Use memory to heal History and avoid repeating its dark periods In choosing to evoke French Guyana and the peoples of Amazonia, we must, from Bordeaux, face up to the historical ties that connect us, across the ocean, to a community of destiny. Bordeaux, like the other major ports that were once slave ports, bears in its memory the responsibility for the deportation of 150,000 black slaves to the Americas from 1672 to 1837. As many downfalls of the world experienced by African peoples, uprooted from their lands, uprooted from their identity and condemned to survive in despair. As a door of no-return.... They knew, once they passed, that they would not come back. In Brazil, Suriname, Guyana... their goal was to run away in the forest to resist, to take refuge in nature, to take root there and find a place they could name home;
to rebuild a human community, far from this nightmare, among the first root peoples. It's the story of the Maroons of Guyana, BushinenguĂŠs, "Blacks of the forest", Lowe nengue, "those who fled slavery", Bonis, Garifunas, Saramakas, Alukus, Ndyuka... They are all communities rich from their beliefs, their art and crafts, their vision of the world, their knowledge, their knowhow, in short their identity, from which we have so much to learn, without falling into the angelic idealization of the "good savage". An identity, today, that seeks to reinvent itself between acculturation and tradition, to find its way beyond integration and disintegration; the challenge is complex.
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