The Guardian view on the history of slavery: much to be learned
Speaking at the British Museum last week, Lonnie G Bunch III, the founderdirector of the US’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, spoke of the duty of museums to show the public “not what they want to remember, but what they need to remember”. Mr Bunch was formally installed on Friday as the 14th secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where he is in charge of 19 museums, 21 libraries, a zoo and a number of research centres, the first African American to hold this key post in the US’s cultural world.
His success at the African American museum has laid down a powerful marker of what museums can be. His vision was for a place where complexity is embraced, where unpleasant facts are not shirked, where untold stories are brought to light, and where African American history is positioned not as ancillary, but utterly central to the history of the US. It aims to be a place of reflection, and also one of celebration; in practice it has become a site of pilgrimage. Mr Bunch’s ambition is to make museums not just places where visitors contemplate the past, but where a better future can be shaped.
The history of race relations is the great, divisive faultline running through American history. The UK has its own difficult and largely undigested areas of history – notably relating to its imperial and colonial past, including its enrichment through the transatlantic slave trade. This legacy has barely begun to be appreciated in its painful complexity.
The British have long found it fairly easy to sweep the history of slavery under the carpet because of its relative invisibility, the plantations themselves being safely out of sight in the Caribbean. There have long been calls for a prominent memorial to the victims of slavery on British soil. An artwork with the ambition of, say, Kara
Walker’s extraordinary sculpture about the transatlantic slave trade currently occupying Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall could have real power.
But a monument would be no substitute for active engagement and real research. Which is why it is so important that Bristol University has appointed Olivette Otele to a role as professor of the history of slavery, based in the institution’s history department and Centre for Black Humanities.
Prof Otele – who, astoundingly, was the first black woman to be appointed to a chair in history in the UK when she took up a professorship at Bath Spa University last year – will look specifically at Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade. With a resolve chiming with Mr Bunch’s words, she has said that her research must aim to set the standard for the way that Britain “examines, acknowledges and teaches the history of enslavement”. The work she does with different communities of Bristolians, educators, scholars and others will, she hopes, “contribute to a stronger and fairer society”.
Other universities are also embracing the moral imperative to examine their and their cities’ historical involvement in the slave trade. Glasgow has set the pace, by establishing up a joint research unit with the University of the West Indies, for which it pledges to raise £20m as a kind of reparative justice after calculating that it benefited from slavery by, in today’s prices, between £16.7m and £198m. This summer, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, praised the initiative as a “bold,
moral, historic step”. These are the first small gestures towards Britons finally remembering not only the things that they want to remember, but those that they need to remember.