APOLOGIES, MEMORY AND HISTORY

Yes it was going fine. There in Westminister Abbey spiritual power in the form of Bishops and Archbishops, blessed the past of Britain’s heroes, their tombs guarding memory. Was this Tony Blair’s farewell to a country increasingly irritated at his dawdling in power — some said fiddling — while Scotland drifted away from the Kingdom, or while Tories re-invented themselves as with-it youth and social democrats rolled into one and dressed in green.

Yes it was going fine. And then, in the middle of the Westminister ceremonies, Queen and all present, a writer from Ghana, now living in Britain, ran up, disturbed the celebrations and called Blair and all hypocrites. Why, he asked Tony Blair, was sorry such a difficult thing to say that with all the pomp, there was nary any apology for slavery, and not a word about reparations. It disturbed the show.

Those Black Abolitionists

It was not as if Tony Blair had been insensitive to black people. In the weeks preceding the service at Westminster, Britain became aware that there were abolitionists who had escaped the ordinary consciousness. There was Ottopan Cuguano born in Ghana around 1750. At 13 years old he was kidnapped, sold and taken to Grenada, peddled around from West Indian island to West Indian island before being taken to England in 1772 and freed. He was the first African to demand publicly the total abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself. It is not surprising that Ottopan Cuguano became somewhat of a leader among the small black community in the Britain of his time. He seems to have picked up some education during the period of slavery. He would encourage another former slave to put his experiences of slavery in writing. That former slave was Olaudah Equiano. He was born into slavery in Benin around 1745. At the age of twelve he was sold and taken to Jamaica. Like Ottopan Cuguano, he was taken by his master on his travels from island to island in the Caribbean. He was also educated by his master, brought to England with him and freed. With the encouragement of Ottopan Cuguano he wrote his Life of Gustavo Basso the African and, with the encouragement of some abolitionists, published it in 1787. It was an instant success, going through five editions in Britain and published in the USA. It was republished in 1966. It is not only a book which gives some firsthand account of slavery.

Influencing Negritude

It is perhaps the first book from an African which presents an idealised version of Africa. This idealised version of Africa would have an impact on how Africa would come to be regarded by a romantic strand of abolitionist opinion in Britain and above all in continental Europe. This romantic strand would influence the negritude writers who emerged from exiled Caribbeans and Africans in the 20th century. I leave aside the case of Ignatius Sancho, at two years old given as a toy to the Duke of Montagu, only because while it is known that Sancho lobbied privately against the slave trade and slavery, his fame is rather through his music.

What was peculiar about the bicentenary that we were celebrating, is that few in the Caribbean knew of Ottopan Cuguano and Olaudah Equiano although one was Jamaican and the other was Grenadian. Whatever of Britain, it was firmly believed here in Trinidad and Tobago, that for abolitionist read Wilberforce. That Sancho was a composer of music for violin and for harpsichord would shock a generation firm in the belief that blacks were interested only in drumming.

American slave experience

Part of the reason was the weight of the American slave experience which followed the emergence of Black Power and swamped Caribbean slave experience. But part of the reason was a na?ve reading of Eric Williams. At some point during the weeks of writing this series, I asked someone from the working class what he knew about abolition. “Wilberforce,” he replied immediately, then added, “I heard it from Dr Williams. Wilberforce said in the British Parliament give the bloody slaves their freedom.”

Indeed the very importance of Eric Williams as a historian and also as a politician has permitted Trinis to escape regarding history. This has been frozen-conveniently-into For Eric or Against Eric.

To be fair to Tony Blair, his celebration of the ending of the slave trade had rescued it from popular oblivion. It was this oblivion which made “apology” a thing of supreme importance.

The demand for an apology rather than for a dialogue informed by history was short hand rescuing of the ending of the slave trade from what had become, through our own fault it is true, the British dominance of memory.

Black Jacobins and

Haitian refugees

This dominance of memory was not only the ending of historical curiosity into the why and wherefore of the abolitionists. Recent Haitian events, from Aristide’s forced departure to Haitian boat people and Haitian refugees, has scuttled the “Black Jacobins” of that other Trini writer: CLR James. John Maxwell writing in Jamaica’s The Sunday Observer of February 25, could remind Jamaicans that Haiti was the only slave society which had liberated itself or that it is in Haiti that it was first declared that people were born free. “In the United States,” John Maxwell wrote, “blacks would not — for another century and a half — be entitled to exercise civil rights” for which Haitians had joined the fight for American freedom. None of this penetrated the bicentenary anniversary here. Rather Mr Manning, speaking at La Joya, declared that it was in the USA that democracy was born. In that sentence Toussaint L’Ouverture and Henri Christophe disappeared. So did the French Revolution and so did the history of Martin Luther King not yet half a century old. Mr Manning was only repeating the democracy as ideology proper to Reagan at the end of the Cold War, and as dogma to George Bush in his fight against terror. The real history was of desperate slaves giving to the world the universality of the right to be born in freedom. The demand for an apology from Tony Blair was not only a question for Tony Blair. It was above all a question for ourselves.

Regrets

For yes, Tony Blair may have “regretted”, he was certainly not penitent. He never had been. At the international meeting on racism held in South Africa, Blair’s envoy and Bush’s envoy were ready to grant the moon, the North Pole and the kitchen sink, anything but an apology for slavery. There had been no apology for the Irish famine and free trade ships sailing down the Lee past the skeleton-starving and the famine graves. No need for it now.

The revenge for that Irish past is in an Irish present shamrock stamped for success. The interruption of the Ghanian writer is only a minor irritation, itself part of a certain hypocrisy.

The incessant demands for slaves that fuelled the trade, the plantations and the latifunda were not in Britain. They were right here. Even as Britain was congratulating herself that the commerce in flesh and tears was over, O’Firril had left Montserrat to arrange the trade for Cuba. Even as abolitionists congratulated themselves on the victory they had won in a British Parliament, Haiti was forced to pay France compensation for every one of the slave-property. What would be billions in today’s money, saddled Haiti with debt and forced open the crack between the poor and the black on one side, the brown now the new aristocracy, on the other. If in the USA, black was defined as in pollution giving satisfaction to poor whites, here in Trinidad and in most of the Caribbean, money whitened. And memory forgot. “To move on,” it is called. To put it bluntly, the eruption of the Ghanaian in Westminster Abbey was for the Queen, Tony Blair and the birds.

If we recalled that there had been commerce in slaves and the ending of that commerce, it was only because Caricom, under her year’s presidency of St Vincent’s Ralph Gonzales, had requested member states and therefore ourselves, to celebrate the occasion. If apology embarrassed us, what then about reparations?

Following the Jewish model

Reparations are not new. Britain demanded reparations from china at the end of what was called Opium Wars. Germany paid reparations, much of it in the loss of what had become her industrial base and her colonies after the 1914-1918 war.

What was new in the granting of reparations principally to Jews after the Second World War was that reparations could be claimed by individuals. And it is on the Jewish model that much of the North American black demand for reparations has been based.

This demand based on individuals is more likely to be practicable in North America than in the Caribbean or in Africa. American slavery was based on the strict division between those classified as black and therefore slave, and white owners. Moreover the companies who used slave labour were within the USA and could be traced. Little of this is relevant to the Caribbean and Africa — and it is in these regions that the impact of slavery was longer lasting.

And for that we turn first to another Caribbean: Walter Rodney.