Her words didn’t sit well with me. Now I understand why. I resented the fact that she seemed to feel that this section of British history was in no way relevant to her. She was indifferent to the facts. Perhaps to her, the accounts didn’t seem real or urgent or pertinent to the way we live now. I don’t know what she thought, because I didn’t have the vocabulary to raise it with her at the time. But I know now that I was resentful of her because I felt that her whiteness allowed her to be disinterested in Britain’s violent history, to close her eyes and walk away. To me, this didn’t seem like information you could opt out from learning.
With the rapid advancement in technology transforming how we live – leaps and bounds being taken in just decades rather than centuries – the past has never felt so distant. In this context, it’s easy to view slavery as something Terrible, that happened A Very Long Time Ago. It’s easy to convince yourself that the past has no bearing on how we live today. But the Abolition of Slavery Act was introduced in the British Empire in 1833, less than two hundred years ago. Given that the British began trading in African slaves in 1562, slavery as a British institution existed for much longer than it has currently been abolished – over 270 years. Generation after generation of black lives stolen, families torn apart, communities split. Thousands of people being born into slavery and dying enslaved, never knowing what it might mean to be free. Entire lives sustaining constant brutality and violence, living in never-ending fear. Generation after generation of white wealth amassed from the profits of slavery, compounded, seeping into the fabric of British society.
Slavery was an international trade. White Europeans, including the British, bartered with African elites, exchanging products and goods for African people, what some white slave traders called ‘black cattle’. Over the course of the slave trade, an estimated 11,000,000 black African people were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to work unpaid on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas and West Indies.
The records kept were not dissimilar to the accounts of a modern-day business, as they documented profit and loss, and itemised lists of black people purchased and sold. This human livestock – these ‘black cattle’ – was the ideal commodity. Slaves were lucrative stock. Black women’s reproductive systems were industrialised. Children born into slavery were the default property of slave owners, and this meant limitless labour at no extra cost. That reproduction was made all the easier by the routine rape of African women slaves by white slave owners.
Profit and loss also meant documenting the deaths of ‘black cattle’, because it was bad for business. The vast slave ships that transported African people across the Atlantic were severely cramped. The journey could take up to three months. The space around each slave was coffin-like, consigning them to live among filth and bodily fluids. The dead and dying were thrown overboard for cash-flow reasons: insurance money could be collected for those slaves that died at sea.
The image of the slave ship Brooks, first published in 1788 by abolitionist William Elford, depicted typical conditions.1 It shows a well-packed slave ship: bodies are lined up one by one, horizontally in four rows (with three short extra rows at the back of the ship), illustrating the callous efficiency used to transport a cargo of African people. The Brooks was owned by a Liverpudlian merchant named Joseph Brooks.
But slavery wasn’t just happening in Liverpool. Bristol, too, had a slave port, as well as Lancaster, Exeter, Plymouth, Bridport, Chester, Lancashire’s Poulton-le-Fylde and, of course, London.2 Although enslaved African people moved through British shores regularly, the plantations they toiled on were not in Britain, but rather in Britain’s colonies. The majority were in the Caribbean, so, unlike the situation in America, most British people saw the money without the blood. Some British people owned plantations that ran almost entirely on slave labour. Others bought just a handful of plantation slaves, with the intention of getting a return on their investment. Many Scottish men went to work as slave drivers in Jamaica, and some brought their slaves with them when they moved back to Britain. Slaves, like any other personal property, could be inherited, and many Brits lived comfortably off the toil of enslaved black people without being directly involved in the transaction.
The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which was founded in London in 1787, was the idea of civil servant Granville Sharp and campaigner Thomas Clarkson. Sharp and Clarkson formed the society with ten other men, most of whom were Quakers. They campaigned for forty-seven years, generating broad-based support and attracting high-profile leadership from Members of Parliament – the most famous being abolitionist William Wilberforce. The public pressure of the campaign was successful, and an Act of Parliament declared slavery abolished in the British Empire in 1833. But the recipients of the compensation for the dissolution of a significant money-making industry were not those who had been enslaved. Instead it was the 46,000 British slave-owning citizens who received cheques for their financial losses.3 Such one-sided compensation seemed to be the logical conclusion for a country that had traded in human flesh.
Despite abolition, an Act of Parliament was not going to change the perception overnight of enslaved African people from quasi-animal to human. Less than two hundred years later, that damage is still to be undone.
After university, I was hungry for more information. I wanted to know about black people in Britain, post-slavery. However, this information was not easily accessible. This was history only available to people who truly cared, only knowable through a hefty amount of self-directed study. So I actively sought it out, and I began by looking into Black History Month.
The existence of Black History Month in the UK is relatively recent. It wasn’t until 1987 that local authorities in London began putting on events to celebrate black contributions to Britain. Linda Bellos was born in London to a Nigerian father and a white British mother, and it was under her leadership that a British Black History Month came to exist. At the time, she was leader of south London’s Lambeth Council and chair of the London Strategic Policy Unit (part of the now defunct Greater London Council). The idea for Black History Month was put to her by Ansel Wong, chief officer of the Strategic Policy Unit’s race equality division. ‘I said yes, let’s do it,’ she explained to me from her home in Norwich.
‘I thought Black History Month was a great idea. What I wasn’t going to do was make it like the American one, because we have a different history . . . There’s so many people who have no idea – and I’m talking about white people – no idea about the history of racism. They don’t know why we’re in this country.’
Ansel organised the first Black History Month, and Linda hosted the event. It was a London-wide affair. The decision to hold it in October was largely logistical, the United States have held their Black History Month in February since it began in 1970. ‘Our guest of honour was Sally Mugabe,’ Linda explained. ‘It was insufficient time to invite [her]. If we’d done it two weeks [later], then we wouldn’t have got the people we needed.
‘We were more inclusive,’ she added. ‘Black was defined in its political terms. African and Asian.4 We only ran it for two years, because Thatcher was cutting all our budgets. It would have been an indulgence.’