The latest fact to hit the headlines at the ACTe Memorial (MACTe, national museum of the slave trade and slavery), the conviction of the former director of the museum (from 2019 to 2023) by the Pointe-à-Pitre criminal court, on April 30, for favoritism in a public procurement case. Laurella Rinçon was sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence, a fine of 10,000 euros, a two-year ineligibility period and a ban on holding a job in the public service for the same amount of time.
If Laurella Rinçon, general director of MACTe from 2019 to 2023, announced that she would appeal the decision, the conviction is a cruel reminder of the failings of the establishment, regularly injured by legal, financial and political affairs.
Read the story: In Guadeloupe, the former director of the ACTe Memorial Laurella Yssap-Rinçon sentenced to one year in prison
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Inaugurated in 2015, in the presence of the President of the Republic at the time, François Hollande, but also many heads of state from the Caribbean, the ACTe Memorial had raised many hopes. “It was designed and built to try to heal, or even close, the wounds of History, in a “truth and reconciliation” approach., as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu did in South Africa”, rejoiced Senator (Socialist Party) Victorin Lurel, its initiator, during the ceremony. The stated objective at the time: to make this establishment a center for exhibition, research and knowledge on the slave trade and slavery. For Jacques Martial, former director general of MACTe, currently deputy mayor of Paris in charge of overseas territories, the memorial is “an extraordinary cultural object which responded to a gap on a subject, an unexpressed need, with which we did things”.
Under his governance, between 2017 and 2019, the museum hosted notable exhibitions: “Darboussier, at the heart of migrations” told the story of this Pointe-à-Pitre sugar factory, closed in 1980 and symbol of Guadeloupean cosmopolitanism. Then, the “Human Zoos.” The invention of the savage” or even “The Black Model. From Géricault to Picasso” described the evolution of representations of black people in Western society.
“Conscious and relevant decision”
Since then, the initiators of the museum have become disillusioned. “What did they do with the ACTe Memorial? »wrote Victorin Lurel, at the end of 2023, in a column sent to the press, proclaiming his “disgust” “faced with the waste that what should have been a major work of our memorial policy represents today”. However, forgetting in passing to recall another case, the investigation by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office, opened in June 2019, into charges of embezzlement of public funds and favoritism concerning the museum’s construction contracts, “likely to constitute an attack on the financial interests of the European Union”, according to a judicial Source. The investigation was launched after a report from the Court of Auditors, in a report on the use of European funds overseas, published in February of the same year. Former overseas minister (from 2012 to 2014) of François Hollande then defended his choice “to enter into a global market”a “conscious and relevant decision”. And was surprised that “the regional services are incapable of justifying the choices that they themselves have suggested”. At the end of April 2024, almost five years later, the premises of the region and those of the architectural firm and developers were searched by agents of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office.
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