Back in October, thanks to an article by Afua Hirsch in The Guardian, I signed the online petition and donated to Memorial 2007, the campaign led by Oku Ekpenyon to erect a statue to Enslaved Africans and their Descendants in London’s Hyde Park. I was disturbed but not surprised to learn that successive British governments have refused to support this statue – in contrast, there are memorials to famous Abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, as well as to prominent slavers such as Edward Colston. There is the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, and Bristol’s M Shed includes an exhibition about the slave trade, but it is a scandal that no memorial exists in London where descendants of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade can remember and pay tribute to their ancestors, and where all of us can acknowledge the unhealed scars of the past.
The British have been able to hide their heads in the sand since the very beginnings of the slave trade, since slavery itself was confined to the far-flung Caribbean and the US. Cultural landmarks such as the 1970s TV series Roots inadvertently perpetuated the convenient myth that slavery was more an issue for Americans than for us. As others have pointed out, it is a myth that suits our island story only too well.
Tonight my local book club is discussing my novel, A Pair of Sharp Eyes, alongside Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I am not so vain as to imagine there is any comparison between my book, set in Bristol at the height of the slave trade, and Morrison’s ground-breaking masterpiece about the problems of selfhood for the enslaved. I can only hope that in Sharp Eyes I acknowledge Bristol’s central role in the early slave trade, and do not depict any of my white characters as champions of the Black people they encounter. My heroine, Corrie, is propelled by a strong sense of social justice, but she is young and naïve and brings her principles to bear with little forethought. She is also prone to congratulate herself uncritically on her kindness to others, as, for example, when she thinks of asking for a cross to be erected to mark a Black boy’s grave, never considering that the name he went by, ‘Abraham,’ was bestowed by a white ‘owner.’ At one point Corrie is even tempted to envy a Black manservant his place in service – she is out of work herself at this point, and fondly imagines that the Black servant enjoys an easy life.
This misapprehension raises something difficult and important, however. Many white British people were treated little better than slaves in 1703. In arguing, as we should, for a national memorial to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, we should also remember how wretched were the lives of many poor British people in early modern times, and how hard-won were certain rights which most of us now take for granted: to safe working conditions, universal suffrage, a living wage, strike action, and, of course, basic freedoms of the kind denied to the victims of human trafficking today.
Acknowledging the unique horror and violence of the transatlantic slave trade is imperative. But slavery is the worst and most extreme consequence of unfettered capitalism now, just as it was three hundred years ago. The proposed memorial in Hyde Park will mainly be to the dead and their descendants. We must also remember and continue to fight for the living, among whom, appallingly, there are many enslaved people and others whose working lives are scarcely better than those of slaves.
