Letter to Department of Education and Other Politicians Calling for Broader Teaching of Slavery

One of the issues that concerns me about the current debate over historic slavery is that the belief seems to have grown up that only White Europeans and Americans practised it, and only enslaved Blacks and other people of colour. Connected to this is a related belief that only Whites can be racist. There’s an image on the net of young man of colour waving a placard ‘The British invented Racism’. Neither of these ideas is true. Slavery existed in many societies across the world from ancient times. It existed in ancient Egypt, the Middle East, India, China and elsewhere. It was a feature of many Black African societies, dating back to 3000 BC, and the proportion of the enslaved population ranged from 30 to 70 per cent according to the individual peoples. Black Africans were also enslaved by the Muslim Arabs and then by the Ottoman Turks, as were White Europeans, who were also preyed upon by the Barbary pirates of Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia. The Islamic world also developed racist views of Black Africans and White Europeans, contrary to the explicit teaching of Islam. The Chinese have also developed their own racial ideologies and hierarchies. However, many people don’t understand this, and this leaves them vulnerable to woke racial ideologies, like Critical Race Theory, which view Whites as innately racist and requiring particular teaching and treatment in order to cure them of their prejudices.

I think part of the problem is that the school curriculum only teaches the transatlantic slave trade. Outside the classroom there is little discussion or mention of slavery elsewhere in the world, except in the case of ancient Egypt. As far as I am aware, there are no TV programmes about global slavery, with the exception of the occasional news item about modern slavery and people trafficking. I am also not aware of any museums which also cover the global history of slavery. This absence, I believe, is leaving people vulnerable to radical ideologies that explicitly demonise Whites and teach Blacks that they have and will always be the victims of White prejudice, maltreatment and discrimination.

Yesterday I emailed messages to Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, Nick Gibb, the minister for schools, and the shadow minister for education, Bridget Phillimon about this issue, recommending that the teaching of slavery in schools and universities should also mention that it was done across the world. As should museum displays about slavery and the slave trade. I doubt that I shall receive a reply from them, as the internet addresses, I used may have been solely for their constituents and MPs are forbidden to reply to anyone except them. I’ve therefore also posted the message to the Department of Education using their contact address. But I doubt I’ll get anything back from them either.

Here’s the message I sent them, which I altered a little according to the minister’s or shadow minister’s sex and official position. Please note: I am not advocating the teaching of slavery and racial prejudice in other societies in order to somehow excuse western slavery and racism. I am merely doing so to counter the very specific issue that some people seem to believe that it is unique to White Europeans.

‘Dear Madam,

I am an historian with a Ph.D. in archaeology. I writing to you to express my deep concerns about the teaching of the subject of slavery in British schools and universities and the historical falsehoods being promoted by radical left-wing ideologies such as Critical Race Theory. I understand that the school curriculum includes transatlantic slavery. This is entirely correct, and that dark page of British imperial history should be taught. However, I am concerned that the exclusive focus on British and White European and American enslavement of Black Africans is leading to the distorted view among many British young people that slavery is somehow unique to White culture and society, and is something that only Whites did to Black Africans and other peoples of colour. This is, I feel, being exploited by the advocates of Critical Race Theory to promote a distorted narrative which demonises Whites as perpetual villains while at the same time teaching Black and Asians that they are victims, who will be perpetually oppressed by White racist society.

The idea that only Whites practiced slavery is far from the truth. Slavery has existed across the world since ancient times, as was recognised by the 19^th century Abolitionists and their opponents. White Britons were enslaved by the Barbary pirates of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia from the 16^th century onwards. This was only ended by the French conquest of Algiers in the 1820s. The Turkish conquest of the Balkans from the 14^th century onwards resulted in the White, Christian population being depressed into serfdom as well as slavery itself. Slavery in Africa existed from at least 3000 BC. It was practiced in ancient Egypt and in many Black African societies. In these latter, the proportion of the enslaved population could range from 30%-70%. Black Africans were enslaved by Muslim Arabs and later on by the Ottoman Turks. It also existed in India, where the slave class are recorded in the Vedas as the Dasyas, and in China and elsewhere.  There are some excellent books about these subjects, such as Jeremy Black’s Slavery: A New Global History (London: Constable & Robinson 2011), Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2003), and Sean Stilwell, Slavery and Slaving in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014).

At the same time, the West has not been the only civilisation to develop racial prejudice and hierarchies of race. Racial prejudices against Blacks, but also White Europeans also developed in Islam, as discussed in Bernard Lewis’ Slavery and Race in Medieval Islam, and similar racial ideologies have also developed in China. But I very much regret that many young people are unaware that other, non-western cultures have also developed such practices. The result has been that some people seem to believe that racism is, once again, unique to the west. There is an image on the internet of a young man of colour bearing a placard saying, ‘Britain invented Racism’ which illustrates this very well.

I am afraid the lack of knowledge of extra-European racism and slavery is being exploited by Critical Race Theory and its supporters to promote the view that only Whites can be racist, and that racism and historical slavery is something that Whites need to be particularly reminded of and feel guilty about as part of wider radical programme to promote restorative racial justice.

I am very much aware that racism needs to be confronted and erased, but I believe this doctrine to be itself hypocritical and racist. I would therefore like to see the teaching of slavery in schools and universities, and museums exhibits about it also include the existence of slavery throughout the world, including Africa. The intention here is not to demonise other societies and their peoples, but simply to make the point that slavery has never been solely practiced by Whites. At the same time, I would also like to see any teaching in schools about racism also include the fact that this too is not simply something that Whites have done to people of colour. I believe strongly that it is through an awareness of the ubiquity of slavery and racism across the globe that a proper understanding of these issues as both part of British history and a continuing problem can be gained.

I hope you as Secretary of State for Education, will consider this issue worth raising will work to introduce these ideas into the current teaching on slavery, and look forward to hearing from you about this issue.

Yours faithfully,

David -‘

My Email to Black Activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu about Slavery Reparations

I gather that she’s been in today’s Guardian, where she’s written a piece about the death of Tina Turner. Turner was one of the greatest soul singers, even appearing as Auntie Entity, the ruler of Bartertown, in the film Mad Max 3, for which she also sang and performed a theme song. Shola’s piece lamented the fact that the singer had died before Blacks had received their proper compensation for their historic enslavement by White Europeans and Americans. She’s an intensely controversial figure. Some people feel that she is anti-British and I believe there was 38 Degrees petition launched by someone to stop the TV companies using her as a guest on their shows when debating racism and related topics. I feel that the issues of Black compensation for slavery raises questions about such compensation that crosses racial and national boundaries and which may affect Shola herself. Slavery was practised for millennia across the globe. Black Africans were enslaved by other African nations, as well as Muslim Arabs and Turks, as well as Indians, Persians and Afghans. Odiously, slavery still persists in Africa and the global south, and has been revived in Islamist-held Libya and Uganda. At the same time, Europeans were held in bondage as serfs until into the 19th century in parts of Europe, and were also enslaved by the invading Turks and pirates from Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia. This rises the issue that if compensations is to be paid to enslaved Blacks, then the same principle should mean that the victims of these forms of slavery should also receive compensation from those, who historically enslaved them.

I’ve therefore sent her this message via the message box on her website. I’ll let you know if I get an answer

‘Dear Shola,

I was struck by your article in today’s Guardian about the death of the great soul singer, Tina Turner, and lamenting the fact that she died before Black people had received reparations for slavery. The question of slavery reparations raises issues extending beyond western Blacks, including the complicity of African aristocracies, the enslavement of Blacks by other nations, including Islam and India, as well as indigenous White European forms of bondage and their enslavement by the Barbary pirates and the Turkish empire. As the granddaughter of an African prince, I would be particularly interested in your perspectives on these issues.

Regarding indigenous African complicity in the slave trade, I’ve doubtless no need to tell you about how generally Black Africans were captured and enslaved by other Black African peoples, who then sold them on to White Europeans and Americans. The most notorious slaving states were included Dahomey, Benin and Whydah in west Africa, while on the east coast the slaving peoples included the Yao, Marganja and the Swahili, who enslaved their victims for sale to the Sultan of Muscat to work the clove plantations on Zanzibar. They were also purchased by merchants from India, and then exported to that country, as well as Iran, Afghanistan and further east to countries like Sumatra. It has therefore been said that reparations should consist of Black Africans compensating western Blacks. Additionally, Black Africans were also enslaved by other Muslim Arabs in north Africa and then the Turkish empire. What is now South Sudan was a particular source of Black slaves and one of the causes of the Mahdi’s rebellion was outrage at the banning of slavery by the British. This raises the issue of whether Turkey, Oman, India and other north African and Asian states should also compensate the Black community for their depredations on them.

The complicity of the indigenous African chiefs in the slave trade has become an issue recently in Ghana and Nigeria. I understand that the slavery museum in Liverpool was praised by campaigners and activists from these nations for including this aspect of the slave trade. I would very much like to know your views on this matter. Forgive me if I have got this wrong, but I understand you are of the Igbo people. These also held slaves. I would also like to know if you could tell me a bit more about this, and how this may have affected your family’s history. Your grandfather was, after all, a chief, and this raises the awkward question of whether your family owned slaves. If they did, how were they manumitted and did your family give them reparations for their enslavement?

There is also the question of the enslavement of Whites both under conditions of domestic servitude and by the Muslim powers of the Turkish empire and Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Serfdom in England died out in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, but it continued in European countries into the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Prussia only liberated its serfs in 1825 and the Russian serfs were only freed in 1860. Serfdom is considered a form of slavery under international law, as I understand. If Blacks are to be granted compensation for their enslavement, then as a general principle the descendants of White European serfs should also be compensated for their ancestors’ servitude.

In Britain, a from of serfdom continued in the Scottish and Northumbrian mining industries. Miners were bondsmen, whose contracts bound them to the mining companies and who were metal identity collars to prevent them running away exactly like slaves. I would be grateful if you would tell me whether their descendants should also receive compensation for their forefathers’ virtual enslavement.

Over a million White Europeans and Americans, mostly from southern European countries such as France, Spain and Italy, were enslave by the Barbary pirates. This only came to an end with the French conquest and occupation of Alegria. If people are to be compensated for their ancestors’ enslavement, then presumably America and Europe should also receive compensation from these nations for this. The Turkish conquest of the Balkans in the 14^th century by Mehmet II resulted in the depression of the indigenous White Christian population into serfdom as well as the imposition of slavery. When Hungary was conquered, the Turks levied a tribute of a tenth of the country’s population as slaves. When one of the Greek islands revolted in the 1820s, it was put down with dreadful cruelty and the enslavement of 20,000 Greeks. Do you feel that the descendants of these enslaved Balkan Whites should also receive compensation from their former Turkish overlords?

There is also the fact that after Britain abolished the slave trade, she paid compensation to the former African slaving nations for their losses as part of a general scheme to persuade them to adopt a trade in ‘legitimate’ products. This was believed to benefit both Britain and the African nations themselves. How do you feel about the payment of such compensation? Do you feel that it is unfair, and that these nations should pay it back to us, or that they should pay it to the descendants of the people they enslaved?

Finally, slavery still persists today in parts of Africa and has even revived. The Islamist terror groups that have seized control of half of the former Libya have opened slave markets dealing in the desperate migrants from further south, who have made their way to the country in the attempt to find sanctuary in Europe. At the same time, slave markets have also opened in Uganda. Slavery is very much alive around the world today. I would be greatly interested in your perspectives on this issue, which is affecting people of colour in the global south. How do you feel it should be tackled? Are you working with anti-slavery organisations, such as Anti-Slavery International and the various organisations by former African slaves to combat this? If not, I would be very grateful if you could tell me why not, when you are obviously motivated by a human outrage at the plight of the historic victims of western slavery.

I hope you will be able to provide me with answers to these questions, and very much look forward to receiving your reply.

Yours sincerely,

David Sivier

Video on the Holocaust Artist, Felix Nussbaum

Bit of art history. I found this video on Blind Dweller’s channel on YouTube. It’s about Felix Nussbaum, a Jewish artist who fled Nazi Germany only to be caught during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, and deported to a concentration camp in France. It was there that he painted many of the disturbing, surreal paintings of Jewish in incarceration, misery and despair. He managed to escape back to Belgium, where he was sheltered by friends, who provided him with painting materials and a studio. But he knew that it was only a matter of time before the Nazis caught up with him and he was sent to the Death camps. He continued painting, and some of his works have an apocalyptic edge. I am not remotely surprised. I can remember reading a description of the Nazi massacre of eastern European Jews, in which the dead and dying were piled up, and it struck me then that it was like the end of world with the forces of evil spewing violence and death. Eventually the Nazis did catch him, and he was deported to Auschwitz along with other members of his family, including his parents and brother, where they were murdered.

The video gives a full biography of his life, or as full as it can in so many minutes. Nussbaum was born in Osnabruck, and he and his parents at one time travelled to Italy to escape Nazi persecution. While he moved to Belgium, they returned to Germany, where I think they were victims of the Nazi persecution. Since his death, he has become celebrated for his works and there is a dedicated museum to him in his home town. The thumbnail below shows one of his paintings. The subject of the painting, holding up his passport stamped with the French and Flemish word for ‘Jew’, is believed to be a self-portrait. There are other characters in his painting which are also believed to be depictions of Nussbaum himself. In one, painted in the French concentration camp, he is one of a number of Jews, dressed in the prayer shawl, worshipping at a makeshift shrine the inmates had made themselves.

I am absolutely amazed that Nusbaum was able to paint during the horrors as I thought the oppressive conditions would have prevented him. I also admire his Belgian friends for hiding him. I don’t know about Belgium, but Nazi Germany passed laws punishing those sheltering Jews not only with death for those actually hiding them, but also for their entire families. Under these circumstances, it took real courage to do so, and the Jews that were hidden by gentile friends and sympathisers appreciated how much those that did so risked.

Nussbaum is a fascinating artist, whose talent graphically lays bare the reality for Jews of this most horrific period in European history. In my opinion, he deserves to be better known and appreciated.

Mad YouTubers Call Kamala Harris Racist for Talking about Black African Complicity in the Slave Trade in Ghana

Yesterday, the right-wing YouTube channel, Black Conservative Perspective, attacked a ‘woke’ YouTube channel for calling Vice-President Kamala Harris a racist. What had turned the VP into the equivalent of the Grand Dragon of the KKK in their eyes? She had dared to give a speech in which she became visibly choked talking about the enslavement of Black Africans by their fellows in order to sell them to White merchants. How horrendous that the VP should talk about such historical facts! The Black Conservative thought that there was a bit of political tit-for-tat going on here. Ghana is joining Uganda on passing further anti-LGBT legislation, and at least one of the country’s politicos had criticised Harris for trying to promote gay rights. So, in his view, Harris had tried to embarrass them by talking about Black African complicity in the slave trade.

Except that, if you go to Ghana, it’s not much of a secret. One of the former Gold Coast slave forts contains a museum as well as being the site of the local market. There are a number of guilds associated with it, one of whose name translates as ‘White Men’s Children’. Its members are people descended from the White slavers and their Black wives and mistresses. Outside Africa, Black African involvement in the slave trade is discussed and taught in some American universities. One of the books I’ve got on slavery is about African slavery, published by a respectable American academic. About a decade and more ago Channel 4 screened a documentary about Africa’s role in the slave trade, videos of which can be found on YouTube. When Bristol City Museum staged their ‘Respectable Trade’ exhibition on the city’s role in the slave trade, this also mentioned that Africans were partners in the horrendous trade. I also used to work with a West Indian historian, who once told me that his people were told by their ‘mammies’ that they had been sold by the Africans.

The Conservative then continued to say that African participation in slavery should be taught in schools, and attacked the woke people, who tell everyone that America is terrible and Black people are oppressed, but have no intention of moving to somewhere like Ghana. America, he concluded, was the best place in the world to be Black. I’m not sure about that, but it’s certainly true that America has pioneered Black empowerment in the west and its approaches are copied by countries like Britain.

I strongly agree that Black participation in the slave trade should be taught in schools, in contrast to the accepted view which seems to be to place all the blame very securely on Whites. But this would go against one of the reasons behind calls for the teaching of Black history in schools. The idea is to teach Black students about their people’s achievements in order to bolster their self-esteem, and in doing so encourage them to do well at school. There are schools in Bristol that teach Black history, and the subject was covered two years ago on the local BBC news programme, Points West. This claimed that Black history was having the intended results, and proudly stated that the pupils were taught about great Black civilisations before they covered the slave trade. This is all very well, but it also clashes with the idea that history should also be the search for objective truth. This will always be out of reach, because every historian has their own views and biases, just as the sources they use also have their biases. Hence historians develop different views of the same events, which may often strongly conflict with each other. African participation in the slave trade, and the existence of slavery in Africa itself, is something that would probably have a dispiriting effect of Black students, rather than inspiring them with pride and confidence.

Nevertheless, that is no excuse for it not being taught. It’s a fact of history, and so should be included in any teaching about the slave trade. As for America, the Conservative is right when he says that Blacks are better off there than in Africa. I’ve no doubt he’s right. Conditions for many Black Americans are poor, but on the whole they’re more prosperous and have better opportunities than most Africans. A friend of mine once told me that one of the Black Panthers escaped the FBI crackdown and fled to Ethiopia. After a year he returned, walked into an FBI office and handed himself in. The reason was that no matter how much he was oppressed as Black person in America, it wasn’t as bad as Ethiopia. Of course, the enslaved Africans who crossed the Atlantic could not possibly have foreseen that one day they would be free, and possess equality with Whites, at least in law. But that’s fortunately how it’s turned out, through much struggle by dedicated people willing to risk their lives and liberty.

America isn’t perfect, and there is still much to do to combat Black poverty and marginalisation. But it isn’t the hell some of the woke ideologues claim. And any objective teaching of the slave trade needs to include African as well as European and American participation in it.

Video on Pioneering Black American Painter Jacob Lawrence

I know very, very little about Black American art. I’ve heard of Grandma Moses and the Harlem Renaissance, and that’s about it. I’ve been watching a number of art history documentaries on YouTube, and this piece about Jacob Lawrence from Paul Priestley’s Art History School channel came as something of a revelation. Lawrence was one of those great figures you’ve never heard of, a true pioneer. He was, for example, the first Black American artist to be taken up by a major gallery. This short video tells his story.

Lawrence came from dirt-poor working class parents, and at various times throughout his career he worked menial jobs simply to pay the rent. He was inspired to become an artist by looking at the Renaissance masters like Giotto on display in New York museums. He was exhibited in a gallery when he was only 18, but still had to keep that day job. His parents would have preferred him to have been a mailman. He carried on like this, painting while working day jobs and occasionally taking art courses for some years until he made his breakthrough and the big galleries began picking him up. During the War he did his national service in a segregated regiment, but was later moved to a desegregated one and served as a war artist. He also met various avant-garde artists, who had fled to America from the Nazis. After the War he was taken up by a number of increasingly prestigious galleries and foundations. The stress of the sudden fame and recognition was sadly too much for him. His mental health deteriorated and he was forced to spend time in a mental hospital. He recovered, and journeyed to Nigeria to explore Africa’s artistic heritage, while lecturing on the influence of African art on western modernism, like the Cubists. He also gained a post as university art teacher.

Much of his work is naturally about Black American history. He was also fascinated by Haiti’s history, and painted a series of pictures about this subject. He also painted a series on the migration of Black Americans from the south to the north after the Civil War, as well as at least one painting of the anti-slavery fanatic, John Brown. He was concerned to paint from every day life, and so much of his paintings show people at work, building, doing carpentry and so on. He also painted scenes based on his incarceration in the mental hospital.

His style is simplistic, and the figures do remind me a little of some of Picasso’s works, like The Bathers. But somebody also said that if you looked at them, there was too much craftsmanship for them to be naive. He also uses bright, vivid colours. It’s a great introduction to one of the unknown masters of modern American art.

The Earliest Robot: Philon of Byzantium’s Wine Servant

One of the books I’ve been reading is Luca Beatrice’s Robot: A Visual Atlas from Ancient Greece to Artificial Intelligence (Milan: 24 Ore Culture 2016). This is an encyclopaedic discussion of robots in history, art, film and television, music, fashion and design, books, cartoons and toys and technology. The book’s blurb runs

‘Since ancient Greek times, man has sought to build a copy of himself. It is here, in the invention of the replica of himself, that he has felt closest to God.

From Philon of Byzantium to Isaac Asimov and Philip Dick, the inventor of the Replicants.

From Daft Punk to Kraftwerk, the band that used replica mannequins to perform their songs.

From Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Her, in which the protagonist falls in love with a computer.

From Astro Boy to the American Marvel comics superheroes and the Japanese characters Mazinger and Steel Jeeg.

And now, in the age of computers, the true robots of our time, those old tin and steel robots have assumed a vintage appeal that makes them even more irresistible.’

Although it’s very comprehensive, there are some glaring omissions. For example, when it comes to bands of real robot musicians, it includes Japan’s Z Machines, but leaves out Germany’s Compressorhead. It also includes some European comics that are obscure to English-speaking audiences, but doesn’t include 2000 AD’s Robusters or ABC Warriors despite the fact that these strips and their characters go back 40 years or so. But there is much that is genuinely new, like the Mutant Waste Company, a British artist’s collective now resident in Italy, who used to build robots out of disused car parts and pieces from scrap yards.

It begins with the first robot believed to have been built, Philon of Byzantium’s automatic servant. It says of this android

‘Designed by an engineer and writer who lived in the 3rd century BC in Byzantium, Philon’s Automatic Servant is the oldest robot in history with human features. Able to serve wine, its structure is composed of several elements: inside, under the tunic, are two containers, one of wine and one of water, connected to the jug by means of air tubes that carry the liquid long the right arm. The left hand, which holds the cup, is connected to a system of levers that regulate the movement of both arms: when the cup is placed on the hand, the left arm descends while the right arms moves to pour the wine mixed with water; as the cup gradually fills, its weight increases and as a result the arm descends until it reaches the lowest level and thus the limit of capacity. The system now comes to a halt, the guest can take his cup, and the arms return to their starting position, ready to begin again. The Automatic Servant is now housed in the Kostas Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology in Katakolo, Elis, Greece.’ (p. 16).

And here’s the photograph of the machine on the opposite page.

I’m pretty sure this is a reconstruction, as I imagine the real machine has been lost, although I might be wrong. Anyway, it’s a truly astonishing piece of engineering and shows once again just how sophisticated the engineers and scientists of the ancient world were. The Japanese also created a similar automaton, a mechanical servant girl that carried cups of tea to the guests.

Historical Slavery Commemoration Groups Plans Slavery Museum in Bristol

Bristol was, along with London and Liverpool, one of the major centres of the transatlantic slave trade. According to last Friday’s edition of the local paper, the Bristol Post, for the 24th February 2023, a group of activists and radical historians have put forward plans to turn the former Seaman’s Mission on the city’s harbour into a museum of slavery. The building is owned by the brewery Samuel Smith’s at the moment. They’re intending to sell it, but are demanding £1 million. The museum is the idea of the Abolition Shed collective, who admit that at the moment they don’t have the money for it, but have submitted plans in order to start a public debate about it.

The Collective is composed of the Bristol Radical History Group, the Countering Colston Group and the Long John Silver Trust. They are backed by the architects Marshall & Kendon, who have drawn up the plans for the suggested museum and education centre. The architect’s planning brief said

“The Abolition Shed Collective believe they have an imaginative reuse the historic buildings are crying out for – an Interpretation Centre or Museum for a Memorial to the Victims of Enslavement to be sited nearby – right where this history actually happened in the 17th and 18th centuries.”

“To tell the story of anti-slavery campaigners that, combined with African agency and resistance of the enslaved themselves, brought an end to this heinous crime against humanity. Bristol was the pre-eminent slave trading port in the world between the 1720s and 1740s, and this vital fact is little acknowledged , it was also home to one of the strongest pro-slavery lobbies in the country that did their best to continue the slave-system right up to Emancipation in the 1830s and beyond.”

The group first tried to get a museum set up in the O&M shed building, but the city council sold it to developers. The city’s elected mayor, Marvin Rees, is also unconvinced that the city needs such a museum. The Collective’s Mark Steeds said that the intention was to create a place where people could learn about the city’s past and commemorate its victims.

“This is about getting this issue out there and discussed. We want to start a conversation about Bristol, its history and how we can all acknowledge and learn from it. Too often, whenever there’s a talk about street names and statues, it becomes divisive. What we want to do is have somewhere everyone can go and learn more about about this part of Bristol’s history that is not really told, acknowledged or remembered, ‘he added. (p. 6).

This could be interesting. Bristol’s Black community has long complained that the city is somehow covering its participation in the slave trade. The city’s deputy mayor, Asher Craig, said in a Radio 4 interview a few years ago that she wanted a museum of slavery for Bristol. In practice, when one group came to her with plans for one, she turned them away and told them to find the money elsewhere. The Bristol Cable, a small local paper, has complained that Bristol should have a museum of slavery comparable to those at Liverpool and Nantes. I’m sceptical, because it seems to me that such museums are less commemorative than a form of moral reproach and recrimination by the Black community at Whites, and present slavery as something only White people did to Blacks. But this could be different, if it also talks about the Abolitionist movement in Bristol.

Grace Ndiritu – Artistic Shaman

Here’s a bit more information that might explain what’s going on at the Wellcome Collection. Webb on his offending video put up a link to the Wikipedia page about Grace Ndiritu – not Enduritu, as I spelled her name – which states that she is indeed an artist and shaman, whose worked with a number of important museums.

‘Grace Ndiritu (born June, 1982) is a British-Kenyan visual artist. In 2009, her art was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection in New York. This gained her a place in Phaidon’s The 21st Century Art Book published in 2014 and Time magazine in 2020. She is a member of BAFTA and also the winner of The Jarman Film Award 2022  in association with Film London.’

‘In 2012, Ndiritu began creating a new body of works under the title Healing The Museum. It came out of a need to re-introduce non-rational methodologies such as shamanism to re-activate the “sacredness” of art spaces. Ndiritu believes that most modern art institutions are out of sync with their audiences’ everyday experiences and the widespread socio-economical and political changes that have taken place globally in the recent decades, have further eroded the relationship between museums and their audiences and she believes museums are dying. Ndiritu sees shamanism as a way to re-activate the dying art space as a space for sharing, participation and ethics. From prehistoric to modern times the shaman was not only the group healer and facilitator of peace but also the creative; the artist.

In 2019 Ndiritu led a group of museum directors, academics, activists and artists, in a reading group with meditation at the controversial AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, Belgium, as part of conference Everything Passes Except the Past organized by Goethe Institut, on the restitution of objects and human remains from Europe back to Congo.

Ndiritu declared that 2020 was The Year of Black Healing. In honor of this, she led a year long programme of exhibitions, performances and talks in collaboration with institutions across the world, which was featured on The Sunday Times radio show with Mariella Frostrup and Elephant magazine.^]‘

‘Since 2013 Ndiritu has been doing shamanic performances as part of her visual art practice, as a result of her training in esoteric studies such as shamanism, which she began over 16 years ago. In 2017 she was invited to give a talk on her work at Fondation Ricard in Paris, alongside other renown speakers such as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev – director of Documenta 13 art exhibition and Fabrice Hergott – director of Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris.

She has also written essays about museums and exhibition making Healing The Museum (2016), Ways of Seeing: A New Museum Story for Planet Earth (2017) and Institutional Racism & Spiritual Practice in the art world (2019). Her most ambitious shamanic performance to date A Meal For My Ancestors: Healing The Museum, included staff members of the U.N., NATO and EU parliament, activists, and refugees at Thalielab, Brussels (2018).A briefing paper on climate change and refugees directly inspired by the performance, written by one of the participants, has now been published by the EU Parliament Research Services (May 2018).To date Ndiritu’s performances have taken place at Fundacion Tapies, Barcelona (2017),Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris (2016), Glasgow School of Art (2015), Galveston Artist Residency Garden, Texas (2015), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2014), Musee Chasse & Nature, Paris (2013), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013).’

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Ndiritu

Wellcome Museum Purges Display on History of Medicine to Include African Shaman – A Piece of Cultural Relativism That Will Also Damage Blacks

This comes from a piece our favourite YouTube historian, Simon Webb, put up on History Debunked a few days ago. He was attacking the new policy towards the museum that has come in with its new director, a woman whose degree is in the arts. Before, according to Webb, the museum was excellent, covering the history of western medicine in rigorous detail and including displays of operating theatres. Much of this, however, has been junked because the new director has deemed it ableist, racist and colonialist. The gallery to its founder, Wellcome himself, has also gone because he did not hold the current, mandatory beliefs. In their stead a gallery has erected containing two photographs showing the horrors of colonial experimentation on Black Africans along with one Mrs Eruditu, a self-professed African shaman, who conducts healing ceremonies and will counsel visitors to the gallery traumatised by the pictures. Webb calls her a witchdoctor, and describes her as completely mad, as she believes inanimate objects also possess consciousness. She doesn’t like the British Museum and the Egyptology displays, because the exhibits there have told her that they want to be underground. Nor does she approve of the display of a Native American totem pole in the Musee Nationale in France, as this has told her psychically that it wants to be out in the open air. Webb states, quite correctly, that western medicine has produced amazing advances in combating disease and extending the human life span. This new policy is a direct attack on that.

I think Webb, if he’s right about the Museum’s new policy, and he seems to be, has an excellent point here. He views it, no doubt, as another attack on western culture in the name of anti-racism, anti-imperialism and post-colonialism. He is, unfortunately, also very likely right about this. There have been pieces on YouTube by other right-wingers attacking the current policies of the Museums Association, which are all about this. I’ve got a feeling that Manchester Museum has also fallen to these new policies, and that they are also reviewing their collections as a result. But this policy is also harming Black and particularly Black African advancement in ways which the founders of the ‘Science Must Fall’ movement, which is ultimately at the heart of this, probably don’t understand.

The ‘Science Must Fall’ movement was a South African campaign to decentre western science because it rejected indigenous knowledges about the world rooted in myth and legend. There was a video on YouTube of a student debate in one of the South African universities, in which a Black female student urged her White comrades to decolonise their minds and accept that tribal rainmakers could indeed make it rain. People are welcome to whatever mystical or religious beliefs they choose, providing these don’t break the law. But they are separate. Back in the 90s, the late Stephen Jay Gould, a biologist and palaeontologist, attempted to end the war between science and religious by stating that there were No Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). Science dealt with fact, and religion with issues of meaning and values. Of course, militant atheists of the Dawkins type disagreed and thought that it was a capitulation to unreason. Gould’s wrong in that religion and science do overlap, but as a general point I think it’s fair. Science and religion, as a general rule, are separate.

I am also sure that the new director is right, and that Blacks were experimented on by surgeons and doctors in the past. It certainly happened in America, where one of the great surgeons of the 19th century experiment on Black women without anaesthetic. I read somewhere that H.G. Wells was partly inspired to write The Island of Dr. Moreau by accounts of a German doctor experimenting on Black Africans. But you have to be very careful in making such judgements. A while ago I provoked an angry reply in a piece I had written for the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. I was talking about the history of medicine in the context of space exploration. One of the books I had consulted for the piece described one particular pioneering doctor of tropical medicine as a quack for his theories and treatment of diseases. Unfortunately for me, one of the other senior members of the Society knew him, and wrote to me stating that he was a dedicated, humane man of science. The problem was that he was facing completely new diseases unknown in the west and which nobody knew how to treat. This is a good point, and I wrote to the aggrieved gentleman apologising for the inadvertent smear and issued a correction to the Journal. I wonder if some of the other pioneering doctors and surgeons, whose work has similarly fallen into disfavour, were like the man I mentioned – a sincere medical man, working in the unknown.

Underlying the attempts to decentre western science are two related attitudes. One is the fact that many displaced, colonised peoples have been harmed by the destruction of their own, indigenous world view. This has left them without meaning, resulting in alcoholism and drug addiction in many indigenous communities like the Amerindians in the Americas and Aboriginal Australians. The other is the belief in the Noble Savage, in which indigenous communities like them are somehow better, and more noble than moral than White, western society. The attempts to decentre western science and include indigenous myth and religion are attempts to restore dignity to these colonised peoples.

But African paganism also has its dark side. The priests of one of the cults in Nigeria were actively involved in the slave trade, to the point where the Nigerian equivalent of the saying that someone has been sold down the river literally translates as they ‘have been stolen by the Oracle’. There is also a widespread belief in witches and witch hunting all across the continent. Many of the accused, as in the pre-modern west are women, and some of the trials are just as deadly. In one Nigerian ritual, the accused woman is given the Calabar Bean, a poisonous vegetable. If she doesn’t vomit it out quickly, she’ll die, and so be judged a witch. There have also been professional witch hunters of the same stripe as the infamous Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, of Civil War England. Way back in the 19th century one of the Zulu kings went on a witch-hunting campaign. Witchsmellers, the indigenous Zulu witch hunters, were engaged and duly pointed the finger at a number of suspects, who were duly executed. A European official talked to the king, and said this all looked very dubious, and wondered if the witchsmellers were right in their accusations. The king laughed, said he wondered too, and had all one hundred of them executed as frauds.

And then there’s muti, which is really sinister. This is the sacrifice of humans, often young children, for their body parts, which are sold to the sorcerer’s clients to bring them good luck. I put up a piece I found on one of the YouTube channels about the amazing efforts of a Black British woman against it in Uganda. But it also appeared in Britain back in the early part of this century. The cops dragged the spine of a murdered boy, Adam, wrapped in various pieces of coloured cloth out of the Thames. The cloth’s colours were those of the muti cult, and it looked like child, probably 12 years old, had been sacrificed. And some African anthropologists have defended such murders. A little while ago one of them presented such a paper at an anthropological conference in Manchester. They claimed that these sacrifices were morally acceptable because Africans had a collective morality that saw that the sacrifice of an individual could benefit the community. Bear in mind that we are talking about the murder of children, whose body parts, including their genitals, are considered most effective if they have been hacked off while the victim was still alive. I believe that the anthropologist presenting the paper was asked to leave.

Indigenous African religion has also been the tool of White supremacist governments to keep Black Africans firmly in their very subordinate place. A few decades ago, a Zulu shaman, Credo Mutwa, had a book published in this country, in which he explained his mystical beliefs and practises. From what I’ve read, it was a mixture of native Zulu lore and western occultism, aimed at the New Age crowd. It was reviewed by the sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, who were very scathing. Mutwa, they claimed, had been a stooge of the Apartheid South African government during their retribalisation campaign. This stressed the indigenous, separate identities of the various South African tribes, who by then had become a Black proletariat. The intention was to keep the Black population divided so they were too weak to successfully challenge the Apartheid government.

Magonia have also several times stated that these books extolling the joys of indigenous life without western science and technology are all aimed at westerners, who have no intention of living like their ancestors did. I think it’s a fair point. The satirist Alan Coren expressed similar sentiments, set in a European context, in one of his pieces for Punch back in the 1970s. It’s about a very middle class, academic couple, who take over a French village and undo centuries of civilisation in order to return to them to what they see as the inhabitants’ natural, pre-Christian, pre-scientific state. But they themselves have no intention of rejecting scientific modernity. The piece ends with one of them stating he intends to write a paper on it. I think the same mindset is at work here.

As for Eruditu’s beliefs about the British museum and its exhibits, this is just animism, pure and simple, the belief that every rock and object has a soul. But I’ve heard very different things about the unhappy state of some of the exhibits. I’ve got a strong interest in psychical research, and a few weeks ago went to an online meeting about ghosts and hauntings in the British Museum. The Egyptology section has something of a cult as some of the visitors there are worshippers, who leave offerings. One spiritualist visitor, a medium, is supposed to have said that the mummies like being on display, as they feel they have a role to teach, but are frustrated at not being able to communicate with the living. This, of course, is completely the opposite of what Eruditu has said, and you can take or leave either or both depending on your attitude to mysticism. I many people are unhappy about the dead being excavated and put on display in museums, and don’t need a mystic to tell them this. But Egypt is certainly one of the great, founding civilisations of humanity, and Egyptology has massively extended our knowledge of the human past and this civilisation’s undeniable achievements and contribution.

Back to Africa. Way back in the 1980s I read an article by a Black African historian, a Muslim, who had presented his own series on the continent’s history on the Beeb. He lamented the fact that the west’s scientific and technological knowledge, inherited from ancient Greece and Rome, was not being transmitted to Africa. He’s right. After all, India and China have made massive strides in development this century because they have embraced science and technology. Sun Yat-Sen, the Chinese revolutionary who founded the Kuomintang, said at the beginning of his movement that ‘We say hello to Mr Science and Mr Democracy’. Sadly, democracy in China got left behind, but science has been taken up with a vengeance so that the country is now a centre of serious technological innovation in space and robotics. And it was helped in this by the early translators of western scientific texts, who referred to it not as western science, but as ‘the new science’. Something similar may well be needed in Africa.

This attempt to decentre and stigmatise western science and medicine has the potential to seriously harm Black advancement. I do think that there is a genuine potential for science and technology in Africa that is currently untapped and stifled. And Webb complained a few months or perhaps a year ago about a piece in New Scientist, in which a Black, female scientist called for more Blacks in lab coats. This movement, which sees Blacks and other indigenous peoples as non-scientific, runs counter to that. It reminds me of some of the scathing criticisms of non-western cultures by the early orientalists, who felt that these peoples would not be capable of assimilating western culture.

And I dare say the promoters of this movement would accuse me of racism, but I am afraid that there are real dangers of encouraging the dark side of African religion and spirituality through an uncritical acceptance of such shamanism.

If Webb is right, then the new director has not only ruined a once great museum, but she’s part of a larger movement that poses a threat to the whole tradition of the Enlightenment, a movement that genuinely endangers scientific advancement for some of the world’s peoples, who most need it.

Museums for the Maroons and Arawak Peoples in Jamaica

A few weeks ago I found a notebook I had when I was working at the former Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, now sadly defunct. I’d made notes in it of anything relevant to what I was doing at the time, cataloguing the Museum’s documents relating to slavery or otherwise seemed relevant.

At the time Jamaica was promoting the Maroons, the free Black communities who had fought and won their freedom from British slavery, as a tourist attraction. There were five Maroon towns, one of which was Accompong. According to a travel book on the Caribbean nation I read at the time, there was a Maroon tour to Accompong which ended up in another towns founded by the free slaves, Maroon Town. On the 6th of January each year, the Accompong Maroon Festival celebrated the victory of the Maroon leader Cudjoe over the British. This took place at the Kindah area and the Peace Cave. There was also a Maroon Tourist Attraction Company, whose headquarters are, or were located 32 Church Street, Montego Bay. This is the company that organised the tours to Accompong.

The museum displaying the history and culture of the Arawak, who with the Caribs were Jamaica’s two indigenous peoples, and who also inhabited many of the other islands of the Caribbean before the European invasion and genocide, is the White Marl Arawak Museum in White Marl, St. Catherine, Spanish Town. This is run by Institute of Jamaica and includes a reconstructed Arawak village behind the museum proper.

Not all of the unfree population of the Caribbean were Black slaves. The Caribbean was also settled using indentured servants, who could be and often were as badly treated as the slaves and often joined them in revolt. There is a Historical Mini-Museum to Jamaica’s indentured German labourers in Seaford Town, also in Montego Bay, as well as a Jamaican German Society. I also believe one of the Caribbean islands also has a gallery or little museum devoted to the Polish settlers. They were freedom fighters, who joined Napoleon’s troops in his invasion Russia in order to liberate their country from Russian rule. Following the Corsican general’s defeat, they fled to the Caribbean. Because of their role in fighting against slavery in the French Revolutionary armies, I recall that they were the only Whites legally permitted to settle in the independent, Black republic of Haiti.

I don’t know if this information will help anybody, but these are important and fascinating parts of Jamaican and Caribbean history.

There were also a couple of books specifically about the Maroons. These were

Angorsah, E. Kofi (ed), Maroon Heritage: Archaeological, Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives (Kingston: Canoe Press/ University of the West Indies: 1994).

The anthropologist Katherine Duchamps also wrote an account of her Journey to Accompong in 1946.

There was also a History of the Maroons published by R.C. Dallas in London as far back as 1863. I don’t know if it’s been republished, but it might be that somebody at university with an interest in the subject could get a copy on academic loan.