Teaching About Mary Prince

Before Teachers prepare to approach this important subject, it is really worth looking at the Teaching pack because it has some excellent advice for any educator.  This resource pack accompanies the Abolition 07 exhibition at Hackney Museum. The exhibition explores the history of Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and the legacy of slavery in 2007.

This pack explores the British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and some of the forgotten heroes in history who helped to abolish it, both male and female, black and white. It provides access points into the study of the transatlantic slave trade. It will enable you and your students to explore this important but largely forgotten part of everyone’s past. The legacy of enslavement lingers today so the bicentenary should have a profound significance for people of the African Diasporas and others all over the world.

“We slept in a long shed, divided into narrow slips, like the stalls used for cattle. Boards fixed upon stakes driven into the ground, without mat or covering, were our only beds. On Sundays, after we had washed the salt bags, and done other work required of us, we went into the bush and cut the long soft grass, of which we made trusses for our legs and feet to rest upon, for they were so full of the salt boils that we could get no rest lying upon the bare boards.”

Further Reading
The Classic Slave Narratives, edited and with an Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1987, Penguin Books

Bermuda—Five Centuries by Rosemary Jones, 2004, Panatel VDS Ltd., Bermuda

The History of Mary Prince—A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, edited with an introduction by Moira Ferguson, 1997, the University of Michigan Press

The History of Mary Prince—A West Indian Slave, edited with an introduction by Sara Salih, 2004, Penguin Books.

“Mary Prince—A Model of Courage and Independence” by Dr. Moira Ferguson, The Bermudian, May 1994.

“Slave story ‘exciting discovery’”—The Mid-Ocean News, January 8, 1988, pages 1,9.

“The Write Stuff” by Sandra Campbell, The Bermudian magazine, April 2000.

‘They bought me as a butcher would a calf or lamb’ by Sara Wajid, The Guardian,  October 19, 2007