David Cameron’s riposte to Russia’s “small island” jibe against Britain has been described as his ‘Love Actually moment’ but apart from the Prime Minister’s jingoistic and entirely false claim that Britons had “invented most of the things worth inventing” his comment that Britain had “abolished slavery” caught my eye, not least because the previous day I had visited an exhibition paying homage to those at the forefront of abolishing enslavement… Africans themselves.
Making Freedom: Riots, Rebellions and Revolutions is currently on show at the Marcus Garvey library in Tottenham until 21st of September, and chronicles the various slave rebellions that fueled the abolitionist movement and sent wave after wave of shivers down the spines of the enslavers.
Clearly the most famous rebellion is the greatest story never told by Hollywood, the Haitian revolution, led by Toussiant L’Ouverture, who defeated the British and Spanish and sent waves of shock to slaver nations and waves of hope to Africans across the American South and the Caribbean.
The exhibition also looks at the Barbados rebellion, the Demerara rebellion in what is now Guyana, the Jamaican rebellion led by pastor Sam Sharpe and much more. There were many hundreds of uprisings throughout enslavement.
Some have become better-known, such as Florida and the Maroons in Jamaica led by Nanny, but there were many more smaller rebellions too. Indeed Africans never stopped rebelling, from fighting against capture to a great many uprisings aboard slave ships. Many individual slave masters were also killed and others poisoned while the ‘underground railroad’ saw thousands risk death, and often faced death, as they attempted to flee the Deep South.
2007, the bicentenary of so-called abolition, was a “Wilberfest” which continued to canonise William Wilberforce at the expense of both African abolitionists like Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, and also white working class Brits in Manchester and elsewhere in the north who identified with the abolitionist cause through the prism of rejecting oppression which they saw as being committed by the same elite class.
The fight against enslavement of Africans was truly an interconnected global effort just as the slavers operated an international system. This is precisely why Cameron is so wrong about his take on history. Britain was the first European nation to “abolish” slave trading in 1807 but it took Britain another 26 years to outlaw the practice of enslaving. And even then it was replaced by forced “apprenticeships” which was slavery by any other name, a system that persisted for many decades thereafter.
Britain’s enforcing of the abolition of slave trading on the high seas was purely to stop competitor nations gaining an economic advantage, as witnessed by British ships throwing enslaved Africans on foreign ships overboard or dumping them on the island of St Helier to die.
Perhaps Cameron doesn’t want to know, considering his own family owe their generational wealth in part profiting from enslavement, as a study by University College London revealed earlier this year.
I would recommend that Cameron takes himself down to Tottenham to view the Making Freedom exhibition and dispel his Vaseline-lensed Wilberfest view of abolition.
While he’s at it, he may want to attend one of Robin Walker’s lectures to widen his view that Britain “invented most of the things worth inventing.” The Prime Ministers’ opinion is so ignorant it would normally only be expressed in Rod Liddle’s Spectator columns. It goes without saying that the greatest inventions in the history of humanity come from all civilisations across the world, from the Middle East to China and the Indian sub-continent.
Historian Walker has written of the first glass windows and multi-storey buildings originating from Africa. There is evidence that speech originated there 100,000 years ago in Africa, and Archaeology Magazine reported that the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs date back to 3,400 BC, and that the earliest known surgery was performed in Egypt around 2,750 BC as recorded on the Ebers papyrus (1550 BC).
Mathematics and geometry was of course central to the ancient Egyptians, who were a lot more Nubian than modern-day Egyptians but that too dates back further to the Lebombo tribe 35,000 BC. Mining goes back even further. While ancient Egyptians were adorned with a wide range of mined gems the first mining dates back 43,000 years to Swaziland. And the smelting of iron, copper and other base metals into tools also has deep roots in the continent in West Africa by 1200 BC.
Stephanus of Byzantium said that “Ethiopia was the first established country on the earth, and the Ethiopians were the first who…established laws.” In 1825, Arnold Hermann Heeren, Professor of History and Politics in the University of Gottengen, published a lengthy essay in which he concluded that ancient Black people of Africa and Asia were the first to conduct international trade.
And that’s before we even begin to consider more modern inventions such as the lightbulb (Lewis Latimer), the clock (Benjamin Banneker), refrigeration (Thomas Elkins), the traffic light (Garrett Morgan), the pacemaker (Otis Boykin), dry-cleaning (Thomas Jennings), railway electrical systems (Grenville Woods), chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants (Percy Lavon Julian), the spark plug (Henry Blair), the lawnmower (John Albert Burr) and much more.
Sure, Britons can claim their share of inventions too but Cameron’s Love Actually / Hugh Grant moment is steeped in mythology and false notions of superiority, both of which are deeply troubling in itself never mind the fact that these sentiments are coming from our Prime Minister. But then again, as I blogged earlier this week, this is the same Prime Minister who thinks Shaun Bailey will pull in the black vote for the Tories…
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
