Le Morne Cultural Landscape was registered as a World Heritage by UNESCO in 2008. Indeed, Mauritius, an important stopover in the eastern slave trade, also came to be known as the “Maroon republic” because of the large number of escaped slaves who lived on Le Morne Mountain. The oral traditions associated with the maroons have made Le Morne a symbol of the slaves’ fight for freedom, their suffering, and their sacrifice, all of which have relevance to the countries from which the slaves came - the African mainland, Madagascar, India, and South-east Asia. Protected by the mountain’s isolated, wooded and almost inaccessible cliffs, the escaped slaves formed small settlements in the caves and on the summit of Le Morne. Le Morne Cultural Landscape, a rugged mountain that juts into the Indian Ocean in the southwest of Mauritius was used as a shelter by runaway slaves, maroons, through the 18th and early years of the 19th centuries. This International Day is intended to inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of all peoples and should offer an opportunity for collective consideration of the historic causes, the methods and the consequences of this tragedy, as much as for an analysis of the interactions to which it has given rise between Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean confronting realistically the innate social dynamics and discrepencies. In 1997 UNESCO established the 23rd of August as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.
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