03.25.07

Resistance and Remembrance 1807 – 2007

Posted in London at 8.21 pm by niltiac

Today is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the British Empire. It was designated as a Day of Resistance and Remembrance with events all over the country, including one at the British Museum.

I am volunteering at the museum this year – currently I am in training to lead tours in the Japan Gallery, which I will be doing once a week or fortnight starting from about May. So I was asked to come along and help with today’s event, which ran from 2pm to 5.30pm this afternoon. I spent the first hour helping with the kids’ art workshop, making African masks, and then the next couple of hours as a photographer’s assistant, which mainly involved getting people to sign consent forms. The advantage with the latter job was that I got to see lots of different things, from a one woman play called Moj of the Antarctic to historian Simon Schama reading from his book Rough Crossings. The day ended with a ceremony from 5.30pm to 6.30pm, with short speeches, beautiful gospel singing, caporeira, and a video message from Nelson Mandela. The highlight for me was an amazing poem written especially for the event, which I think was by Jean Binta Breeze (but I’ll have to double check).

I thought the day went really well. There were loads of people there and it was very racially mixed (though not equally in all events, interestingly enough). Everyone, young and old, seemed to be having a lot of fun. And I think it’s an important to remember and recognise, not only the inhumanity of slavery but also the great struggle against it, by the slaves themselves and by abolitionists back in Europe.

The slave trade was abolished by an act of parliament in 1807, ending an unholy trade that had persisted since 1562, during the reign of Elizabeth I, and condemned many thousands of people to misery. Britain then pressured other countries to follow suit (either out of conviction or to maintain economic competitiveness) and they soon did so. The law was pushed through parliament by an alliance of evangelical Protestants and Quakers. There were also many women abolitionists – the intellectual forebears of the Suffragettes.

Of course, slavery itself didn’t end with the end of the slave trade. It took until 1833 until it was abolished in the British Empire, and of course the United States had to fight a civil war before it ended there. The legacy of slavery is all around us, persisting in deeply engrained racism, ‘shade-ism’ among blacks, economic dependency, and the collapse of once proud nations and kingdoms in Africa. Slavery itself also persists; it’s not legal but human trafficking and forced labour, including sexual servitude, goes on more than we care to admit. The theme for many of the speakers was how the abolition of slavery should remind us of our shared humanity and the importance of kindness.

My ancestors were taken to a foreign land in chains and forced to work in chain gangs at another man’s bidding. They were convicts, taken from the prisons of Britain and Ireland to Australia. Yet, the parallels to slavery end there. Convicts were free after a certain period of time and were often granted a complete pardon from the governor; many went on to become prosperous and upstanding members of the community. The children of convicts were born free. The biggest difference is that my ancestors were white and racism was not a problem for them or their descendants.

Since Australia never had slavery, the black population is quite small. There are indigenous Australians (both Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) but they are racially different to Africans and in any case, their numbers are relatively small, around 1 per cent of the population. The parallel is closer to the native Americans in the US and Canada. This doesn’t mean that blacks are unwelcome or that Australia is racist, it’s just for historical reasons. Australia is a very diverse country but mostly through post-war immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (Melbourne is the world’s second biggest Greek city after Athens!) and Asia (particularly east Asian countries such as Vietnam).

Britain, like the US, has a much larger black population than Australia. It is quite different to the US because almost all of the black Britons have arrived or been born here since the Second World War. There were never any official policies of segregation here, but there is no doubt that there was, and is, racism. There is still a long way to go.

I have just finished reading Small Island by Andrea Levy, which is about Jamaican immigrants. It’s a really good read with compelling characters and an interesting story. I found the part about the black Jamaican airman during the war and his experience, both with the RAF and the British public, and with the American GIs (who practised segregation) also camped in the same northern English town.

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