An African flavoured extravaganza of music, dance and story-telling is unfurling this week at the Pegasus to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. Journeys to Freedom consists of nine plays (split into three performances of three plays) and features a cast of 140 young people from age six to 19.

The idea is not necessarily to see each performance in order but that any one show watched on its own gives a taster of an aspect of black history. I saw the first show featuring (episode one) Anansi The Spider - The Story of Stories, a piece which demonstrates the power of the African storytelling tradition. It is about a young girl captured as a slave and how a story her grandmother told her gives her comfort and hope. She then realises that her sense of self will not be lost even though she has been torn from her loved ones and her home.

The very young actors bought the story alive brilliantly using music as a key part of their lively and comic performance. African drum beats fused with flute, guitars, keyboard and singing. The actors wore beautifully made colourful costumes, which although designed by a professional were made by the performers themselves. Impressively the stage management was also done entirely by members of the Oxford Youth Theatre.

Although this piece, as with many of the others, is set hundreds of years ago in a places foreign to us, connections and comparisons to Oxford are continually made.

Episode two, The Poet, the Test and the Oxford University Press tells the true story of how a slave girl was befriended by a rich family who loved and educated her. She, Phillis Wheatley, became the first American black female poet in print, her work published by the Oxford University Press. This poignant performance showed the cruel treatment of ordinary slaves in comparison to the kindness Phillis was shown. The attitudes of the time - how people genuinely believed that Africans were 'savages', 'animals' and impossible to educate were shocking to see.

The final episode, King Mansa Musa -The King of Bling, is a fun, high-energy dance piece, in which a posse of dancers adorned with gold strut their stuff to a montage of pop songs. A narrator tells of how King Mansa Musa was the King of Mali during the 1300s, a time when the country was immensely wealthy, prior to colonisation and slavery.

The end of the show was met with well-deserved raucous applause. The three performances were highly entertaining, visually stunning and musically rich. And not only that, but thought-provoking, educative and relevant.

The other episodes in the cycle feature more traditional tales, a piece on Oxford abolitionists, a Haitian revolutionary's story, Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela.