Bordeaux (AFP)

None of the former French slave ports had yet done so: Bordeaux has affixed explanatory plaques on five streets in the name of slave traffickers, an effort to remember hailed by anti-racism activists even if some would like to go further in full swing " black lives matter ".

While a statue of a slave trader was unbolted in Bristol (Great Britain), or others of Christopher Columbus attacked in Boston or Miami, Bordeaux prefers "memorial pedagogy", explains Marik Fetouh, deputy mayor in charge equality and the fight against discrimination.

For the rue David-Gradis (1665-1751) for example, 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 notable Bordeaux that his name was given to this street".

Racism was born with the slave trade, says Marik Fetouh, "racism is there to justify the trade in human beings and the classification between superior and inferior beings".

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.

And these five plaques are part of an effort to remember that began ten years 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 who has been pushing local politicians for twenty years to face this shadow.

"It took time, but it touches my heart," said Rose Bayang, of the Collectif du 10 mai which advocates a "responsible" commemoration.

Mr. Diallo campaigned in all cities for explanatory street signs: "We have always been welcomed except that for ten years, they have never done anything".

Bordeaux has passed the act but he accuses the city of having hung these plaques "on the sly" on Wednesday, even if the initiative had been announced in December.

- "Rename a street" -

"There is an embarrassment of this municipal team on the issue and this embarrassment is manifested by a failed act", he denounces, asking that the initiative concerns about twenty streets, including "those who have lived from slavery, who owned colonial plantations in America. "

At the beginning of June, he had sent an "open letter" to the municipal candidates of 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.

The other ancient hubs of slavery also defend their memory work.

In La Rochelle, the private mansion of a slave shipowner was bought by the City to make it the New World museum, "the first or among the first cities to devote such a space" to the subject, underlines the curator Mélanie Moreau .

Nantes "had organized in 1992 the first international exhibition on the Trafficking and slavery in Europe", recalls Olivier Château, Deputy Heritage.

"When we let the unsaid remain, these wounds prevent the rapprochement of the French in their diversity", thinks Jean-Marc Ayrault, former mayor (1989-2012) and president of the Foundation for the memory of escalation .

pjl-rns / ff / cbn

© 2020 AFP