Why there are thousands of Campbells in the Jamaican phone directory
ONE need only look through the records of wealthy Scots to find clues that were always staring us in the face over our shameful past. Just look at the ledgers of Sir Robert Cunningham, a slave owner on St Kitts. In a record from 1730, he lists his horses – Jack, Beauty, Trooper, Duke – and a few pages later, his slaves: Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Whisky, a blacksmith aged 23 and worth £75.
One of the reasons it has become easy to forget the past is that we helped destroy it. When Sierra Leone achieved its independence in the 1960s, the departing British took all records of slavery with them.
Joannes Caulker, a historic archivist in Freetown, says: “We lost our history. They only let us know what they wanted us to know.” Joe Alie, professor of history at Sierra Leone University, is clear his country is still paying the price of slavery. Millions of young men and women were taken away, robbing the country of human potential, and forced to slave for white masters. “While we lost, they gained,” Alie says. He speaks of an inferiority complex in nations subjected to slavery. “We were dehumanised during the slave trade era – that is a lasting legacy.”
Hayman also journeyed to Jamaica with Graham Campbell, a well-known figure in Glasgow with his rasta dreadlocks, and now an SNP councillor in the city. Speaking of the rape of African women by white masters, he says that is what “created people with Scottish names like me”.
In the Jamaican phone book there are thousands of Campbells – page after page of them – all named after the plantation owner who once bought their ancestors. The book is also full of Mackenzies, Macleans, McLeods and McPhersons. Scotland and its trade in slaves shaped the modern island. “I have this name because you were over there,” says Campbell. “I am the descendant of survivors.”
On Jamaica there stands a plantation once run by the Stirling Maxwell family, who owned Pollok House in Glasgow, now a national treasure. The plantation was called Hampden. It had more than 200 slaves. The national costume of Jamaica, the quadrille dress, is tartan. The St Andrew’s Cross is in the Jamaican flag. The dock in Jamaica where barelyalive slaves were taken from ships before being washed, oiled, shaved and given rum so they would appear in good health for the slave market is called Farquharson Wharf – it was run by Scots.
Further south, in British Guyana, a run of coastal towns is testament to how entrenched Scots were in the slave trade there. The towns all have Highland names – Belladrum, Cromarty, Dingwall, Dunrobin, Golspie, Inverness. The list goes on and on.