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Service to Commemorate the bicentenary of the Abolition of
the Slave Trade Act, Westminster
Tuesday 27 March 2007. By Revd. Lindsey Sanderson
Eleven Scots, church
leaders, members of the Scottish Churches Forum, members of the ACTS 2007
working group and staff, travelled to
The service, at which Her
Majesty the Queen, the Prime Minister and other political figures were present,
contained elements of remembering, reflecting and responding and used extracts
from ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano’, the most well
known black abolitionist, one of William Wilberforce’s speeches, as well as
Scripture and the personal testimony of Cleophas Mally, from Anti-Slavery
International about his experience as a child domestic worker in Togo in the
1950s. In the prayers abolitionists
known and unknown, black and white were remembered, as were nations still
affected by the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade and people who
endure modern forms of slavery. In his
address, the Most Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, said that
people are born for freedom and that we in
Music was an integral and
highly symbolic part of the worship with an orchestra playing the music of Le
Chevalier de Saint George, an Afro-French composer and abolitionist, an
Adventist Choir singing African American Spirituals, two specially commissioned
pieces which used texts from the Bible, John Netwon and Equiano and Efiba Arts
played West African drums in a deafening rhythm at the close of the service .
Perhaps the most moving though was the sounding of the elephant horns from the
Quire Screen. These horns were used to warn communities of the coming of a
slave raiding party in
Within the service, 1807
and 2007 were linked together through word, music, prayer and reflection. For
those of us there from