A walk of remembrance will weave through the streets of Liverpool city centre on Saturday 23 August 2025, bringing communities together to mark Slavery Remembrance Day.
Coordinated by National Museums Liverpool, the walk will comprise key sites around the city, pausing for moments of reflection, performance and historic insight, before culminating with a masquerade and libation, performed at the historic waterfront.
This year’s commemoration is launched by award-winning writer, psychologist, group analyst and thinker, Guilaine Kinouani, who will deliver the Dorothy Kuya Slavery Remembrance Memorial Lecture on Friday 22 August, at 5.30 at Liverpool Town Hall.
Tickets for the lecture are available to book here.
Guilaine’s lecture, “Remembering without Remembering: the Kongo, enslavement, absence, presence, resistance”, is an exploration of the impact of transatlantic slavery on the Kongo Kingdom. Guilaine will argue that a focus on West Africa has created a hegemony and almost erasure in understanding of the legacy – geopolitically, culturally and environmentally – of transatlantic slavery within Central Africa.
Guilaine Kinouani said: “Outside of our conscious awareness, and despite a collective act of ‘forgetting’, the Kongo persists. It is ever-present in the mist of its absence. The disavowed enslavement and brutalisation of the region can be felt in the soil that carried these millions of trembling and shackled feet.
“For the Dorothy Kuya Slavery Remembrance Memorial Lecture I will explore the erasure of this history and the fundamental paradox of absence and presence; what it can teach us about death, life and resistance, and, critically, what it might mean to ‘remember without remembering’.”
International Slavery Museum and Maritime Museum are now closed for a major redevelopment as part of National Museums Liverpool’s Waterfront Transformation Project.
Michelle Charters OBE, Head of International Slavery Museum said: “While our museum doors are closed for redevelopment it feels more necessary than ever for this act of recognition and commemoration to take place. Everybody is welcome to join us on the Walk of Remembrance, lively with colour, music and meaning, and explore the streets of the city we know so well with deeper understanding.
“This year we’re also honoured to welcome Guilaine Kinouani, as keynote speaker at the Dorothy Kuya Slavery Remembrance Memorial Lecture. Guilaine brings her unique and powerful voice to what promises to be an unforgettable event.”
A book event for ‘Searching for my Slave Roots’ by Malik Al Nasir will also take place at the Walker Art Gallery on 23 August 2025, from 5-7pm. Malik will explore the main themes of his fascinating new book. Following the twists and turns of his journey into the past, a major subject of the book is the nuanced ways that trauma plays down through generations of the enslaved, and how wealth and privilege plays across generations of slaveholders and their descendants. Announced by the University of Cambridge as the winner of the Vice-Chancellor’s Global Impact Award for his research, in ‘Searching for my Slave Roots’ Malik unravels not just the legacies of slavery but also plantation economics and the wealth of a slaveholding dynasty. The event is supported by the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, a strategic partnership between National Museums Liverpool and University of Liverpool.
Liverpool has marked Slavery Remembrance Day on 23 August since 1999. Designated by UNESCO, this internationally recognised date marks an uprising of enslaved Africans on the island of Saint Domingue (modern Haiti) in 1791. The date serves as a reminder that enslaved Africans were the main agents of their own liberation.
Liverpool was the European capital of transatlantic slavery, responsible for half of Britain’s trade. The ships set sail from Liverpool with goods and franchise, which were exchanged for enslaved men, women and children on the Atlantic coast, who were then taken across the ocean on a horrendous journey known as ‘The Middle Passage’. Slavery Remembrance Day acknowledges this major period of trauma and injustice in world history which has all too often been forgotten – or not even acknowledged.
Each year Slavery Remembrance Day invites a speaker to deliver the prestigious Dorothy Kuya Slavery Remembrance Memorial Lecture. Previous speakers have included: Mr Martin Luther King III, award-winning film director Amma Asante, renowned activist and scholar Dr Maulana Karenga, civil rights campaigner Diane Nash, Zimbabwe’s first Black cricketer Henry Olonga, poet Lemn Sissay, author and musician Akala, and historian, David Olusoga. In 2024 the lecture was led by photographer, artist, filmmaker, public speaker and historian, Fiona Compton.
Find out more about Liverpool’s renowned human rights and anti-racism activist, Dorothy Kuya, here.
Slavery Remembrance Day events:
• Dorothy Kuya Slavery Remembrance Memorial Lecture, 22 August 2025, 5.30 at Liverpool Town Hall
• Walk of Remembrance, 23 August 2025, 12 noon, meet at Liverpool Playhouse theatre
• Searching For My Slave Roots by Malik Al Nasir book event, 23 August 2025, 5-7pm at Walker Art Gallery
For a full programme of events and specially commissioned creative commissions: www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/