On Friday, as part of the National Day of Remembrance of the Human Trafficking, Slavery and their Abolitions, a bronze statue made by the young Haitian sculptor Caymitte Woodly aka "Filipo" from Port-au-Prince, was unveiled at a ceremony on a quay of the Garonne in the heart of the city from where leave at the time, the boats of the shipowners in the era of the slave trade.

After a bust of Toussaint Louverture, donation of Haiti inaugurated in 2005, this second statue commemorating slavery in Bordeaux is much more prominent than the first, located on the left bank at the level of the Stock Exchange.

This statue on a human scale, made in a Girondin workshop, represents Modeste Testas (1765-1870), a slave with exeption path "It was important that this work testifies to the experience of a slave with an exceptional path in connection with Bordeaux" said Marik Fetouh, Deputy Mayor in charge of Equality and Citizenship.

By choosing to achieve a status in the effigy of Modest Testas, the City of Bordeaux who deported up to 150,000 slaves between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries wanted to place an extremely strong symbol in the heart of the public space and give back a human face to those slaves who were considered at the time as objects.

Learn more about Modeste Testas :

Born in 1765 in East Africa, she was not yet called Modeste Testas but "Al Pouessi", was captured young during a raid, then transported to West Africa to be sold to the Testas brothers, Bordeaux owners of a sugar factory on the island of Haiti called at the time "Santo Domingo" where she was later deported.

François Testas took Modeste in 1795 to the United States shortly before dying there. Modeste was emancipated by will, but also forced to marry another slave. She died at the age of 105 on the land she had inherited. One of his grandchildren, François Denys Légitime, became President of Haiti in 1888-1889.

See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-20917-haiti-politics-mayor-chevry-celebrates-the-abolition-of-slavery-in-la-rochelle.html

HL/ S/ HaitiLibre