There will be no street parties or popping of champagne corks in Britain to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome. The best that this country could manage was a half-hearted friendly football match between a Manchester United team and a motley collection of European footballers.
The former slave Olaudah Equiano was a key figure in the British campaign to end slavery.
March marks the 200th anniversary of the act of parliament that officially ended direct British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. The act of 1807 made it illegal for a British ship to transport captive Africans across the Atlantic for sale into slavery.
Africans resisted slavery at every point. There were rebellions on board the ships that carried them across the oceans, which often resulted in the cruelest retaliation. But it was on the plantations that the most serious challenges to the slave economy took place.
Very few people these days would question the barbarity of the Atlantic slave trade. Nor can anyone easily deny that vast profits were made from slave labour in the plantations.
In the coming months, it will be hard to turn on the television or pick up a newspaper in Britain without seeing some mention of the 200th anniversary of parliament’s abolition of the slave trade. A flood of forums, lecture series, museum exhibitions and commemorative ceremonies are also marking this event.
Here are articles about the revolt against slavery including Adam Hochschild and Marika Sherwood, on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire.
‘If you take a step back and look at how the political landscape has changed over the past couple of years you can see how much has been achieved. Climate change was barely mentioned during the last general election. Now it seems to be top of many people’s priority lists.
Gordon Brown is in competition with David Cameron as to which party takes global warming more seriously.
The Trial, perhaps Franz Kafka’s finest literary accomplishment, draws us into the strange and yet oddly familiar world of its protagonist, Josef K.
On Tuesday 6 March Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to achieve its freedom, commemorated 50 years of independence from Britain. In 1957 Kwame Nkrumah, the man who led the nation’s freedom struggle, declared, "The independence of Ghana is meaningless until it is linked with the total liberation of Africa."
