No Apologies Wanted

Published: 26/03/2007

Blair should not apologise for slavery. My fear is that all this pushing and shoving towards the gesture might just get our moralistic PM to into the political pulpit he has made his own. I can see him, with eyes slightly moist and that tremor in his voice, delivering an unforgettable sermon seeking messianic redemption on behalf of the nation. Could any of us bear to listen to him without heaving? Besides, as we know, haughty and high Brittania, holds her trident tight, doesn’t ever do humble.

Ken Livingstone thinks She should, so now do Drexel Gomez, the Archbishop of the West Indies, our archbishops and many black leading lights in Africa, Britain and the United States. Livingstone, returning to fine GLC form, fired off a salvo last week demanding state contrition: ‘The British government’s refusal of such an apology is squalid. Until recently, almost unbelievably, it refused even to recognise the slave trade as a crime against humanity, on the grounds that it was legal at the time.’ Then, ever the top boy in the white class, Livingstone, unfurled an overdue apology for London, our capital home to slaves and ex slaves and also merchants, investors and traders with the blood of black people on their piles of bank notes.

I have problems with Livingstone’s postures, dubious allegiances and tribal loyalties to the Labour party. However, more than any other living British politician, Livingstone has proved himself a true anti-racist over thirty years and his public acknowledgement comes from a font of genuine repentance. His master Blair hasn’t, and any apology will only be another useful trick in the New Labour toolkit. As will slavery day called for by John Prescott, remaking himself into a Wilberforce manqué. Never was so noble an idea damned by such a disreputable advocate.

The various public debates as well as the media and institutional coverage of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade have been instructive, making the official remembrance worth all the time and money poured into it. We have been able to know them for what they are, members of the British Establishment, defined as the people who hold power on these isles. For me the fascinating revelation is that they have been as split as the rest of the country. Some individuals have focused determinedly only on the great abolitionists, others have chosen this moment to look at the way Britain has avoided engagement with the horrors of slavery, a minority have made space for the black side of the story, others on the slavery still going on in the world, and an alarming number have gone (once again) for denial of responsibility by blaming African partners in the dreadful trade or by claiming that the exercise encourages national ‘self hate’ for crimes committed by others a long time ago.

So there is no such thing as a clubby establishment and that is a heartening revelation. So too is the reminder that there were white people from the rich and famous to the ordinary who came out against enslavement. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote an acidic riposte to Edmund Burke who saw slaves as property; William Cowper and William Blake embodied their outrage in art, women like Maria Edgeworth led a boycott on sugar and then there were the steadfast influential men like the heroic Granville Sharp who used the law to break down support for slavery in Britain, the Clapham Sect, and of course Wilberforce. There are some British black people and radical whites, including Livingstone, who find it offensive that white abolitionists are getting so much attention. I understand the reservations, but can’t empathise with the offence felt. Battles against injustice – the emancipation of slaves and women, liberation from colonialism and apartheid, civil and human rights – have always needed good people from the other side to take up the cudgels and they have, in their millions. I salute them and their contemporaries who fight ceaselessly against xenophobia, arrogant foreign policies, the rights of dispossessed everywhere.

We have also been reminded of just how appalling the business was. Radio4 has been especially brave and brilliant, (upsetting their petty national listeners I am sure) featuring the broadcaster Henry Bonsu and actor/ playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, both descendents of African slaves. Bonsu went to Ghana to deal with his countrymen’s complicity- that untold story which remains hidden to the shame of west African countries. Kwei-Armah took us back to when Roots was broadcast and he learnt as a teenager about the bestial abuse of his people by the great civilized. The programmes pierced the heart. Remarkable too has been the output by key intellectuals – David Dabydeen and James Walvin in particular – the latter’s vivid new The Trader, The Owner, The Slave (Jonathan Cape) tells the story through three individuals. Present day global slavery too has been investigated and publicised through the months. What still hasn’t been given enough space and prominence is the role of slaves themselves in ending the practice – their spirit and rebellions caused the edifice to shake then fall. To give them due credit proves a step too far for Great Britain, still unable to acknowledge any truthful history that distracts it from its long glorious march.

Our country is besotted with its earliest kings and queens and family trees and tales of empire and world war heroics and Jane Austen costume dramas (many featuring rich men who made their loot owning slaves and plantations), yet slavery is just too old and passé say David Cameron, right wing and neo con liberal pundits and even a few museum curators who make their living animating the old and passé. What they mean is they can’t bear the burden of guilt and responsibility for the terribly bad things done by this country during slavery and ever since.

How can Tony Blair say sorry for slavery when he will never apologise for Iraq? And at a time he sends thousands of African and Arab asylum seekers to murderous regimes? He believes the west has the moral authority to behave immorally. Baroness Amos of slave heritage, a key figure in this commemoration went around Africa threatening countries which refused to back our war cries in the UN. Same thing goes for Tories too. They have to remain defiantly unapologetic on slavery because they cannot create new expectations. What next, they must think, regret for aiding and abetting Idi Amin and Pinochet who killed so many of their own? A fulsome apology from Douglas Hurd for abandoning Bosnian Muslims to their fate under Milosovic? Can’t be doing that. Both these parties have supported inhumanity for the sake of the national interest – the same reason used for slavery.

The history of slavery lives on in the devaluation of black and other non-white lives here and abroad. As the famous signatories of the letter in the Independent protested last week, how does the EU let the genocide in Darfur carry on? Easy, they are only blacks. Mugabe is a villain who must be deposed but the extraordinary concern for his violations is aroused because his whites are his victims too, unlike those tortured and killed in Darfur and Uganda and the Congo where they are only blacks. Black Britons are still near the bottom of the growing heap and now many kill each other before they grow.
Our leaders have yet to accept these as the legacies of slavery. To do so would require them to have Wilberforce’s integrity, honesty, and indomitable political will. Can you name one politician today who comes near?

Published in The Independent