Sanitised history

‘THIS is the story of this country… generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”

The most powerful speech of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia was made by the first lady, Michelle Obama. Her words remind us of the extent to which the slave trade and it’s legacy is part of that country’s national consciousness.

Not so in Britain, where political leaders hardly make reference to the dominant role the country played in the global slave trade. British slave traders generated immense spoils by transporting 5.5 million African slaves to its Caribbean colonies. A database launched last week by academics at University College London illustrates the extent to which the historic wealth of the slave trade extends its reach into modern Britain.

The extraction of this wealth came at terrible cost. Slaves were shackled and transported in appalling conditions. Those who survived were often treated with unspeakable cruelty.

When David Cameron visited Jamaica last year, he called for Jamaica to “move on” from its past and spoke positively of Britain’s role in abolition. He neither acknowledged Britain’s role as a perpetrator, nor the fact that even the act of abolition was a terrible injustice. While British slave owners were paid about £16 billion (R282 billion) in today’s prices, their slaves were forced to work a further four years without pay to further compensate their owners.

We cannot understand our role in the world using only a sanitised version of our history.