March 25 marked the 200th
anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain.
Trevor Marshall takes a look at how Barbadians have chosen
to remember two of the men who helped shape the debate.
THE Saviour or the Emancipator—who
was the real hero?
In Barbados today, 201 years after the Battle of Trafalgar,
which was fought off the coast of Spain some 4 000
miles away between the English admiral Viscount Horatio
Nelson and the French admiral Pierre Villeneuve, the
governing opinion among both black and white citizens
is that Lord Nelson fought and won this battle for
Barbados and its people.
The statue to Nelson, erected on March 22, 1813, is
solid testimony to this belief. In fact, anyone who
argues against such a belief is instantly pilloried
as a “twistorian” or an ignoramus.
By contrast, 200 years after the Abolition of the Slave
Trade Act was passed in Britain, practically nobody
in Barbados knows either about that event, which was
phenomenal for our black ancestors, or the man who
piloted that bill through the British House of Commons,
William Wilberforce, the hero of British abolitionism.
This fact would be shameful, to say the least, in a
country where the majority of the populace is descended
from Africans who were enslaved in British colonies;
it is scandalous in Barbados, the Caribbean island
nearest to Africa and the one that was, for 180 years,
the entrepot—the clearing house—for Africans
who survived the Middle Passage, that 3 500-mile stretch
of ocean between West Africa and this region.
*
It is scandalous for another, equally epoch-making reason:
Wilberforce, who was a member of the British Parliament
from 1774 to 1825, dedicated his life and career to
securing the end of slavery, “the crime against
humanity,” as the United Nations has deemed it.
He was the single most influential anti-slavery leader
in Britain for some 50 years.
Wilberforce is critical to the present status of blacks
in the Western world as free, independent people, but
if our people, especially our school-age youth, are totally
ignorant of his life, career and accomplishments, then
we as a people have slipped back into the chains of intellectual
and psychological slavery.
The point is that, in Barbados, Nelson and Wilberforce
are like the negative and the positive ends, respectively,
in the same electrical circuit. The two entities are
incompatible to us because of the reverence we as a people
have had for Nelson, who allegedly “saved Barbados
from French colonization.”
This is a persistent and nonsensical myth; such a concern
was never his. What is unchallengeable is Nelson’s
own statement in May of 1805. In a letter to Simon Taylor,
a friend in Jamaica, he wrote:
“…I ever have been, and shall die, a firm
friend of our present Colonial system. I was bred, as
you know, in the good old school, and taught to appreciate
the value of our West Indies possessions; and neither
in the field, nor in the Senate, shall their just rights
be infringed, whilst I have an arm to fight in their
defence, or a tongue to launch my voice against the damnable
doctrine of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies.”
*
Nelson is honoured in Barbados and
Wilberforce is unknown. With the 200th anniversary of
the abolition of the slave trade this year, we might
be expected to convince the world we have always endorsed
and supported Wilberforce’s campaign for abolition.
Of course, there is that slight matter of Lord Nelson’s
position as some kind of Barbadian hero with a strident,
pro-slavery stance.
Not to worry. We Barbadians will find a way to highlight
Wilberforce for the moment and hide our fascination with
Nelson—also for the moment. AE
Trevor Marshall teaches History in the Department of
Humanities at Barbados Community College.
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