Academic wants Scotland’s links to slavery to be taught in schools

Scotland’s historical links to slavery should be taught to school children, the UK’s first black professor believes.

Professor Sir Geoff Palmer said making slave history a mainstream school subject was one way to change racist attitudes.

After taking part in the weekend’s Black Lives Matter protests, Sir Geoff also argued against the demolition of slave traders’ statues arguing their destruction meant atrocities of the past would be forgotten.

The academic, knighted for services to academia and human rights, said education lay at the heart of challenging racism.

“Slave history has to be done properly in the curriculum and it has got to be examinable so that it changes attitudes,” he said.

“That’s what we need.

“It has got to be like maths and physics and all our other mainstream subjects,” he added.

He argued today’s racism could be traced to the treatment of black people as property and the sense of entitlement felt by slave owners.

Rather than removing monuments to those who exploited slaves, the emeritus life science professor at HeriotWatt University, said plaques should be erected beside the monuments explaining the human cost of their behaviour.

Sir Geoff has been a member of a group charged with coming up with a form of words for a plaque to go alongside the statue of Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville, in St Andrews Square, Edinburgh.

Melville, a former home secretary nicknamed the Great Tyrant, has been blamed for costing thousands of lives through his insistence at the end of the 18th Century that the slave trade should be abolished gradually over a decade.

Slave history has to be done properly in the curriculum. PROFESSOR SIR GEOFF PALMER