Thrills and spills

Submitted byJeeraik009 onTue, 08/23/2011 - 18:51

Visiting Curacao's  Kura Hulanda Museum  devoted to slavery should be compulsory. It's a specialist museum with collections that focus on the African slave trade and the fate of displaced blacks once transported to the New World. Beginning with a small display that documents man's earliest civilisations, the viewer is invited to meander through galleries that move through time and space telling the story of Europe's intervention in Africa; the establishment of the triangular trade in sugar, cotton and human chattel, and the attrocities that attended the Middle Passage crossing from that continent to the Americas. Collections are rich with historical artifacts as well as life-size installations that invoke the horrors of bondage. In later galleries devoted to the 20th century, viewers come to see how resistance to slavery and Jim Crow oppression were directly tied to the emergence of political movements such as Marcus Garvey's UNIA and Stokely Carmichael's Black Panthers. Finally, the display ends with exquisitely curated modern spaces filled with African artifacts that emphasise Africa's heritage and a culture that its African Diaspora can be proud of. The Kura Hulanda Museum provides an education that no one should miss – an alternative to Disney World – that shows how we are all implicated in this history of wealth and woe. View more pictures from the museum