Quacou, Hankey, Cuffee, Fatima, Fanny Ibo and Quamina. These are the names of African people enslaved on the Caribbean island of Grenada, inscribed in the colonial slave registers of the 1830s. They tell a story of inhumanity, brutality and human endurance. Yet this painful history is at risk of being lost for ever.
In July, Hurricane Beryl destroyed everything in its path, including the museum on Grenada’s sister island, Carriacou. The same month, a fire at Barbados’s Archives Department destroyed historical documents from the colonial era – including vestry and hospital records. Officials revealed afterwards that they had been in the process of securing a fire-suppression system for the archives.
As the Caribbean branch of the International Council on Archives noted with “great sadness and deep concern”, the fire “has not only resulted in the loss of invaluable historical records but has also dealt a severe blow to our collective cultural heritage”. Barbados has begun the process of digitising its invaluable archive, but so much more needs to be done across the Caribbean – and quickly, before accidents or natural disasters consume these ageing papers.
Grenada’s national archive was damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and has never reopened to the public. You can read about Fanny Ibo and Quamina, enslaved Africans who toiled on Grenada’s sugar cane plantation of Beausejour, by going to see the red-leather-bound slave registers held in St George’s, Grenada’s capital. But for how much longer, as temperatures rise, and the ancient paper is at risk of crumbling? The history of an entire people is slowly being erased – records of the children who died at birth, their mothers who died in childbirth and their fathers who died of exhaustion, worked into the ground by Britain’s enslavers.
Britain’s government authorised transatlantic slavery and encouraged plantation owners to enslave Africans in the Caribbean, as did other European powers. Shouldn’t it step up and help the islands it colonised to preserve a vital collective record of the past? The slave registers, which tell us what little we know about Cuffee and Fatima, and hundreds of thousands of other enslaved Africans across the Caribbean, should be digitised and made available online for everyone to access.
As Ingrid Thompson, chief archivist in Barbados, says: “These records hold fragments of information about who we are. The legacy of slavery is one of erasure. Every detail contained in these records is another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of human existence on these islands.”
The names of the enslaved African people and the plantations they lived on at the time of emancipation in 1834 are of tremendous interest to people trying to trace their family history – whether they live in Britain, the Caribbean, Africa or the United States. For example, records naming the enslaved Africans who were shipped from Barbados to South Carolina could provide vital clues to African Americans trying to research their past. “In the Caribbean, our history is a painful void,” says Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the Reparation Commission for the Caribbean Community (Caricom). Protecting and preserving what we know of this history and making it publicly accessible is a way of easing the pain – it is a measure of reparative justice.
Britain’s national archives hold many records from the period of slavery. Yet most of these valuable documents are not digitised, and Caribbean scholars or family genealogists must make the pilgrimage to Kew in London to examine plantation records. Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, noted that he was the first person to hold this office who was a descendant of enslaved Africans, and said this would inform his approach to governing. Could he rally support for a project to digitise all the archival material from the period of slavery held in Britain’s archives, and create an online museum that explains their meaning? What a tribute this would be to his Guyanese ancestors and to the entire Windrush generation, to recognise the importance of the heritage of those who helped build postwar Britain.
And it’s not only Britain’s government that could champion the creation of an online museum, bringing together all the archives held in the Caribbean and Britain. So, too, could King Charles, whose ancestors sanctioned the slave trade at its inception – through the Royal African Company, which shipped thousands of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and to North America. In 2022, as Prince of Wales, Charles told Commonwealth leaders how he was seeking to “deepen my own understanding of slavery’s enduring impact”.
What will King Charles say when he makes the keynote speech at next week’s Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Samoa – speaking this time as head of the organisation? As a constitutional monarch, he is constrained by the policies of the government of the day. But a palace source says, “One of the core issues the king is taking a keen interest in is the preservation of historic records, which is so vital to current and future understanding of that part of our shared history.”
The king made this keen interest evident when he was filmed looking at the “slave bible” in Lambeth Palace – the edition authorised for use in Caribbean churches in the era of slavery, with the Old Testament references to freedom erased for fear they would encourage a revolt. Perhaps he can similarly give symbolic support for the immediate preservation of vital historical records in the Caribbean – and the donation of money to help make the vision a reality.
Slavery was a long time ago, and no one alive today bears responsibility for this shameful part of our history. But there are painful legacies of slavery which exist to this day – including not knowing who your ancestors were or where they came from. Clues about past lives exist in the Caribbean’s historical records. We must preserve and protect these archives, and make them digitally available to all – before the memory of Quacou, Hankey, Cuffee, Fatima, Fanny Ibo and Quamina is lost for ever.
Laura Trevelyan is a journalist and an honorary fellow of the PJ Patterson Institute for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at the University of the West Indies
Nicole Phillip is head of the University of the West Indies Global Campus, Grenada, and author of Collins’ Junior History of Grenada.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
