In spite of or maybe because so much attention has been given to the Bicentennial Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade I sense that many in our society are still wondering what all the fuss is about.
Much of my own ministry has been in Bristol, Hull and Liverpool and my own Diocese is united with Virginia in America and Akure in Nigeria in a partnership which replicates the Slave Trade Triangle. The people and places have opened up my imagination to the realities of racism so inextricably chained to trade in black slaves. Slavery in one form or another has always been and remains even to this day a feature of human society. What was distinctive about the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery was its overt racism. The millions of slaves were African and black.
Recently I was part of a consultation on the environment in America. It took place on an old Cotton Plantation in South Georgia. We were addressed by a black Pastor from Atlanta who had been with Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when he had given his celebrated "I have a dream" speech. The pastor said only half jokingly that he'd felt nervous coming to the plantation especially when he'd seen the Old Oak Tree. The mainly white gathering froze in guilty embarrassment. The hanging of black people because of the colour of their skin was for him and his audience within their living memory. The roots of racism cannot be disentangled from the history of slavery. Racism is the legacy of the transatlantic trade.
Those who wonder what all the fuss is about fail to see this connection and underestimate the destructive power of racism in the modern world. In Liverpool we came face to face with its ugly manifestation when the young, talented and black Anthony Walker was murdered with an axe in a hideously brutal racist attack. The taunting and bullying of a person because of the colour of his skin has its antecedents in the dehumanising treatment of black people who were traded in their millions from Africa to America in the vilest of barbaric conditions and in ships that sailed out of London, Bristol and Liverpool. I can barely bear to tell you this but one such slave ship was actually and cruelly named "The Blessing". Estimates vary but at least ten million slaves were transported and at least one million died in transit. Did I say "died"? I should have said killed because the mode in which they were traded was grotesque and deliberate. The remarkable autobiography of Olaudah Equiano called (and this must be a classic example of English understatement) "An interesting narrative" catalogues the brutality of the life at sea and testifies to the tragic lot of the slave in transit.
"The stench of the hold .........became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died ...... This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of chains .......... the filth of the necessary tubs [latrine buckets], into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable".
For those who survived the conditions on arrival were equally harsh. On a visit to Virginia I was taken by a young black priest to stand on the banks of the James River where half a million slaves were traded in Richmond. She showed me Lumpkins Jail where they were corralled before being sold and the gallows where they were hanged if they rebelled. I wept for the shame of it. I think I wept also out of a sense of mystery for here I was in the presence of a young black woman who had embraced the faith of the very people who had been her ancestors oppressors. I was standing on the same soil as grace. It brought into sharp focus the relationship between Christianity and the trade in slaves.
