3. Rights of Passage, 2021

Rights of Passage was an intergenerational music and history exchange between London and Dakar. Young and older people developed media projects examining the representation of histories of enslavement in the UK and Senegal, alongside a sonic enquiry into the musical strategies used to resist oppression in the past and present. Staff and students at Goldsmiths Department of Visual Cultures and Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal supported the process and together explored Dr Yankhoba Seydi’s notion of the ‘enslavement of the mind’ as a way to map legacies on to contemporary experiences. The project was presented on the renowned international Pan-African radio station Galaxy Radio through a listening session hosted by Sista Jah Sun Ray on the Community Talk Show. This project was a partnership between Deptford People’s Heritage Museum, University of East London Music Department, Goldsmiths, University of London’s BA Curating and Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar. It built on the museum’s first exhibition Chip on Your Shoulder, held at the Pepys Community Centre in autumn 2021 and supported by the Naval Dockyard Society and the Lenox Project.