The injustice of slavery is not over: the graves of the enslaved are still being desecrated
It should come as no surprise that centuries of amnesia towards Britain’s own history has left us with a lot to learn. My personal school education during the 1990s contained a gaping hole between the Tudors and the second world war. If you wanted to surgically remove the period of colonial expansion and transatlantic enslavement, you’d struggle to beat it.
So those of us with time, resources and motivation are left to bridge the void through self-education, which often involves grappling with significant facts and figures.
The numbers of Africans estimated to have been trafficked by Europeans to their American and Caribbean colonies: 12 million-plus. Deaths on the Middle Passage alone, across the Atlantic: 1.5 million at a highly conservative estimate. The cumulative individual tragedies on slave trails to the coast, in the barracoons, and on the beaches: no one can even count.
So the four centuries of African enslavement by Europeans remains an abstract story. The need to make it real, to find things that you can see, touch and feel is what most motivated me to participate in the ambitious documentary series Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson, to be broadcast on the BBC starting on Sunday. It’s an attempt to get away from the numbers and statistics and instead focus on the real people who endured this era – their flesh and bone, dreams and legacies.
In Brazil, for example, you can see the remains of men, women and children who survived the Middle Passage, only to die on arrival in Rio de Janeiro: I found myself kneeling before their bodies.
The Cemetery of the New Blacks, as it’s known, was only discovered when the Guimarães dos Anjos family wanted to renovate their house and found what they thought was evidence of a serial killer having operated there. It turned out to be a mass grave from the transatlantic slave trade. As is so often the case, it’s the details that stay with you. Among the bodies – estimated at up to 30,000 – archaeologists also found the remnants of contemporary domestic waste. When Africans died, they were dumped into mass graves, into which people also flung their household rubbish. Nearby, a laboratory has categorised the objects found on their bodies – pipes, amulets, rings – the things they carried all through the Middle Passage into this new world. These little objects affected me deeply. It had never occurred to me that enslaved people might have imagined themselves smoking, or being able to protect themselves with a charm. These minuscule traces of home crystallised just how much had been taken away.
Many of these artefacts turned up during the 2016 Olympics. Building work for the Rio games – a new light rail system, fancy glass office buildings – unearthed Valongo, a wharf which had a monumental role in the slave trade but had been long forgotten. Four million enslaved Africans were trafficked to Brazil – 10 times the number taken to what is now the US. Many arrived through this port. The African-American historian Sadakne Baroudi, who has dedicated much of her life to educating people about what happened there, told me its name should be known and understood to the same extent as those of Hiroshima and Auschwitz.
When it comes to the transatlantic slave trade, forgetting is the final, ongoing wrong. Everywhere we travelled, it was the same story. In Portugal – the first country to commoditise Africans, in the 1440s – bodies were also tossed into a rubbish dump in the Algarve coastal town of Lagos. Many of the skeletons discovered had signs of violent
trauma, of having been shackled and bound. A third were children. The site is now an underground car park with a putting golf garden on its roof.
These discoveries are particularly egregious from an African perspective. In so many cultures across the continent, the only thing worse than being abused in life is being abused in death – without proper burial rites or the dignity befitting of ancestors.
But most of what we sought was beneath the water, because of a little known but bone-chilling fact. The Atlantic, like many bodies of water crossed in the slave trade, is littered with the wreckages of slave ships.
One such is the infamous ship the London, in which the bodies of enslaved Africans are believed to lie beneath the sea off Ilfracombe in Devon.
So much of this is a British story. The oldest slave ship ever discovered, which lies in the Channel, still contains artefacts that were exchanged for human lives. It’s hard to believe that this Royal Africa Company vessel – dubbed 35F – lies in one of the busiest waterways in the world, unknown by almost everyone outside the marine archeology community, and completely unprotected.
Then there is the Douro, an 1843 wreck found off the coast of the Isles of Scilly – another green and pleasant part of England in no way associated in the popular imagination with the brutal traffic of slavery. Those who already know about this history will notice something strange about the date. The slave trade was abolished by Britain in 1807; slavery itself was outlawed years later, in 1834.
That the Douro, whose cargo of textiles, munitions and manillas – bronze bracelets that were used as currency for purchasing African people – was wrecked 36 years after British ships were banned from the slave trade, speaks to a different story. That story is of the one million people or more who continued to be enslaved late into the 19th century.
The divers who found these artefacts were for many years free to sell them to the highest bidder, some even trading them on eBay. In the absence of sufficient institutions to protect these finds for future generations, we are still reliant on their discoverers’ individual goodwill to store them in their basements and garages: incredibly, this is still where much of this precious history remains.
There is a reason why most of us have not seen these things for ourselves. The documentary’s team of divers risked their lives exploring some of these wreckage sites – they are treacherous, deep and dangerous. Anyone wondering at the anger towards prominent memorials of slavers such as Edward Colston, might understand it better having seen how the enslaved are, by contrast, still disrespected and dishonoured.
Because the reality is that, having been content to ignore these stories for so long, our societies still seem relaxed about seeing the remains of these brutalised people being debased, their graves turned into mini-golf, the remnants of their lives and experiences washed away. To the list of historic wrongs we are already grappling with, in this year above all, this injustice is ongoing and renewed every day.
• Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson starts on BBC 2 on Sunday at 9pm
• Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist
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