“The sins of the fathers,” according to a stinging verse in the Bible’s Book of Exodus, “shall be visited upon the children, even unto the third or fourth generation.” Is that remotely fair? Can we – should we – be held responsible for crimes committed by our ancestors? The question underpins Antoinette Sandbach’s protest at her outing as a descendant of Samuel Sandbach, a 19th-century mayor of Liverpool who amassed a fortune through enslavement of African people, and from compensation payments at the end of British slavery in the 1830s.
Sandbach, a former Tory MP, has threatened to sue Cambridge University over the work of the historian Malik Al Nasir, who has named her in his research on British enslavement in what is now Guyana, where he has heritage. Sandbach has said she is appalled by the actions of her ancestors, and that she is supportive of Al Nasir’s work – but there is no public interest in identifying her as a descendent of Samuel Sandbach, who died in 1851. This is about a right to privacy, she contends – the right not to be held publicly accountable for acts in which she played no part.
Sandbach’s complaint is a symptom of a national affliction. Britain is viciously in conflict with its colonial history. We are pathologically unable to come to terms with the less comfortable aspects of the past – such as the crime against humanity that was the enslavement of more than three million Africans and their descendants, and the centuries-long looting of Asian and African nations. Even if these histories are accepted – and that is not happening – we cannot reach any consensus on how, or whether, to address their continuing consequences. Other nations have done better.
This awful legacy is the product of generations of denial. In 1841, less than a decade after the end of slavery in the Caribbean colonies, the Tory politician Robert Peel hailed that move as a “moral triumph” for the nation. This became key to the notion of the British empire as benevolent, even “the best the world has ever known”. The cleansing myth that Britain “led the world in getting rid of transatlantic slavery” has been taught to generations since, including my own. That has obscured what those 250 years of industrialised murder and exploitation actually did to millions of African people. Slavery was bad, we learned, but the British were the good guys.
But neither Antoinette Sandbach nor the rest of us committed those crimes. So why should we be named? The simple answer for me, a descendant of men who enslaved more than 900 African people in Jamaica and Tobago, is this: I am ashamed of what they did, and I accept my part as their descendant in the collective denial of the history.
Many whose ancestors were enslaved are still, unavoidably, a part of its story. So am I. It would be wrong to duck out of it. Doing so has resulted in a national psychological trauma, a toxic lesion in our sense of ourselves. And, of course, that plays a key part in the perpetuation of the structural racism and inequalities that affect our society now.
In telling the story of the money generated, families such as the Sandbachs, with famous ancestors, are highly visible. That is not necessarily fair. All of 19th-century Britain was affected by the wealth – 11% of GDP in 1800 – generated by enslavement and the industrial complex around it: it fuelled 19th-century growth. But the Sandbachs are not to be pitied. According to Al Nasir’s research, a trail of inheritance leads from the 19th-century tycoon to some of the current generation, including Antoinette, who inherited fragments of the estate Samuel owned in north Wales. Privilege and power are less measurable, but they flow down generations too. Antoinette is not the first of Samuel’s line to become an MP.
I’m a co-founder of a group, Heirs of Slavery, for people who want to acknowledge they are descendants of enslavers. I’ve spoken to many people in Sandbach’s position. There are those who say they feel shame but “don’t want to see the family’s Wikipedia entry changed”. Some others are uncomfortable with the history but go along with the right wing’s furious rejection of any discussion of reparative justice. Absurd whataboutery thrives. It is reported that Sandbach said in her complaint emails that the treatment of the African enslaved people could be compared with the lot of Victorian housewives – when in fact on a British plantation an enslaved person had no more rights than did a farm animal.
But most of the descendants whom I speak to accept that you cannot, as a family, or as a nation, select the good bits of your story to boast about, and erase what’s uncomfortable. It’s not just dishonest: the denial is deeply harmful to the people from the other side of the story. It postpones any hope of us ever becoming a nation at peace with this past. And that is a matter for all of us. “How are you going to heal yourselves?”, I was asked by a descendant of those enslaved when I started unearthing my family’s hidden history. The act of healing starts with acknowledgment.
Last week another “heir of slavery”, Charles Gladstone, went to Guyana, where his ancestor John, father of the Victorian prime minister, became the wealthiest enslaver of all in the institution’s final era. He worked with Samuel Sandbach. Charles took part in a ceremony at the University of Guyana and did a thing Antoinette Sandbach might consider. He recognised John Gladstone’s acts and apologised, acknowledging slavery’s “continuing impact on the daily lives of many”. “We know,” he concluded, “that we can’t change the past. But we believe that we can make a better future.”
Alex Renton is author of Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Story of Slavery (Canongate)
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