Are we still talking about the transatlantic enslavement of Africans, or is it firmly in the past now?… Haven't we just been through a year of talking about it? Anyway, if I'm tired of it, I can imagine how most readers feel.
But I am only tired of the way the British establishment choose to present it. It opts to omit any mention of Britain's almighty manufacture of it, stake in it and ongoing benefit from it… which is precisely what led a national newspaper some weeks ago to run a front page exclaiming in apparent surprise that "two of the biggest names in the City of London had previously undisclosed links to slavery in the British colonies".
Shock horror. I am grateful for the information, but really, if we still deem this a revelation, something is seriously awry.
It's not going too far to suggest that the whole establishment in 19th century Britain, and that includes museum collectors, sullied their souls by participating directly or indirectly in the trade of human beings - and in three years' time that statement may be backed up with detailed evidence.
This summer, University College London's history department is
launching a three-year project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council investigating the legacy of British slave ownership. The objective is to uncover the identities of the slave owners in Britain in the 19th century, and to establish how much money they made and how it was invested.
The outcome will be a British slavery database accessible to the public, and, of course, information on which parts of our national structural environment were built with African blood. As the researchers on the project have acknowledged, this remains an under-researched part of history. Why?
"It's been much more comfortable for the British to sit with the history of abolition than the history of slavery."
The Maafa (holocaust) will never go away until the British establishment gets a backbone and starts to face up to its collective and individual wrongdoings.
But I am only tired of the way the British establishment choose to present it. It opts to omit any mention of Britain's almighty manufacture of it, stake in it and ongoing benefit from it… which is precisely what led a national newspaper some weeks ago to run a front page exclaiming in apparent surprise that "two of the biggest names in the City of London had previously undisclosed links to slavery in the British colonies".
Shock horror. I am grateful for the information, but really, if we still deem this a revelation, something is seriously awry.
It's not going too far to suggest that the whole establishment in 19th century Britain, and that includes museum collectors, sullied their souls by participating directly or indirectly in the trade of human beings - and in three years' time that statement may be backed up with detailed evidence.
This summer, University College London's history department is
launching a three-year project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council investigating the legacy of British slave ownership. The objective is to uncover the identities of the slave owners in Britain in the 19th century, and to establish how much money they made and how it was invested.
The outcome will be a British slavery database accessible to the public, and, of course, information on which parts of our national structural environment were built with African blood. As the researchers on the project have acknowledged, this remains an under-researched part of history. Why?
"It's been much more comfortable for the British to sit with the history of abolition than the history of slavery."
The Maafa (holocaust) will never go away until the British establishment gets a backbone and starts to face up to its collective and individual wrongdoings.
