“Our mission is to contribute to the global healing of collective wounds left by the traumatic historical encounter between the African, Amerindian and European peoples and their descendants, through a deep remembrance of that history and the ancestral times preceding it.”

 

On January 1^st 1804, after enduring more than 300 years of colonial rule, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of Africans, the slave population of Cap Haïtien in northern Haiti rose up against its oppressors, starting a revolution which overthrew the trans-Atlantic slave system, created the Western Hemisphere’s first free black nation, and shook the entire western world’s political and economic system in a way which reverberates to this day…

N a sonje. We will remember.

N a Sonje Foundation seeks to offer an environment that encourages the development of respectful understanding and equal relationships between peoples of different cultures: Africans, Europeans, Amerindians, and their respective descendants around the world, emphasizing a more complete memory of the historical events that created the political, economic, interpersonal, and international dynamics in which we live. Through sharing the lost, forgotten, or simply untold histories of Haiti’s past, we hope to bring to mind and nourish those memories whose community value is worth embracing in the present.

To this end, N a Sonje Foundation presents the Memory Village.

Overview and Objectives:

N a Sonje Foundation believes that the day has come when seeing and hearing alone are no longer sufficient venues for the transmission of truth about our history and cultural tradition; that a more direct and dynamic approach is necessary in order to convey the deep emotions and spiritual dimensions which are an inseparable part of the whole.

The Memory Village is envisioned as a living, interactive, historical village within which people from all over the world will have the opportunity to re-visit the three main cultures involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, through personal participation in history-based re-enactments of those lives and times.

By offering an opportunity to experience the condititions and events that shaped lives of others, if only for a brief moment, N a Sonje believes that the Memory Village will constructively contribute to understanding, healing, and courage at a personal level, with the hope that this will lead to an eventual impact on a global scale.

Location and Site Plan

The Memory Village will be situated on about 4 acres near the rural mountain village of Gwo Jan, a provincial community of the city of Petionville, a main suburb of Port-au-Prince. (Gwo Jan was established by Africans who escaped from the sugar plantations during the colonial era.)