When I arrived in Martinique I found that the country does a great job of teaching visitors about its past, including is slave history. One of the sites at the top of my list to visit was the Anse Cafard Slave Memorial. This famed memorial by Laurent Valere was completed in 1998 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the the emancipation of the slaves in the French West Indies. It is dedicated to the African slaves that drowned when a ship capsized in April 1830 attempting to sneak them in at night; the importation of new slaves was illegal by that time. Most of the ship’s “cargo” was in fact the over 40 men, women and children who were chained in the ship’s hull when it crashed into Diamond Rock mountain.
The memorial is comprised of 20, 8 ft tall statues that are seemingly hunched over and angled toward the sea. As you can see, visitors can go up to the structures to touch them and take pictures.
Will you be visiting? What types of things are must do’s when you go to a new place?
