Michael Wood on slavery
“You can’t hug your way through history,” said historian David Cannadine recently. We read history for entertainment and enjoyment as well as illumination, but it is not a comfort blanket. Sometimes its lessons are stark and unavoidable. That came to mind earlier this year when the historian Lonnie Bunch became the first African-American to head the Smithsonian in Washington. Founder director of the wonderful and shattering National Museum of African American History and Culture, Bunch spoke of “not what people want to remember, but what they need to remember”.
In the States, slavery is at the centre of the national narrative – America’s ‘original sin’, as it’s been called. For Britons, it has proved more easy to ignore slavery because it didn’t happen on our soil, but across the ocean, out of sight. But it helped make our wealth – as Fons Americanus, Kara Walker’s astonishing installation on slavery in the Tate Modern, reminds us.
Last month, Olivette Otele was appointed professor of the history of slavery at Bristol, the most crucial place in Britain’s story of slavery (incredibly, Otele is the first black woman to have become a history professor at a British university). This marks a turning point in British education. At stake, as Otele put it, is how Britain “examines, acknowledges and teaches the history of enslavement”, which she feels will help make “a stronger and fairer society”. These are great issues – and a moral imperative – as the mistreatment of the Windrush generation has shown us.
The African slave trade was the biggest forced migration in history, consisting of 12 or 13 million people, not including those who died while being transported to the Americas. A third were on British ships – a massive fact in the history of this country. Facing up to it, and commemorating it, has taken a long time. Liverpool was the pioneer: the slavery museum there started as part of the Maritime Museum in 1980. Then a slavery gallery was created in 1994, which explored Liverpool’s role in the trade. By the early 2000s, the growing interest and high volume of visitors led to the decision to create a museum specially dedicated to the history of slavery and its legacy.
The new museum (which I strongly urge readers to visit) opened on 23 August 2007, the date of the International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade (chosen because it marked the beginning of the 1791 Haitian slave uprising). That year was also the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act, which abolished the slave trade – though not slavery itself – inside the British empire.
That same year, the long-mooted idea of a British monument to the victims of slavery was formalised. Since then, the organisation Memorial 2007 has campaigned tirelessly, but the government has failed to support it, though they have backed memorials for the First World War, the Holocaust, and Srebrenica. You can see the monument – entitled ‘Remembering Enslaved Africans and Their Descendants’, and designed by the sculptor Les Johnson – on the website memorial2007.org.uk/the-sculpture. The memorial secured planning permission for a space in the Rose Garden in Hyde Park, but so far less than £100,000 of the £4m that is needed to fund the project has been raised. If that cannot be found soon, the planning permission will expire, and the site will be lost.
In his great speech three years ago at the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, President Obama cited the historian John Hope Franklin, (one of the driving forces behind the museum): “Good history is a good foundation for a better present and future.” Obama continued: “The best history helps us recognise the mistakes that we’ve made and the dark corners of the human spirit that we need to guard against. And, yes, a clear-eyed view of history can make us uncomfortable, and shake us out of familiar narratives.”
How compelling to hear a politician speak so urgently of the power of history. And let’s not think these issues are dead. Across the world, forms of slavery still entrap hundreds of millions. Empire and slavery made each and every one of us in the UK, whatever our origin. The legacy of the Atlantic slave trade is still with us – especially Britons of African descent – psychologically, culturally and materially.
A monument in Hyde Park would be a reminder, as Lonnie Bunch said, not of the history we want to remember but the one we need to remember.