Africa-Press – Cape verde. Cape Verde will apply in November for documents on slavery to UNESCO’s International Memory of the World Register, hoping to make a contribution to humanity, official sources said this Wednesday.
Cape Verde will apply to UNESCO for documents on slavery in November
“ It will be a contribution from Cape Verde to the study, to humanity, to the African continent, to people of African descent, but also to the consolidation of the items that lead us to shape our national identity”, stated the Minister of Culture and of Cape Verdean Creative Industries, Abraão Vicente.
The government official was speaking to the press, in Praia, on the sidelines of the presentation of the new website of the National Archives of Cape Verde and the presentation of the proposal for candidacy of documents on slavery to the United Nations Educational Organization’s International Memory of the World Registry, Science and Culture (UNESCO).
According to the Ministry of Culture, the candidacy proposal includes four boxes of separate documents, 12 handwritten books registering slaves on all nine inhabited islands of the archipelago, dating from the end of slavery in the colonies.
But there is also a handwritten book dated 1858 referring to the Charters of Freedoms given by the General Government of the Province of Cape Verde and another of Oath Records of the Mixed Luso-British Commission for the abolition of the slave trade, dated from 1843 to 1849.
For the minister, this is a “significant advance” since the creation of the National Commission for the Memory of the World, in which his Ministry accepted the proposal from the Pedro Pires Institute to evaluate the inscription of Amílcar Cabral’s writings in the memory of the world , whose candidacy will also be formalized next November.
Abraão Vicente said that it is not enough to say that Cape Verde was a slave settlement or that it has a mixed culture and that it plays a “ fundamental role ” in history, without showing the facts and data.
“ And we believe that the National Archive gains relevance here in what are the structures of the Ministry of Culture and the State, in the sense of being able to make a concrete contribution to bringing to light all aspects of a country with more than 550 years of history ” , he stated.
The minister said that the presentation of this candidacy will institutionally consolidate the role of the National Archive in the construction of Cape Verde’s identity as a Nation.
For the president of the Institute of the National Archives of Cape Verde (IANCV), José Maria Borges, when approved, the candidacy “ will be of great value to the country ”, because this documentation will become the property of humanity.
According to the same source, this process shows the work that is done by archivists in organizing and processing this documentation and making it available for access and research.
José Maria Borges said he was “ confident ” that the application will be accepted, arguing that the institution is carrying out a series of activities, together with regional and international partners, but also that the person responsible for this area participates in several events.
“ The national archive has already done its work internally, it already has a team that is working on this documentation for submission ”, he said.
Created in 1988, the National Archive was transformed into a public institute in 2020, with 6,000 linear meters of shelves where it stores documentation from the colonial period, and its “main mission is to collect, organize, conserve and disseminate the national archival heritage ”. The Week with Lusa
For More News And Analysis About Cape verde Follow Africa-Press
