I have just read Katharine Viner’s article about the Guardian’s links to enslavement (How our founders’ links to slavery change the Guardian today, 28 March). I live in Martinique, a Caribbean island where France kept the black population in slavery until 1848, and some of my ancestors were slaves.
Just like Britain, France compensated slave owners, while slaves got nothing except freedom – with, in the case of France, the obligation to live on the plantation where they had been slaves in the first few years after abolition.
Today, both countries view slavery as a crime against humanity, but there seems to be more awareness in the UK, at least at the level of private individuals, about ways of promoting the descendants of those who were enslaved in the Caribbean.
The initiatives that you have described in favour of people of colour in journalism in the UK are laudable, more so than saying that one feels guilty about the wrongdoings of one’s forebears. The sins of the fathers are not to be transferred on to the children.
More than remorse, I would say that the people of the Caribbean and the black diaspora in the Americas and in Europe expect action to make their lives and their perception of the world better – when the colour of your skin is often an obstacle to equality, even in 2023.
Guy Patrick Bellance
Fort-de-France, Martinique
• What the Guardian is doing goes some way to genuinely apologise and to set in motion measures to help mitigate against racist attitudes in present times.
Well done for acknowledging a great hurt – in a world where people seem to do much to cover up mistakes. This is exactly where we all need to begin – taking responsibility for the wrongs of the past and joining with others to make amends.
What you are doing is highlighting the need for honesty, accountability and the exploration of what we can do differently. This is exactly what is needed. Thank you for setting a good example by being honest, taking responsibility and doing what you can to do something different.
Maggie and Chris Smith
Canterbury
• The Scott Trust’s decision to investigate slavery in its origins, to apologise, build relationships with descendant communities, and launch a programme of reparations is a powerful example for other institutions to follow. The Guardian’s commitment to employing Black journalists and report meaningfully on communities of colour across the world already makes the paper more insightful.
But we in the west still benefit enormously from the institutional inequality that prevents the majority of the world’s population from having an effective voice in international decision-making. We will not tackle global heating so long as western citizens have a veto. Please can we also have a sharper focus on minority rule in global governance.
Titus Alexander
Author, Unravelling Global Apartheid – An Overview of World Politics
• While I accept that the horrors of slavery were beyond appalling, as a Lancastrian I find myself somewhat torn. My grandmother, a Guardian-reading socialist all her life, worked as a weaver from the age of 13 until her marriage. The eldest of six, with a father who was in and out of work because of ill health, she had to work, and had to stay working until her youngest brother, and only he, was through university.
Education was always important in our family. Cotton wove its thread through all our lives in Lancashire: whether through machinery engineering, spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing, calico printing, creating the dyes, or mining for coal to power the steam engines and heat all those homes that housed the workers. All of this gave us food to eat, clothes for our backs and that highly prized education.
In the apologies for slavery, I have seen nothing about the fight by the cotton weavers who starved in their support of the enslaved – the great Lancashire radical author and poet Edwin Waugh wrote a report on the condition of Lancashire weavers during the cotton famine – a first-hand, eyewitness report on that support.
It is all too easy to condemn the wealthy for their complicity in the slave trade, but should I now feel guilt because my grandmother, my mother-in-law and so many thousands of others worked to keep food on the table?
Of course, I feel guilt that my country was involved in the slave trade, that it took so long to come to an end. But I also feel pride that we did develop those machines, that we did work to improve lives, that we did develop links over the whole world, and that my grandmother enabled her youngest brother to take that university place she herself would have loved. The history of slavery is complex indeed.
Catherine Duckworth
Clitheroe, Lancashire
• It’s good to see the Guardian openly and honestly acknowledging its founders’ part in the slave trade (Editorial, 28 March). The Lancashire cotton industry profited enormously from slave-picked cotton. It also profited from child labour on a vast scale, with young children exploited in the spinning mills and weaving sheds for a pittance. Deaths and life-changing injuries were common.
Child labour persisted well into the 20th century, with Lancashire having by far the highest number of children forced to work in the mills as well as being expected to go to school after a morning’s work in the factory. It would be good to see some recognition of this aspect of exploitation by the “cotton lords” who espoused liberal values while accepting child labour and slavery.
Dr Paul Salveson
Bolton, Greater Manchester
• Aged 17, a friend and I spent a week at a summer school in Kent organised by the Movement for Colonial Freedom. This was a small window on to a world that was never mentioned and, most importantly, an opportunity to meet and hear from people from around the world whose history and lives were bound up with colonialism and slavery. My girls’ grammar education in the early 1960s passed without any mention of slavery or the nature of our trading relationships depending on the labour of enslaved people.
Later, an anthropology degree at LSE in the late 1970s relied heavily on the work of colonial officers based in various African countries, who undoubtedly knew of the history of the trade but failed to take it into account in their analysis of the “tribes” they described.
Thank you for giving me and other readers the opportunity to be educated, and for establishing projects that go some way to acknowledging and addressing the horrific wrongs of the past.
Helen Kendall
Bath
• Thank you for using accurate language in your articles by referring to “enslaved people” and “an enslaver of people”, rather than the usual “slaves” and “slave owners”.
Joyce Corston
East Molesey, Surrey
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
