AS we come to the end of Black History Month, Glasgow-based dramatist May Sumbwanyambe, can be sure that, in his new play, Enough of Him, he has made a particularly excellent contribution to Scotland’s reckoning with its too often neglected role in the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.
Set in Perthshire in the late-18th century, the drama (which is a co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and Pitlochry Festival Theatre) considers the path-breaking legal case of Joseph Knight, the Black slave who won ahis freedom when, in 1778, he established at Perth Sheriff Court that slavery had no status in Scots law.
This is no legalistic courtroom drama. Rather, Sumbwanyambe offers us a brilliantly imaginative leap into the lives of, not only Knight, but his nominal “owner” Sir John Wedderburn, Margaret Wedderburn (the slave owner’s wife), and Annie Thompson (the servant in the Wedderburn’s mansion at Ballindean, who would become Knight’s wife).
