Welcome to our third newsletter.

Hello! It’s good to be able to update you all after a busy few months. In this newsletter you’ll find an account of a truly historic event on Emancipation Day in Jamaica, tales of the Leeds Carnival, and a house near Bath that celebrates the ‘father of Africa’. There’s also news from one of the brilliant educational charities some ‘Heirs’ are supporting, new reading on reparations and colonial history, and, to wash all this down, a zinger of a rum punch recipe from a new celebration of Caribbean cooking...

With thanks for your continuing interest and support,

Alex, Charlie, David, John, Laura, Richard, Robin and Rosemary

*Sisters Kate Thomas and Aidee Walker, descendants of the Malcolm family, address the crowd at Jamaica’s Emancipation Jubilee ceremony.*

Saying Sorry in Jamaica

Every year on the night of 31 July, Jamaica holds a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the emancipation of enslaved people in the Caribbean; it’s a huge and emotional event, followed by an all-night celebration with music and dancing.

This year, for the first time, the organisers invited descendants of the people who enslaved Africans in Jamaica to take part in Jubilee night. Several members of Heirs of Slavery, representing the Wedderburn, Harrison, Fergusson/Renton and Gladstone families, delivered short video messages that were played to the crowd after a wreath-laying ceremony attended by Laura Trevelyan. Robin Wedderburn spoke for us all – watch the video of his speech below this article – when he talks of the humility and gratitude he and his family felt.

We five Wedderburns – Sarah, Harry, Alister, Susannah and I – want to acknowledge our historical links to enslavement and to make apology to the people of Jamaica. We declare ourselves committed to speaking out against any attempt to ignore or excuse this ghastly history and to do what we can to promote repair. We recognise that the effects of this evil persist today –deprivation of opportunity and prosperity, continuing racial prejudice and no doubt more.
For us to start offering you our hand in friendship would be ridiculous. Instead, we come to you with a big ask: that you might, in spite of the past, offer us your forgiving hand.

Two descendants of the Malcolm family, Kate Thomas and Aidee Walker, travelled from New Zealand to be at the Emancipation Jubilee and speak from the stage. Jamaica’s Gleaner welcomed their apology, calling it ‘a small step along the long, winding pathway to justice’. Here is Kate Thomas’s account:

As sixth-generation New Zealanders, we’ve never felt connected to the British Empire. To be honest, we’ve never felt much connection to our ancestors beyond the grandparents we remember. Many English, Scots and Irish who emigrated to New Zealand throughout the 1800s were escaping poverty or the British class system, which they felt held them back.
This contrasts with Māori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa, New Zealand, who know the names of their ancestors and the waka (boats) they arrived on eight hundred years ago. My brother-in-law, who is Māori, has photos of his 3rd and 4th great-grandparents on his living room wall.
In late 2022 my sister, Aidee Walker, did one of those popular DNA tests, which surprisingly indicated a connection to Nigeria. It encouraged us to explore our ancestors’ migration stories to New Zealand. We discovered that our 3rd great-grandfather, Neill Malcolm, had been born in Jamaica in 1825, and had emigrated to New Zealand from Britain in 1849, when he was twenty-four. Neill’s birth records state that he was ‘quattro or mulatto’.
We learned that he had been born to John Malcolm and his housekeeper, Mary Johnson, and that John was the proprietor of Argyle Estate in Hanover Parish. John Malcolm was part of the Scottish Clan Malcolm, who over three generations and nearly 100 years had owned several plantations in Jamaica, worked by thousands of enslaved people.
The word ‘stunned’ doesn’t do justice to how we felt.
In 2023, we read about the Trevelyan apology to the people of Grenada, and connected with Laura Trevelyan via Heirs of Slavery. Over several months, she guided us through a process that led to an apology at Jamaica’s Emancipation Jubilee at Great Seville House on 31st July 2024. This month also marked the 200th anniversary of an uprising on Argyle Estate, which had resulted in six enslaved people being executed for fighting for freedom.
We never set out to make an apology. We debated who it would serve, and decided we would only apologise if it was meaningful to Jamaicans. But Professor Verene Shepherd, former Director of Reparations Research at the University of the West Indies, assured us that an apology was an important first step toward reparatory justice, and from then on we instinctively knew that it was a commitment we needed to make. It was a deeply profound experience, difficult to put into words.
We’re incredibly grateful to both Verene and Laura for their patient guidance and support as we navigated our past, and to local historian Oshane Robinson for research into the Malcolm family. The apology marked the beginning of our journey, not the end. We will continue to educate ourselves about this deeply disturbing history, to support other families exploring acknowledgment or apology, and to work towards reparatory justice.

Robin Wedderburn’s message to the Jamaican Emancipation Jubilee.

From Canboulay to Carnival

David Lascelles, whose local Carnival in Leeds has been celebrated for nearly sixty years, explains the continuing significance of the event to both Caribbean and diaspora communities. The picture above shows David and his wife Diane with Leeds Carnival founder Arthur France, his daughter and grand-daughter. Arthur was the subject of the first ‘Missing Portrait’ image at the former Lascelles family home Harewood House, an ongoing celebration of Black people whose place in our shared history we now acknowledge.

Every August Bank Holiday Monday since 1967 – minus a year due to COVID – Leeds has celebrated Carnival with a parade through the streets of the city. This year it was, as ever, a joyful and inclusive occasion, with more than 100,000 revellers of all ages, shapes, sizes and ethnicities watching the spectacularly-costumed Carnival Kings and Queens and their troupes dancing their way round the Carnival route.

Present-day Carnival is a celebratory affair, but many layers of meaning lie behind the feathers and the sparkly bikinis and the deafening sound systems. Early Carnival-type celebrations took place at the only time of year that enslaved Africans had a moment of near-freedom, when they could mix with those from other plantations.

Barbadians call Carnival ‘Crop Over’, while in Trinidad an early name for it was Canboulay (from cannes brûlées, burnt canes). The event marked the end of the sugar harvest, a back-breaking time for the enslaved, but one after which they could at least celebrate a little, with dancing and music. Some of the costumes reflected African roots, such as the Moco Jumbie, a scary figure on stilts with a huge head. Others, like the Dames Lorraines – huge hairy men dressed in a parody of the bustles and frills of the grand female dresses of the time – made fun of European masters and mistresses.

The steel pan, the traditional sound of Carnival, was invented in Trinidad in the 1930s, when African drums and bamboo bands were banned by the British authorities as ‘subversive’. Inventive musicians instead started tuning and beating oil drums from the island’s booming oil industry.

Carnival is a crucial cultural occasion for today’s West Indian diaspora as well as for those living in the Caribbean, linking all the way back to Africa as well as growing directly out of the experience of enslavement. Dance, party, celebrate – all good things to do. But never forget where it comes from.

Leeds West Indian Carnival is largely council-supported, and Leeds City Council is, like all councils, under serious financial pressure. By supporting your local Carnival – if you’re lucky enough to have one – you are helping to keep a vital component of contemporary West Indian culture alive.

Breaking Bread with Kin

Heirs of Slavery co-founder Richard Atkinson is a publisher with a longstanding specialism in food books; here he writes about one of his recent publications, KIN by Marie Mitchell.

During my twenty years as a commissioning editor, I had published books conveying the culinary delights of Chengdu and Bombay, Marrakech and Venice – but I’d never published a cookbook from the Americas. So I was thrilled to be able to collaborate with the chef Marie Mitchell on her first book, KIN – it was right up my street.

In this book, Marie makes a powerful and personal case for Caribbean food as one of the first truly global cuisines, borne out of the violent convergence of African, American, European and South Asian cultures. Above all, though, as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, she’s been motivated by the desire to understand the recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation, and by her belief in the powerful connections that are forged by breaking bread with family, friends and strangers. Because – and trite though this might sound, it is too often forgotten – we are all connected by shared culture, experiences and DNA. What’s more, we need to actively cherish these connections and forge new ones, because a world in which we are all connected is undoubtedly better than one in which we are all separated.

Here in the UK, cookery is a vibrant field of publishing, representing a kaleidoscope of cuisines, and many of the food books that originate here are exported all around the world. This reach almost certainly derives from our history as a former colonial power – and I would like to believe (ever the optimist) that the warmth with which the British embrace global food is a sign of the openness with which we face the world today. I’m convinced, though, that Caribbean cuisine is underrated by the general British public, widely perceived as party food for soaking up Red Stripe and rum punch at Carnival – a misconception that Marie Mitchell hopes to put to rest in KIN with eighty recipes layering different notes and spices to create subtle, rewarding flavours.

Marie and I were determined that KIN should authentically represent her heritage, not least through its visuals. So we made it our purpose to hire a truly diverse creative team, two of whom had never worked on cookbooks before. We were so fortunate, in particular, to be able to engage the Jamaican-British photographer Christian Cassiel; the food stylist (and author in her own right) Benjamina Ebuehi; and the designer/illustrator Emma Hall, whose Sankofa bird (its head turned back while carrying a precious egg in its mouth, representing the need to reflect on the past to build a successful future) adorns the front cover.

We launched KIN in June at the Museum of the Home in East London – a venue with its own link to the history of enslavement, through the transatlantic slave trader who founded the almshouse in which the museum is located. Even so, it felt an entirely appropriate place to celebrate, as a museum that celebrates all things domestic, since this book belongs in every kitchen. Here is the recipe for Marie’s delicious, lethal TT Lime rum punch which was served at the launch...

For six

400ml lime juice (about 10 limes) / 500g dark brown soft sugar / 2 x 7.5cm cinnamon sticks / 10 cloves / 500ml of your favourite rum / Angostura bitters, to taste / Ice cubes (optional), to serve

Place the lime juice in a sterilized jar and leave it at room temperature for at least 24 hours, or up to three days. Pour 500ml of water into a medium saucepan on a medium heat. As soon as it starts to boil, take the pan off the heat and add your sugar, cinnamon sticks and cloves. Stir to dissolve the sugar and then leave the syrup to cool and infuse. Add the lime juice and stir to mix. Finally, add the rum and a few dashes of angostura bitters, to taste. You can leave the cocktail to steep like this, in the fridge, for a few days if you like, before serving (remove the whole spices once you’re happy with the strength of the infusion). Serve it in lowball glasses, either neat or over ice.

photo of the book Kin, showing TT Lime rum punch recipe

A Sense of Belonging

Driven by the belief that access to university should not be limited by skin colour or poverty, the Cowrie Scholarship Foundation (CSF) provides scholarships for disadvantaged Black British students at UK universities. Heirs of Slavery co-founder Rosemary Mecklenburgh attended a recent event held by the organisation in London.

Almost a hundred people from across business and higher education met at King’s College London on 19 June 2024 to join scholars and representatives of the Cowrie Scholarship Foundation. Since 2020, CSF has partnered with twenty-six British universities, provided thirty-three full scholarships and raised fee pledges from universities of more than £3.4 million, while almost £500,000 has been raised in donations to ensure scholars do not experience financial hardship. I was honoured to have been invited as a representative of the Harrison family – as a family we’d decided to donate to the foundation when it was first being set up.

The event’s theme was ‘Creating A Sense of Belonging’. The highlight, for me, was hearing from eight Cowrie Scholars who shared their personal stories – all of them were inspirational. During childhood they had faced challenges such as bereavement, life as young carers, financial hardship and intense feelings of difference. All were extremely motivated, but understandably anxious about applying for a university place. They described the many difficulties they had faced during their early years at university and how their Cowrie mentors had, through practical and emotional support, ensured that they carried on with their studies. Without this help, they explained, they would likely have dropped out.

Professor Richard Oreffo, in setting up the Foundation, has created an amazing scheme for Black students to achieve their potential – benefitting not only individuals, but society as a whole. Some members of Heirs of Slavery are already donating – more information here.

Remembering an Abolitionist

Alison Dow lives in Norwich, where she was formerly a GP. As a ‘child of empire’, she was born and raised in Northern Rhodesia — now Zambia. A descendant of the sugar merchant Aeneas Barkly, who in the 1830s received a very large compensation payment for the loss of his ‘human property’, Alison explains the pivotal role played by a Norfolk figure in the history of anti-enslavement.

A few years ago I settled in the fine city of Norwich. I’d known since childhood about Thomas Fowell Buxton and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and was pleased to see this plaque adorning the wall of our magnificent Norman cathedral:

‘Remember Thomas Fowell Buxton Bt Member of Parliament whose efforts led to the emancipation of 700,000 slaves on 1st August 1834’

But I was puzzled to find that few local people knew about him. I starting asking questions, and made enough noise that I was asked to address the Norwich Society. I researched extensively and gave my first talk in February 2024. Word has spread, and I have a developing program of talks.

In my presentation about Buxton, I discuss his childhood, his Quaker mother and wife, some buildings he was associated with, his life as a social reformer, and his parliamentary battles. I also examine the concept of ‘Radical Norwich’ and the large dissenting community that inspired and supported him, as well as outlining the history and mechanics of the slave industry. I finish with a discussion of the £20 million compensation fund of the 1830s, the significance of the year 2015 – when the UK’s debt for compensation was finally paid off – and I refer repeatedly to the important bicentenary of 2034. I have thrown down the gauntlet here in Norwich. Nine years to plan!

I see Thomas Fowell Buxton’s life as a direct conduit to discussions on reparative justice. If anyone would like further information, or would like to me to give a talk in their area, do please contact me – alisondow@btinternet.com

Bath’s ‘Portal to the World’

Fairfield House, above, is that rare thing in Britain: a place of Black heritage and identity which has nothing to do with the transatlantic slave trade. But it could play a constructive role in how we repair the damage, suggests William Heath, founding chair of Friends of Fairfield House. The building celebrates the legacy of His Imperial Majesty (HIM) Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. Known as the ‘father of Africa’, HIM’s words on anti-racism, human rights and international morality – memorably put to music by Bob Marley – still resonate globally.

In 1935 Mussolini’s fascists invaded Ethiopia, an ancient, never-colonised, Christian nation led by the charismatic emperor Haile Selassie I. Arriving in Britain, the emperor was treated as a war refugee rather than a head of state, and, instead of being lionised in London, he was banished to the provinces.

He travelled to Bath, Somerset, where the warm waters soothed his mustard gas burns, and purchased Fairfield House, a nine-bedroom Italianate villa which housed the imperial family, the government in exile and the priests of Britain’s first Ethiopian Orthodox church. Before long, Britain was at war with Italy.

In 1940, Ethiopia was liberated and Haile Selassie re-entered his capital, Addis Ababa, along with eighty British troops. In 1954 the emperor returned to Bath, and was awarded the freedom of the city; during the same visit he donated his former residence to the city as a home for the aged. (For more information about the emperor’s connection with Bath, see here.)

Fairfield House today has been called Bath’s ‘portal to the world’. As well as hosting exemplary day care services for elderly Black, Indian and Chinese men and women, it attracts new visitors to Bath: Ethiopians, Rastafari and others of African heritage. Through its unique demonstration of pluralism, tolerance and diversity, it offers a completely different starting point for Bath’s (and Britain’s) relationship with people of African heritage, and the opportunity for the transformative evolution of our narrative and identity.

The portal works both ways, too. It transports people from Bath to Ethiopia and elsewhere – which is how, in February this year, I found myself with Pauline Swaby, our long-standing daycare services manager, sitting in a garden in Kingston, Jamaica with Barbara Blake Hannah, Britain’s first black female TV presenter.

Barbara said some memorable things that day, such as that Fairfield House was ‘the only place in Britain she would want to visit’, and she declared that she wanted Fairfield House to be ‘the throne on which a new attitude towards Black people is built in Britain’. Many Rastafari hold HIM to be their messiah, the same living God made flesh as Iēsous Christos. A devout Rastafarian herself, Barbara reveres HIM, seeing him as showing us all the way to godliness.

During that trip, it became clear to me that Britain must fix its relationship with Jamaica – this has to start with the monarch and government. It will take acknowledgement, apology and repair. And while Fairfield House has little to give in terms of acknowledgement or apology, it might just offer a unique (some might say God-given) opportunity for repair.

Today, Fairfield House is a vibrant community existing in a building that has suffered decades of neglect. As Friends of Fairfield House, we work flat out in supportive partnerships with the local university, the council and the National Trust. We offer historic tours on Sundays, a shop, office rentals and research placements. But now we must raise the capital to fix the building.

Do visit us, work with us, come and celebrate with us. It’s a refreshing change from the necessary, worthy but challenging work of decolonising our stately homes and religious buildings. We have to protect and celebrate HIM’s legacy. And – to borrow the word used by iconic Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie: Yichalal! We can do it!

*William Heath, Barbara Blake Hannah and Pauline Swaby in Jamaica.*

Two New Books

Excellent reviews and plenty of media attention have greeted The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism (Hurst, £25), Professor Alan Lester’s collection of essays about some less salubrious incidents in British colonial history. The historians whose work Lester has gathered here focus on under-examined stories from Tasmania to Canada, by way of India and the Caribbean; the legacies of territory-grabbing ‘heroes’ of imperial legend such as Sir Stamford Raffles and Cecil Rhodes go under the lens too. Other essays examine the need for the honest appraisal of such stories – it is a matter of ‘importance for democracy now… amid history’s appropriation by apologists, racists and culture warriors’, as Lester puts it. Professor Lester and two of the essay writers – Sathnam Sanghera and Bronwen Everill – make their case on a BBC History podcast, here.

Trinity College, Cambridge has led the way among academic institutions in examining how it benefited from enslavement and in addressing its debt to the enslaved and their descendants today. In Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now! (OUP, £14.99) the dean of the college, Michael Banner, makes the case for countries to start conversations about reparative justice with CARICOM. Predictably Dr Banner has been derided in the right-wing media: ‘logic deeply flawed’ said the Telegraph, which of course is a recommendation for this tightly-argued and eminently logical book.

News in brief…

The historian and leading reparations activist Professor Verene Shepherd has been a great friend to Heirs of Slavery, and a help to us as we have debated how to acknowledge our families’ pasts. She retired this summer after seven years as the inaugural director of the Centre for Reparation Research, based at the University of the West Indies’ MONA campus in Jamaica, which has since 2017 functioned as the research arm of the CARICOM Reparation Commission (CRR) and its network of National Reparation Committees. The CRR was created to ‘promote, research and engage in advocacy around the legacies of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, African enslavement, Asian indentureship, colonialism and its legacies in the Caribbean’ and to ‘help to bring justice and positive transformation to societies affected by these legacies’. Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Professor Shepherd’s successor in the role, laid out her priorities in this recent article for Jamaica’s Gleaner.

In June, Heirs of Slavery co-founder Laura Trevelyan was a panellist at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, USA, in a compelling discussion with historians Vincent Brown and David Olusoga and ex-New York Times editor Dean Baquet about the necessity and scope of reparations for the stain of slavery. You can watch their conversation here.

In September, in Barbados, an Anglican church group launched a £7m reconciliation project to atone for its part in the atrocities of transatlantic enslavement, and to compensate descendants of enslaved people. United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG) was created in 1701 as the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. For over a century it owned the Codrington sugar plantations in Barbados along with thousands of enslaved people. They worked and died to fund ‘Christian’ missionary work and the printing of bibles. The new fund will work with local and regional partners in the Caribbean to allocate money to education and entrepreneurial grants and historical research. It will also support land ownership among descendants of enslaved people. See here for more information.

Looking forwards...

On 2 October, at Senate House in London, the historian and leading light in the Caribbean reparations movement Sir Hilary Beckles will give the Memorial2007 Annual Lecture hosted by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. See here for details.

UNESCO, the UN’s cultural organisation, will hold its first dialogues for reparatory justice in Paris in October. The event marks the thirtieth anniversary of UNESCO’s Routes of Enslaved Peoples programme. The idea is to hold six meetings with the aim of building a common understanding of what reparative justice means. Members of the Trevelyan family have been invited to attend and speak of their experience in coming forward as descendants of enslavers.

The 1833 Commemoration Group, a charity dedicated to marking in 2033 the bicentenary of the legal abolition of enslavement in the British Emoire, will be officially launched in the House of Commons on 16 October. As its chair, historian Professor Penelope Corfield, writes: ‘The legislation was an important legal landmark – but it had flaws in implementation – and, shamefully, slavery and neo-slavery persist to this day. So! We seek to learn from – as well as to remember – our history.’

Notice board...

After the success of our first two online workshops, we are planning more meetings this autumn with a view to supporting and encouraging our ‘heir’ supporters in their own acts of reparative justice. These will happen online on weekday evenings and will concentrate on either ‘family research’ or ‘reparative action’. We will be emailing heirs about these meetings soon.

Interested in finding out whether enslavement wealth paid for the building of your local Anglican church? The Church of England has reacted to calls from the public to take a more local approach in its ongoing efforts to understand how it benefited from the enslavement of Africans, with amateur historians being offered training and funding to assist their research. For more information, contact charmaine.simpson@churchofengland.org or see the Church’s Healing, Repair and Justice Fund using this page.