The Lamplighter

Kingston Bridge? There has been some belated progress. There is a move afoot at last to have a Scottish Slave Museum, and we have also seen Glasgow University’s pioneering decision to start making repayments to the University of the West Indies. Many people in Scotland involved in these ventures will comment on the fact that Scotland has been slow to acknowledge its legacy, and slow to teach its children about why Jamaica Street is Jamaica Street and why every second place name in Jamaica comes from a Scottish place name.
At school, I was taught about the industrial revolution, but not about the slave trade which financed and powered it. I was taught about the suffragettes, but not about the women abolitionists who came before them, and who went on to become them. I am thinking here of Jane Smeal, who set up the Glasgow Ladies Emancipation Society in the 1830s. Or, of how as early as 1792, around thirteen thousand Glasgow residents put their name to a petition to abolish slavery. I never learnt, for instance, that the movement to end slavery in the British Empire in the eighteenth century is probably the first human rights campaign in history.
What else? I was taught about James Watt’s steam engine. In Balmuildy Primary School, I was in the house group Watt (we had four house groups: Baird, Carnegie, Fleming and Watt). I was proud of Watt’s steam engine, but I was not taught that money from a slave trader financed his invention. I was taught my times tables the old-fashioned way by rote, but was not taught about the triangular slave trade, the three-legged journey British slave traders undertook.
At school, I learnt that Glasgow was a great merchant city. I learnt about the shipping industry, but not about the slave ship Neptune that arrived in Carlisle Bay, Barbados, on 22 May 1731, after leaving Port Glasgow months earlier, carrying a hundred and forty-four enslaved Africans, half of whom were children. When they arrived, they were ‘polished’ – meaning a layer of skin was removed with fierce scrubbing – and a wadding rammed up the rectum of those who had dysentery, and then put up for sale.
I learnt about the French revolution, the Russian revolution, but not about the Demerara rebellions, the St Kitts uprising. I learnt about clans and clan names and kilts and the differing tartans and the Highland clearances, but not that in Jamaica in 1770 there were a hundred African people called MacDonald, or that a quarter of the island’s people were Scottish. There was a network of Argyll Campbells at least a hundred strong in Jamaica too, concentrated on the west of the island, where the place names were nostalgic: Argyle, Glen Islay.
Yet Scotland never acknowledges the existence of the Scottish plantation owner, who was often as cruel as his English or American counterpart. It almost seems anti-Scottish to imagine all those MacDonalds out there in Jamaica stuffing their faces on mutton broth, roast mutton, stewed mudfish, roast goose and paw-paw, stewed giblets, fine lettuce, crabs, cheese and mush melon. Or knocking back punch, porter, ale, cider, Madeira wine and brandy – this from a true account of a plantation owner’s meal in 1775 – while the enslaved Africans got whipped for sucking a sugar cane.
Remember Roots? I remember running home from school, excited, on the night it was on television. Remember the characters – Chicken George, Kunta Kinte, Cassie? It was the first time that I remember seeing black people, a whole lot of black people, on television. Before Roots, I had to make do with a nurse in Angels and Trevor McDonald. And, perhaps, during Wimbledon, Evonne Goolagong.
Recently, I went to Manchester’s Cornerhouse to watch BBC Black Archives footage of early interviews with Sir Learie Constantine, the cricketer, from 1966. It struck me how unusual it still is to see black people, even from that near-past, captured on screen. Constantine was talking about how black people have been taught to forget Africa, how black people are uncomfortable remembering. Then there was footage of a beautiful black woman in 1958 smoking a cigarette and talking very articulately about independence in Barbados. It made me wonder where she’d been, why I hadn’t seen more of her face. I missed her.
Marking the abolition is also marking the missing faces: the people buried at sea, the deaths in the tobacco and sugar fields. It’s a common misperception that 25 March is about ‘celebrating’ the abolition of slavery. It isn’t. It marks the passing of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act through the British parliament and the abolition of the slave trade. Slavery itself wasn’t abolished by this country until 1838.
Imagine waiting a further thirty-one years, after most decent people had decided that the slave trade was intolerable. Here’s Pitt’s speech to the House of Commons, way back on 2 April 1792: ‘We may now consider that this trade as having received its condemnation; that its sentence is sealed; that this curse of mankind is seen by the House in its true light; and that the greatest stigma on our national character which ever yet existed is about to be removed.’
If someone asks me to write something to mark the abolition of slavery in 2038, I’ll be seventy-six. Imagine the frustration of being an enslaved African in 1807, knowing the trade was supposed to have stopped because people in Britain had decided it was evil, and still being subjected to endless beatings and whippings, and still not getting a sniff of free air for another thirty-one years.
It’s time that Scotland included the history of the plantations alongside the history of the Highland clearances. A people being cleared off their land, and taken from the Slave Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Guinea Coast to a new land. Forced to board a ship and taken on a nightmare journey from Hell.
One third of African people did not survive their journey in ships where they were packed more tightly than in a