Akala

Accra in Ghana is obviously much poorer than London and the city faces many issues, yet teenagers stabbing each other over iPhones and postcodes is not one of them. I know for much of Britain it is easier to believe that there is a certain kind of boy that gets involved in that sort of stuff, that someone like me, an open exponent of education, could not possibly fall prey to such a mentality – if only things were so simple. The sense of hopelessness and fear felt during those formative years is so intense it is hard to even remember the sensation properly. The pressure to accumulate, the understanding that poverty is shameful, the double shame of being black and poor, the constant refrain of materialism coming from every facet of popular culture, the empty fridge, the disconnected electricity, the insecurity of being a tenant with eviction always just a few missed paycheques away, the stress and anger of your parents that trickles down far better than any capital accumulation, the naked injustices that you now know to be reality and the growing belief that one is indeed all of the negative stereotypes that the people in power say you are.

The threat posed to some people’s entire sense of identity by and exhibition of human excellence inside a black body is an amount of fear, sideways admiration and contempt for another group of humans that I can’t even imagine being constantly burdened by. These seemingly odd responses to black excellence did not pop out of a vacuum, but rather stem from centuries of anti-black marketing in European literature, thought, philosophy and historiography. Take the ‘historians’ that claimed that Africans, unlike the rest of humanity, had no history, and thus when they found evidence of this supposedly absent history from ‘pre-colonial’ Africa – from the ruins of great Zimbabwe, to the manuscripts of Timbuktu, to the sublime metal art of Ife Ife and Benin – set about trying to look for a non-African source for these works. In some cases, scholars were more willing to entertain the idea that aliens were responsible for African history than Africans! This ‘intellectual’ trend was pioneered by those who took the conditions of enslaved people - that is people physically prevented from attaining an education – and decided that their perceptions of the intellectual aptitude of slaves represented the permanent and genetically pre-determined state of all black people. To smarter and more humane European thinkers, even during the nineteenth century, it was obvious that an enslaved person had very good and obvious motivations for hiding and/or playing down their intelligence, and that any technological gaps between Europe and West Africa were no more likely to be due to skin colour than the technological gaps that existed for centuries between olive-skinned Romans and the ‘white’ people to the north and west of them, or indeed between Song China and tenth-century Britain.

What does it say about this society that, after two centuries of being of the most successful human traffickers in history, the only historical figure to emerge from this entire episode as a household name is a parliamentary abolitionist? Even though the names of many of these human traffickers surround us on the streets and buildings bearing their names, stare back at us through the opulence of their country estates still standing as monuments to king sugar, and live on in the institutions and infrastructure built partly from their profits – insurance, modern banking, railways – none of their names have entered the national memory to anything like the degree that Wilberforce has.
In fact, I sincerely doubt that most Brits could name a single soul involved with transatlantic slavery other than Wilberforce himself. The ability for collective, selective amnesia in the service of easing a nation’s cognitive dissonance is nowhere better exemplified than in the manner that most of Britain has chosen to remember transatlantic slavery in particular, and the British empire more generally.