One of the UK’s leading experts on race has described the government as “the most racist” in his lifetime, and called for a public holiday to remember the horrors of the slave trade.
Speaking on Slavery Remembrance Day, Prof Kehinde Andrews said one day was “not even close to enough” to acknowledge the UK’s links to the historical transatlantic slave trade.
“If you think about just how important slavery was to Britain and how horrific it was, it should be a national memorial; there should be a day off,” he said. “There was really nothing more important to Britain’s development than slavery.”
For more than 200 years, Britain was involved in the transatlantic slave trade. It was abolished in 1807, but the full abolition of slavery did not follow for another generation, until 1833, when the Slavery Abolition Act was introduced.
Once slavery itself was abolished, at the expense of the British taxpayer, Britain used 40% of its national budget, which was £20m – roughly £1.3bn in today’s terms – to buy freedom for all slaves in the empire. Compensation was paid directly to slave owners, and not a penny was handed to the people who had been enslaved.
Even then, according to a recently republished 1938 thesis on capitalism and slavery by Eric Williams – then an Oxford University scholar, who would later become the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago – the abolition of slavery was fuelled not by Britain’s newly discovered moral conscience but by its economic self-interest.
Andrews, who was the UK’s first professor of Black studies, drew parallels between the dehumanisation of Black lives in the slave trade, and the lack of national media coverage around missing Black women.
“Slavery is absolutely abhorrent,” Andrews added. “It’s certainly one of the worst atrocities in human history, but because it’s Black people, we don’t want to remember it.
“That is directly linked to the lack of care of Black women going missing,” he said, referring to the disappearance of nursing student, Owami Davies.
The poorer economic and health outcomes of Black communities in Britain was also “directly because of slavery”, Andrews added.
Poverty rates for Black Africans and Caribbeans in the UK has largely remained just over 40% for the last 25 years, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. A disproportionate number of Black people are in prisons, according to the Lammy review, and there is evidence of structural racism leading to people from minority ethnic backgrounds having poorer health outcomes.
“That isn’t an accident,” Andrews said. “That is the legacy of slavery: impoverishment where Black people are more likely to die, more likely to be poorer.
“What’s important is repair, so that these inequalities don’t exist,” he said, although he added it was “highly unlikely” any government would ever successfully eradicate them.
Slavery Remembrance Day was chosen by Unesco to annually commemorate the day on which enslaved people successfully revolted against French colonial rule on the island of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, on 23 August 1791. Considered the most successful slave uprising in history, the revolt was instrumental in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.
For the playwright and author Bonnie Greer, the UK’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade was a matter of historical record that “paled” in comparison to a day of remembrance celebrating the agency of self-liberated enslaved people, who risked death and “decided to live” more than 300 years ago, she said.
“I remember them as human beings taken to the abyss and doing what few have done: transcend it,” Greer said of the self-liberated enslaved people. “They have given their descendants a key, a complex one that we must keep studying and not be so enraged and so traumatised that we stop digging; stop uncovering; stop bringing to the light of day a very complex part of of the human story.”
