, a slave deported to Santo Domingo.

"The actions that the city of Bordeaux has implemented in recent years have been strong," admits Karfa Diallo, founder of Mémoires et Partages, an association that has been pushing local politicians for the past twenty years to face this shadow. . 

Karfa Diallo would now like the initiative to cover around twenty streets, including "those who lived on slavery, who owned colonial plantations in America".

 "Rename a street"

At the beginning of June, he had sent an "open letter" to the municipal candidates from the former slave ports of Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Le Havre and Marseille, as well as Biarritz, where he denounced a district called La Négresse.

"It is urgent to rename, or at least to explain and to contextualize, the hundred streets, squares, districts and monuments which in France violate the republican principles and feed the foul beast of racism", he wrote.

But today, he thinks, recent anti-racist movements "demand that a symbol fall," he said, asking "that we rename a street" in these cities. We must "respond to the impatience of this youth who is shaking us up," he says.

With AFP

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