8T were passionately persuading us to abolish slavery this week in History.
Students prepared and performed their speeches in front of the class.
Their passion and persuasive literary techniques were impressive as they combined their knowledge of the Atlantic slave trade with emotive language to prompt a change in the law.
We even had a poem inspired by the poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling.
Well done 8T History.
If You Could Face the Truth – written by one of our students
If you could taste the sugar in your tea,
And know it cost a human soul their name.
If you could feel the chains that crossed the sea,
And still believe that trade is not to blame.
If you could stand quietly and hear the silent scream
Of eighty-five thousand dead beneath the waves,
And call it religion, profit or a dream,
While knowing humans are bought and sold as slaves…
If you could smell the stench below the deck,
Where flesh crams in filth, where freedom died.
If you could see them beaten, scarred and wrecked,
Let speak wealth or empire pride.
If you could watch as mothers lose their child,
As women suffer violence, men are torn.
If you could call such torment ‘just’ or ‘mild’,
While human dignity is crushed, forlorn.
If you would walk that ship and not feel shame.
If you defend tradition, wealth or name,
While closing off your heart, your mind, your soul.
Then what are we, but tyrants masked as kings,
Who drink the tears of others’ lives.
But if we choose to break those brutal things,
Then maybe the world can realign.
