Free For All at Southwark Cathedral

This week we have been performing Free For All in Southwark Cathedral working with schools from south London boroughs. One thing that has been special is the amount of background knowledge that the children have brought about the slave trade. At the beginning of each day we ask the children to look at the two big puppets (you can see in the photo above) and tell us what they see. Often the African puppet is labelled as, a slave, poor and good. While the English puppet is seen as a slave trader, rich and bad. Children this week have not launched in with such stereotypes and have even articulated how powerful African chiefs were coerced or tempted by guns from Enlglish slave ship captains in exchange for people from their or other tribes. Our aim in all this is to show that the slave trade was a very complex story and many ordinary people, who we may not have counted as bad, did some very cruel things. Perhaps also a challenge for us to question how our actions or lifestyle can affect others. We were also very grateful to all the teachers who got involved this week. Their participation  always lifts and encourages the children to perform well. Pictures will follow in due course in the photo gallery