Slave trade City must tell its story in an intelligent way
On June 7, 2020, the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol city centre was toppled and thrown into the harbour. One year on, Post reporter Tristan Cork spoke to Mayor Marvin Rees about the aftermath of that historic event. Here the Mayor speaks about his fe
THE Mayor of Bristol has expressed caution over the idea of some kind of memorial to, or museum about, Bristol’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, warning that he didn’t want the only focus to be on that part of Africa’s history.
Marvin Rees said the idea of a slavery or abolition museum, or even some form of memorial to the victims of the forced transportation of enslaved people from Africa to North America and the Caribbean by Bristol’s merchants, should be part of the discussion of the We Are Bristol History Commission.
Speaking on Monday, on the first anniversary of the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston which brought Bristol’s key role in the transatlantic slave trade and how it remembers and tells that story to the fore last year, Mr Rees shared his thoughts on how the city might to honour the victims of slavery.
Asked what he thought in principle of the idea of a memorial and/ or specific museum to slavery in Bristol, he said: “I think it’s part of the History Commission’s discussion. I certainly think that the teaching on the transatlantic slave trade needs to be intelligent.
“I like what David Olusoga said – that this is just about doing good quality history, it’s not about trying to get guilt or get an emotional reaction.”
Liverpool’s slavery museum opened in 2007, to mark the bicentenary of the banning of the slave trade – but not slavery itself – within the British Empire in 1807. It has gone on to be one of the country’s leading education centres for teaching of the horrors of the slave trade.
Meanwhile, the port of Nantes, that has been described as a French version of Bristol, created a powerful memorial to the victims of its transatlantic slave trade and to the abolition of slavery in French colonies, in 2012, along with a series of city-wide education points and venues to tell those stories.
In the 17th century, thousands of destitute, orphaned or convicted people from the West Country region, or prisoners of war from around the British Isles, were also sent as bonded or chattel forced labour to the Caribbean by Bristol’s merchants – at the time in roughly the same numbers as enslaved Africans.
But in the 18th century, the industrialisation of the transatlantic slave trade, created by merchants like Edward Colston, meant the numbers of enslaved Africans being transported multiplied, far exceeding the numbers of their fellow English men, women and children Bristol’s merchants were transporting.
Bristol became one of the biggest centres of the transatlantic slave trade between 1725 and 1740.
By the 1730s, an average of 39 slave ships left Bristol each year, and between 1739 and 1748, there were 245 slave voyages from Bristol. One estimate suggests that more than half a million African men, women and children were brought into slavery by Bristol traders in the more than 100 years of the city’s involvement in the genocidal trade.
Apart from a small section of the M Shed, a plaque on the outside of that building, and the name of Pero’s Bridge across St Augustine’s Reach, Bristol, has no noticeable or significant memorial to the victims of the Bristol merchants’ efforts to send enslaved people across the Atlantic.
Campaigns and projects to create some kind of memorial or museum to the slave trade and its abolition have never got off the ground.
A project to turn the O&M Shed – the last unconverted industrial dockside building on the harbourside – into an ‘Abolition Shed’ museum or education centre failed when Bristol City Council pressed ahead with its conversion into a food venue, even spending £1.4 million on buying and moving a large houseboat that was moored in front of it.
Campaigners have now turned their attention to other empty buildings around the historic harbourside and Old City.
But Mr Rees expressed his caution over such an idea in principle, although he reiterated he wanted the story of Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade to be better told.
“It’s just about doing good history, and this has been a part of Bristol’s history, so it needs to be in that story, in all its fullness, not watered down, not embellished, just a factual account of what Bristol was involved in,” he said.
“But it’s important to remember that the history of African people is not just one of slavery, and that’s the other danger – that well-meaning people say ‘right, well, let’s do a slavery thing,’ so the sum total of my engagement with my history is about slavery – well, that’s not good enough.
“That doesn’t lift me up. There are many things good things that have happened in, around, through and beyond that particular piece of African history.”
» TV Tonight: Statue Wars: One Summer in Bristol, Page 35
❝ This has been a part of Bristol’s history, so it needs to be in that story, in all its fullness, not watered down, not embellished Marvin Rees