THE Jamaica National Heritage Trust (JNHT) is urging students to plan projects for next year to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans to Jamaica.

Speaking at a lecture last week, Chairman of the JNHT Professor Verene Shepherd called on students and teachers to inform the Trust about the planned projects that their institutions will undertake to mark this important milestone in 2007.

She also called on Jamaicans to tell the Trust about historical buildings so steps that could be taken to preserve them.

“We have statues and busts of our National Heroes and so forth, but perhaps it’s time to launch a campaign to create permanent markers of other persons who have made contributions in various ways,” Shepherd noted.

She challenged students to write to the Trust to say where signs should be placed about significant sites and persons of interest. “It’s part of our responsibility to identify and protect these sites”, she told the audience of mainly students of the Mico and St Joseph Teachers’ Colleges in Kingston.

The trade in Africans to the English-speaking Caribbean officially ended in 1807.

She made the comments at a lecture by historian Dr Joy Lumsden on black Jamaican politicians during the period 1865 to 1944.

Fittingly, the lecture was delivered at the offices of the Trust on Duke Street, which is the old headquarters of the Legislative Council, where many of the early black political representatives in question served.

Lumsden called on students interested in researching Jamaica’s history to visit websites, libraries, schools, communities and talk to their grandparents.

Shepherd, in congratulating Lumsden, said her work was the result of perseverance. “Don’t let anyone tell you that nothing exists on that topic,” she advised students interested in historical research.