The International Slavery Museum

On an autumn day last October, whilst on a visit to London, I travelled by train to Liverpool - a city which I had never visited in almost 30 years of living in the UK. A bitterly cold wind swept me down towards my waterfront hotel. I had come for an overnight visit in order to spend the next day at the International Slavery Museum which comprises one floor of the warehouse-like building housing the Maritime Museum.

What had led me to make this special trip?

Last year I attended a few day workshops organised by the Human Rights Media Centre (HRMC) in collaboration with the Cape Town Holocaust Centre. To these, the HRMC brought people from the refugee community together with South Africans who had experienced human rights violations during the apartheid years. Shirley Gunn of the HRMC had asked me to come in case people giving testimony needed emotional support.

The event is structured so that the Holocaust, the exhibition and the Centre's educators, provide both the containment and the catalyst for invoking feelings about the other atrocities the participants have experienced. Survivors being enabled to tell their stories in the context of the group listening and acknowledgement, serves to break down barriers between people and communities. This may not be the goal of the 2 organisations involved, but that is my viewpoint of what the workshops achieve.

I think it was the second time I went: we had been taken round the exhibition and were having a debrief about what came up for people. A Cameroonian refugee said: "I feel bad. It's as if we black people are not important. There is no museum for us. Slavery transported millions of Africans and many died - it was our holocaust."
I could see the Centre staff about to respond and I thought it might be defensive. So I said, "You are right. There should be many museums in every African country. There is an Apartheid Museum but that's in Johannesburg. The only slavery museum I know of is in Liverpool," and I acknowledged how difficult it must be for him to have the Jewish holocaust given such prominence in the context of so little formal recognition of African suffering.

And so it is thanks to him that I decided to go and have a look at the Slavery Museum the very next opportunity I had.

What struck me most about the exhibition is that it pulled no punches with regard to how slavery benefited the city and people of Liverpool and how it contributed to the industrialization of Britain. It was from those very docks outside the building that slave ships would sail on the first leg of their journey to West Africa, equipped with what was deemed necessary for the trading of slaves by the merchants of Liverpool and beyond. The suppliers and prices paid for goods like chains, food, textiles etc. that would be needed to purchase and incarcerate the recently-bought slaves on the middle passage to the Americas or West Indies were shown neatly itemised. Like the small-scale model of Treblinka at the Holocaust Centre, we had instead a model of the Western hemisphere "killing fields" - in this case a typical plantation. Not a death factory as such, but a farm prison where life was cheap. It wasn't designed for extermination but for production and profit.

Subsequently on my return home, I watched a series Channel 4 had produced called "The Mill". It is based on extensive archives found at Quarry Bank Mill in Chesire. Through the characters and the story, it portrays the relationships between industries in Great Britain and the slave trade, and the way capitalism disconnects or alienates the different elements of exploitation. The mill is a cotton mill in 1833. That should immediately raise an eyebrow - where is the cotton coming from?

The series is concerned with the issue of child labour in Britain and especially at the mill. Seeing it straight after being at the museum, it showed what the museum couldn't - the unbridled exploitation of labour by the beneficiaries of the slave trade at home. Virtual slave labour was going on in Britain too and many of these labourers were children - sometimes as young as 9. The disconnect is embodied in the character of the mill-owner's wife. She attends fashionable Abolitionist meetings in the town without realising, like so many owning-class women, that her husband's income and therefore her comfortable lifestyle, actually derives from the slave trade she is opposing. Meanwhile her son, like many plantation-owner's sons out in the West Indies, fathers a child with a girl at the mill. Of-course he will not make it legitimate. The child will not have Mr Mill-Owner and Mrs Abolitionist as grandparents.

It seems shocking that there is only one museum and a few other small exhibitions (e.g. in Bristol) dedicated to the Atlantic slave trade that lasted over 400 years. Due to open in Washington, DC in 2016 is the National Museum of African American History and Culture.