#anguilla

European Eel (Anguilla anguilla), family Anguillidae, order Angulliformes, River Severn, England, UK

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED.

On this day in 1834, slavery was abolished in the British Empire. Britain played a key role in the dehumanisation, oppression and trading of West African slaves. The British Empire was built on this slavery. The British Government paid slaveowners and their descendants reparations up until 2015, whilst descendants of slaves, including the Windrush Generation, were given nothing. Slaveowner statues and streets named after them still exist in the UK to this day.

Emancipation Day is celebrated by various West Indian countries that were colonised and brutalised by the British Empire: Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, Belize, the Bahamas, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Anguilla, Guyana, Turks and Caicos and the Cayman Islands.

It is also celebrated by Black people in other parts of the diaspora such as Canada, the USA and South Africa.

Estella Warren by Tiziano Magni