Sophie Nadeau
As the world marks the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, a University of Ottawa communications professor will draw upon a one-million dollar grant over five years to continue his research about the black experience in Canada during the 19th century.
Professor Boulou Ebanda de B'béri won the grant from the Community-University Research Alliances program, created by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, to study the freedom experience of blacks in the Chatham and Dawn Settlements of Southern Ontario.
A Cameroon native who joined uOttawa in 2004, Professor Boulou Ebanda de B'béri, began working on the project in 2005 and says “it is a marvellous misfortune” that the anniversary coincides with the funding announcement.
“It is a bittersweet moment. The abolition anniversary allows us to recall a good moment linked to very sad things that happened to humanity and unfortunately, there hasn’t been a lot of attention to the issue,” says Prof. Boulou Ebanda de B'béri. “Canada was a country in which we had both slaves and freedom fighters.”
The Chatham and Dawn settlements, often known as the “Promised Land” communities, were home to a significant group of people of African descent in the 1800s. The settlements are linked with stories about the Underground Railroad and the people who used it to escape from slavery in the United States to Canada - a part of a much larger story.
The "Promised Land" communities generated powerful ideologies of freedom, identity, and citizenship. From this philosophical crucible, black Canadian women and men in the 19th century worked to abolish slavery in the United States, and to protect civil rights in Canada. Though the communities themselves were small, they were the vital centre of a culture of justice that drew interracial support and forged links of freedom across the United States and Britain.
Despite the importance of these communities in creating and defining Canada's multicultural character, only fragments of this connected history have been explored. Much of it remains locked in rich but fragile primary sources, and little has found its way into Canada's national memory.
The Promised Land project will address this problem of "historical amnesia." The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of community and university researchers whose goal is to recover the fullness, interconnectedness and significance of black history in these communities. The overall aim is to highlight the historical importance of the Promised Land as an unrecognized and central story in Canada's past, and to draw attention to its current relevance as a model of multiculturalism in a global age. It will preserve and make accessible primary sources, develop educational materials and create community projects in the arts and public history.
The information gathered from the project will be housed on an open-access server at Professor Boulou Ebanda de B’béri’s Media Lab for the Study of Cultures and Societies, which was jointly funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Research Fund.
For more information about this project, please write to: b.debberi@uOttawa.ca.
