In spite of the endless work and lack of food or water they continued to cut the sugar cane under the threat of overseers who used their own belts to "encourage" those that were slowing down from exhaustion. At last, at the end of the day, there was time to rest and make music from their homeland. With help from African drummer, Wedzi Zvirero, they beat out the words and the rhythms for them to get lost in and forget their slavery. The rhythm got faster and faster and the children's fingers beat out the drum sounds with all the audience joining in at the same time. Yes, this was not a sugar cane field in the West Indies but a group of pupils from Ashfield Junior School re-enacting slavery and loss of freedom in the Whitehaven Civic Hall at the launch of a new teacher's resource pack the "Abominable Traffic".

This event marked the beginning of school activities for the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Trade in Slaves act and was hosted by Creative Partnerships Cumbria an Arts Council funded organisation. "Abominable Traffic" will enable students to access information based on Cumbrian archive material about how our economy was connected all those years ago to the trade in slaves. As well as the records and artefacts, the dialect, family and place names of Cumbria reveal that this part of the British Isles has hosted waves of immigrants - some invaders, some enticed, some enslaved - for thousands of years.

Baroness Young actor, academic and politician addressed the hall full of students and teachers making it clear that we all "now have the power to make sure that something like slavery could never happen again". She also took questions from students attending Whitehaven and St Benedict school about her own ambitions and successes. Baroness Young is pictured above along with Andrew Mortimer the director of Creative Partnerships Cumbria as she released a balloon presented to her by Amnesty International, West Cumbria, to symbolise freedom from slavery.

Another event marking the 200th anniversary is at the Beacon which is hosting, Legacy, an exhibition of work by contemporary British (Cumbrian) and African artists. The exhibits are by no means run-of-the-mill and provoke you to rethink your relationship to the world around. From representations of slaves as if they were fuel and not human beings to the massive collage of newspaper cuttings covering modern-day slavery such as trafficking and child labour there is much that is thought provoking in this exhibition. To mark the importance of these events the exhibition was opened by the Mayors of Copeland and Carlisle, Copeland’s Chief Executive and the Lord Lieutenant of Cumbria, who released symbolic balloons to mark the hard-won freedom of slaves.