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