Spotlight on... Making Freedom: Riots, rebellions and revolutions

This article turns the spotlight on the resulting exhibition: Making Freedom: Riots, rebellions and revolutions, which commemorated 175 years since emancipation from enslavement on Aug 1, 1838 for Africans in the Anglophone Caribbean. Exhibitions on aspects of enslavement history in mainstream national and regional cultural institutions in the UK often emphasise the contributions of British parliamentarians, abolitionists and anti-slavery campaigners in the struggle for emancipation. Uniquely, the Windrush Foundation project turned the spotlight on people of African-Caribbean descent who fought and campaigned -- often at the expense of their own lives -- to secure freedom for their families and wider communities. Members of this African diaspora suffered the brutalities, injustices and traumas of plantation enslavement in the Americas. The central narrative of the Making Freedom exhibition featured historical and geopolitical information about the causes, consequences and legacies of the major slave revolts and uprisings that took place throughout the Caribbean region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.