Sugar and Slavery
What is London’s dirty big secret? What does a cup of sugary tea have to do with a terrible crime against humanity. And what commodity links millions of enslaved Africans and London’s dockers? The answer (and a few more questions for every Londoner), are at the Museum in Docklands, which has launched its new permanent gallery ‘London, Sugar & Slavery’.
You realise something is going on as soon as you reach the front door of the museum on West India Quay. A shroud of black cloth conceals the statue of Robert Milligan beneath. Milligan was a wealthy merchant and ship owner who was instrumental in building the West India Docks, and so his statue stands proud on the quayside. yet nowhere on the docks (until now) is the truth acknowledged … that the wealth of Milligan and his friends was largely built on the slave trade. For generations, West Africans were forcibly taken to work and die on the sugar plantations of the West Indies.
Indeed, the very building in which the museum stands is an old sugar warehouse. It wouldn’t be here but for slaving, and curator Dr Tom Wareham candidly admits that the museum missed a trick when it opened back in 2003. ‘We believed the story was of London as a port … we didn’t focus at all on London’s role in the slave trade.’
Indeed, people tend to think of Bristol and Liverpool when it comes to Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. But London, the biggest port in the world during the 18th and 19th centuries, was also the fourth largest slaving port. The new gallery redresses the balance, joining the dots ‘between ordinary Londoners, arch capitalism, despoiled West African civilisations and the thriving multicultural city we enjoy today’.
There are superb African artefacts pre-dating Europeans’ arrival on the continent, including a bronze leopard from Benin and the beautiful bust of a Yoruba King. In brutal contrast are the punishment collars and manacles, the whips and chains of the slave ships. And there are the newly acquired papers of Thomas and John Mills, who owned plantations in Kitts and St Nevis, giving us a glimpse of the lives of both slave and slaver.
There is the Buxton table, at which the terms of the Abolition Act were hammered out. But debunking the simplified history that has slavery being abolished by William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp and a few others, the names of lesser-known names are projected onto the surface. Africans such as Ottobah Cuoano and Olaudah Equiano are reinstated in their rightful place at the table. It’s just one example of an imaginative use of ’son et lumiere’ and film in the gallery. A disembodied voice asks us to imagine being taken from our home, our family, losing our freedom, our name, our children … it’s extraordinarily effective in putting you, the visitor, in the place of those stolen Africans.
And as you enter the gallery, a stunning film by Stephen Rudder (himself a south Londoner whose family came to London from Barbados) makes the point that this is the history of all of us. A succession of Londoners, white and black, voice the words of a captured slave against images of London, west Africa and the West Indies. Artefacts abound showing ordinary black Londoners in the 19th century and before.
It dispels forever the myth that London was a white city to which Black people arrived from the 1950s onwards. Catherine Hall, Professor of History at University College London advised on the gallery, and observed ‘It has helped me think about my city, how the fruits of slavery are built into the environment in which we live, and how relationships between people, right into the present, have been shaped by that history.’
It becomes even clearer with the museum, a former sugar warehouse, standing in the shadow of the towers of Canary Wharf - which is now home to banking giants such as HSBC, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays. These are the titans of global capitalism, a system built on the blood, sweat and tears of those sugar plantations in Jamaica and cotton fields in the United States. Robert Milligan and his cohorts, the wealth of America and transatlantic trade, the docks and dockers of the East End, the slaves and their descendants, and indeed every Londoner - all are inextricably and forever linked.
Getting there
Museum in Docklands
West India Quay
Canary Wharf
London E14 4AL
www.museumindocklands.org.uk
Museum entrance is two minutes walk from West India Quay. There is an NCP car park behind the Museum on Hertsmere Road. Free admission for under 16’s, NUS card holders and disabled carers;Annual adult ticket £5; Concessions £3 (over 60s and unwaged) allowing unlimited readmission for a full year.
Mon to Sun: 10am-6pm
Last admission: 5.30pm
Closed: 24-26 December and 1 January