Age of Remembrance: until recently, it seemed beyond belief that so many millions of Africans could have vanished in the Atlantic Ocean and on the plantations in the Americas, with no response. Were their deaths meaningless? Why were we so forgetful in remembering them?

On 18 June, the US Senate apologised "to African-Americans on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow laws" well into the 1960s. The apology comes against the background of the popularisation of August as the month when Africans around the world remember the horrors of slavery. The two events are linked.

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But first I need to declare an interest. In 1995, with the support of the late Bernie Grant, MP, I helped organise the UK's first African Remembrance Day, on 1 August, to remember the victims of slavery. These enslaved Africans had been in my thoughts after reading a play, 'Joe Turner's Come and Gone', by August Wilson in 1988. Up to that point I had accepted intellectually that millions of African men, women and children had died in the crossing from the continent to the Americas. But this had remained merely an academic fact, a collection of statistics. But the vision evoked in 'Joe Turner ... ' of an army of bones, walking out of the Atlantic, reawakened 'Dem Bones' of the old Negro spiritual. It hit me then that if the notion of sacredness really meant anything, then the Atlantic Ocean was sacred ground, since it contained the bodies and souls of millions of Africans who had left the continent but died before they had undergone the brutal rites that changed slaves into New World Africans.

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The dead lay at the cold bottom of the Atlantic, undisturbed for centuries, but more tragically unacknowledged. It seemed beyond belief that so many millions could have vanished in the sea and on the plantations, with no response. Were their deaths meaningless? Why had we been so forgetful in remembering them?

From 1988 I became quietly obsessed by these bones and the human beings they represented. But I wasn't the only one thinking about it in this way. Between 1988 and 1995, when the first Remembrance Day took place, events happened globally which, perhaps, provided reasons why our neglect as Africans had been so profound. Chief amongst these was the 1994 ending of apartheid and election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa. Following this there was a great emotional release for Africans around the world. This was the moment when the "age of slavery and second-class citizenship" ended.

The age lasted 400 years during which European people had the power to enshrine in law or a constitution our supposed inferiority. From the resistance of African chiefs, the slave revolts, the Haitian revolution that marked the real beginning of abolition, the American civil war, the Pan-African congresses, the anti-colonial struggles, the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa--there has been wave upon wave of campaigns focused on the need to challenge the powers that controlled our bodies, resources and countries, we had to keep looking ahead, to remove the next glaring indignity. With the end of that age in 1994, we began the "age of Remembrance"--the process of looking back to assess our losses, to acknowledge those that we didn't have time to bury properly along the way.

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing movement of Remembrance Days and apologies. Many of the Caribbean governments who, upon independence, abandoned celebrating Emancipation Day, have now revived the day on 1 August. In the early 1990s the OAU formed an African Reparations Movement; in 2000 the Pope apologised; in September 2001, the UN Durban Conference declared the slave trade a crime against humanity; in 2004, UNESCO launched 23 August as the International Remembrance Day, and in 2007 the UK devoted a year to marking 200 years of abolition of the slave trade.

Although in their apology, the US Senate added that "nothing in this resolution (a) authorises or supports any claim against the United States; or (b) serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States", we know that after the age of Remembrance, will come the age of Reparations.