Sign for exhibition at London's Museum in Docklands, Oct 23, 2008. Photograph by Phakamisa Ndzamela.
By Phakamisa Ndzemela
LONDON, Nov 12 (Docklands Wire) – The London financial district of Canary Wharf is full of shiny skyscrapers housing big banks, but overshadowed by them is a brown, older building where British wealth of another age was made partly on the backs of slaves.
The home of the Museum in Docklands was built in the 1800s by the West India Company as a warehouse for sugar produced by slaves. Ships sailed from the docks outside to West Africa where slaves were bought and transported to sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
The same ships returned to London loaded with sugar which was stored in the warehouse.
“The sugar trade was enormously important and it generated huge amounts of wealth for Britain. A lot of the capital that was used to turn England into an industrial country came from the plantations,” said Nick Tallentire , a former history teacher and a visitor assistant at the museum.
Museum visitors see graphic evidence of the cruelty of slavery. One exhibit is a whip used for beating slaves, another an old diary recording daily events happening on the ships and in the plantations. Slaves are listed in the diary the same as horses and other livestock.
“They were horrible things that happened,” Tallentire said.
“Sometimes they were worried about epidemics spreading on board ship. So sometimes sick slaves who were still alive were thrown overboard and of course they drowned and that was known to have happened quite often. It was an incredibly cruel trade.”
“You get a good understanding of what happened during the slave trade…It’s a mixture of emotions when I find out stuff like this,” said Candice Brown, 13, a ninth grade student who came to the museum to learn more about black history.
But for Trevor Slade, 57, visiting from Yorkshire, the exhibition does not adequately portray the sufferings of poorer white labourers who worked in the West India Docks.
“I don’t think it’s really put in context. When the slave trade was going on there was an awful oppression on white people as well, the poorer classes. It (the exhibition) tends to over-emphasise the effect on the African population,” Slade said.
DRAMATIC PERFORMANCES
The Museum caters to younger children with dramatic performances by Julie Gamble, playing a slave girl.
“You’ve got to bring a human element to it,” said Gamble, who is passionate about the performance she gives.
“However hard it might be, you have to really bring it home to them (children) what it must have been like, that your own bones, your own sinews, are not your own.
“You do not own your body, you were owned by another and any child you have is not yours. There’s no family for slaves.”
