Born out of the investigation of the links of the Guardian’s founder John Edward Taylor with slavery, this podcast reveals the role of the UK in maintaining slavery throughout the world. The enquiry starts in Cottonopolis, a.k.a. Manchester, back in the 1820s when Taylor was involved in the cotton industry, a raw material that comes from the US. The subsequent episode takes us to Success, a former sugar plantation in Jamaica, co-owned by another Guardian founder. Then we travel to the Sea Islands, on the coast of Georgia and South Carolina where descendants of enslaved Africans who picked the cotton still live. Finally, Badagry in Nigeria, where the slaves were put on boats to go to Brazil, a country where were sent the largest number of slaves. The two final episodes are about resistance, fighting against occult slavery and the implications it still has in the everyday life of the Black community and reparations, how can this be done… and the answers are amazing. A very touching and eye-opener podcast.
“- Why does the history of transatlantic slavery matter so much ? Not just for the Guardian, or for Manchester. After all, there are some people who would argue that the past is in the past, that we should move on from it. But it’s not all in the past. For David Olusoga, there are two particularly important legacies that remain with us today.
– The first is the idea of race; the other thing that is unique about the forms of slavery that emerge in the Caribbean, in the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries is that it’s racialised. It says that people of one ethnic or racial group are synonymous with slavery and that they are suited to slavery. It required the propagation of these ideas over decades. And huge amounts of money and effort, and ingenuity and creativity went into creating those stereotypes. What is striking when you read the books written and the pamphlets designed by the slavery lobby, the slave traders, the slave owners, their supporters in parliament, the people they paid to write those documents and produce those cartoons and books, is that you come into contact with the stereotypes that we know today. The idea that Black people are of the body but not of the mind, the idea that Black people are childish and not capable of adult reflection and adult thoughts, the idea that Black people are over-sexualised, that Black people are by their nature violent. Those ideas that are still in our thinking, that are still in our societies, that still shape the life chances of people in Britain, in America, in France and elsewhere today, were the product of the slave system. Racism came out of slavery, racism didn’t pre-exist. Of course, there were forms of prejudice, of course, there was fascination and some ways chock about human physical difference, but that’s not racism. Racism is a system of hierarchies, and it was invented to justify the slave trade and slavery. They’ve outlasted slavery, they’ve outlasted the age of the European empires, and they are still with us.”
Six episodes of approximately 45 minutes each
Episode 1. The bee and the ship
Episode 2. The meaning of Success
Episode 3. The Sea Islands
Episode 4. The Brazilian connection
Episode 5. Resistance
Episode 6. Reparations