African Storytelling at the Royal Geographical Society

On Monday 12 November 2007 , 31 intrepid children set out for the Royal Geographical Society, to do a workshop on the Bombay Africans.

Who, you may ask? We asked the same question.

Our workshop started with an introduction about the work of the Royal Geographical Society. It was started by a group of explorers who wanted to share their findings and keep records about the world. Now, almost 200 years later, the Society has numerous artefacts in their archives, from all over the world, including 1 million maps!

Our storyteller, Jan, informed us all about the slave trade on the east coast of Africa . A lot of us knew about the slave trade on the west coast to America , only a few of us knew about the slave trade to India . We were introduced to some very important characters, some of whom were slaves, others explorers. We looked at how their lives were intertwined and discussed the impact it had at the time. Armed with this knowledge we created some freeze frame images of the important events we had just discovered.

The workshop was only 2 hours long but in that time we learnt so much about the slave trade and how it affected our character’s lives. We even got to touch the trunk of the tree under which David Livingstone was buried! We got back to school weary but glad that we had learnt something new and different in a fun way.