Today, we took a 1.5 hour train ride from Périgueux to Bordeaux to see a city that has a huge area under UNESCO Heritage Listing. Bordeaux is classified "City of Art and History". The city is home to 362 monuments historiques (only Paris has more in France) with some buildings dating back to Roman times. Bordeaux has been inscribed on UNESCO World Heritage List as "an outstanding urban and architectural ensemble". For your education, Bordeaux is France's ninth largest city with a population of 240,000.
Alain Juppé was mayor of Bordeaux from 1995-97... and set in motion an ambitious renovation of the city centre... that led to UN recognition. He cleared areas to make plazas... he redesigned inner city transport system... he stream-cleaned hundreds of monuments... and created many pedestrian malls. Bordeaux grew from being a 'don't go' city on the tourist map... to being one of France's fastest growing tourist destinations. The city's clean-up is continuing to this day. We loved the feel of the place... its history is presented in a fashion that shows much care and planning.
For us, the surprise of the day was the museum rooms dealing with France's role in the Slave Trade. Bordeaux could easily have tried to sweep the unflattering Slave trade chapter of its history under the carpet. After all, the Muslims started it... and in the European league, France was always a second division player. Bordeaux was France's second-largest slave port in those times, sending out about 500 ships to ply the slave trade. During the slave period, Bordeaux accumulated a number of African-France citizens. Eventually (in 2009), some from that community demanded greater recognition be given to this undesirable period... asking for street names honouring leading slave traders to be changed... and erection of a monument acknowledging the past. Our renovation hero, Alain Juppé, thought that was going too far... you can't humiliate a family just because they sold a few slaves... goodness me... where will it all end.
After Alain Juppé's period as mayor, the next administration gave the slave descendants a better hearing... and organised a display of the history in the archaeological museum. We found this section of the museum very interesting... the statistics were horrifying... the life stories emotional. During our visit we saw a few African-France citizens having difficulty coping with the emotional side of their visit. The numbers of enslaved people were staggering... statistics are unreliable... somewhere between 9 million and 20 million Africans were taken into slavery... the wide disparity between 9 and 20 million could reflect, in part, the number of deaths during the voyage. We saw a statement that the number of slaves the French transported to the French West Indies was 13,000 per annum... but their reputation today suffers because they were involved.
Anyway, good on Bordeaux for facing up to its past... and acknowledging the wrong done to the ancestors of their African-France citizens.
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