Event worthy of discussion
Today, as you read this, is the last day of Black History Month. That may not mean a lot to many readers but it’s an event I think worthy of discussion.
I must shamefully admit to being unaware of the existence of Black History Month until I came across an article this week about efforts in Britain to create a
memorial for the victims of slavery.
The seeds of BHM were sown in 1969 at Kent State University in Ohio when teachers and students proposed making the existing Negro History Week a monthlong celebration of black history.
The first Black History Month was celebrated in 1970 and official national observance was instituted by President Gerald Ford in 1976.
Eleven years later BHM was founded in the UK and October was chosen as the month to incorporate black history into the curriculum for school-age children, with a particular emphasis on AfricanCaribbean history given the UK’s close links to Caribbean countries.
And it is here that we come back to the efforts to establish a memorial in London to the victims of slavery because, of course, the UK’s ‘‘link’’ to the Caribbean was the massive wealth generated for British landowners and businesses from the exploitation of African slaves in sugar cane fields of the Caribbean islands from the 17th to the 19th century.
Sugar plantations relied almost
entirely on an imported slave labour force, who endured the most intolerable harsh and cruel conditions.
The idea of a memorial to the enslaved and their descendants was conceived in 2002 and it’s proposed that this, the first such national memorial anywhere in the world, should be sited in the Rose Gardens at London’s Hyde Park Corner.
However, despite almost two decades of campaigning the group, Memorial 2007, has failed to win government support for the £4 million project and has consequently managed to raise just £100,000, putting the memorial in severe jeopardy because planning permission for the site expires next month.
The group had been hopeful of state support after the British Government in 2015 granted £50 million for a Holocaust memorial.
As a native-born Brit, I find it shameful that there has been such a woeful lack of support for this project.
My abhorrence of the slave trade has undoubtedly been sharpened because I have seen first-hand the Slavery
Memorial in Zanzibar on the site where captured Africans were kept in dark, airless underground chambers before being sold – some of these chambers can still be seen close to the memorial.
As one campaigner for the UK memorial, Afua Hirsch, commented: ‘‘This campaign is not requesting a favour for a marginal section of society. The history of how we came to be this nation is a history for us all. If we can’t dignify it with a simple memorial, one whose location, design, importance and even planning permission have already been established, then we really have lost the plot.
She added: ‘‘One reason that British people feel complacent about Britain’s role in pioneering slavery, and the racism that underpinned it, is that it happened slightly farther away. The Caribbean is Britain’s own Deep South, where enslavement and segregation as brutal as anything that existed on American soil took place at the hands of British people. And that distance facilitates denial.’’