To judge by the tone of the commemorations marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, the British public has just realized it was a bad thing. “The slave trade defied anyone to discuss it because it was so horrendous”, John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, told the Guardian (March 23), taking historians, students and ordinary readers by surprise. “We need to get the proper history told.” In matters of race relations, Britain mimics the United States (with a twenty-year time lag), so it was natural that Mr Prescott should cite Alex Haley’s book Roots as a curative agent. “That book had an effect on Americans who are now going back to Ghana and turning the slave dungeons into a shrine.”
In the Observer, the actor and writer Kwame Kwei-Armah, formerly Ian Roberts, told how “the television mini-series Roots . . . had a profound effect on me. I told my mother that I, too, would trace my family tree and give us an African name”. The poet Jackie Kay, who like Mr Kwei-Armah is part African and part Scottish, has also testified to the inspiration of Roots, of seeing “a whole lot of black people on television for the first time”. Meanwhile, members of the evangelical Christian group Lifeline have been touring the globe in chains, wearing T-shirts with the logo “So sorry”. Lifeline members have “apologized to the vice-president of the Gambia and to a descendant of Kunta Kinte, the slave made famous in the Alex Haley epic Roots” (Guardian, March 24).
The vice-president no doubt accepted the apology with grace, but the reaction of the “descendant of Kunta Kinte” must have been more complex. Haley’s non-fiction saga, at the end of which the author travels to the Gambian village of Juffure to be reunited in spirit with Kunta Kinte, has long since been exposed as fraudulent. In 1978, Haley paid $650,000 in damages to Harold Courlander, having admitted that large passages of Roots were copied from his book, The African. Allegations that the genealogy linking him to Kunta Kinte was false were never rebutted by Haley, who died in 1992, nor were suggestions that the African griot who outlined the family tree had been coached. (A full account of the case appeared in the Village Voice, February 23, 1993.)
None of it diminishes the powerful impact on the young Jackie Kay, but the case for a retrospective “apology” for an abhorrent trade that ended 200 years ago is not bolstered by being backed up by a dodgy book.
Indeed. What we need is good history and with the honesty which good history will reveal in all of us there will be no need for these spurious apologies. However, there is a bigger problem here than a dodgy book. We regret the sins of our fathers but we are not responsible for them. We should learn from them – as we have – but to apologise for them is meaningless. This year in Ireland we commemorate an event in 1607 known as the Flight of the Earls, when some of my ancestors, having been defeated in the war they launched against the English to try to preserve their Gaelic culture, fled to the continent to avoid their final humiliation. We are not looking for any apologies – I hope. It is sufficient that the truth be recalled.
Today’s New York Times carries a feature on what it calls “the climate divide” in which it observes that there is a growing consensus that the first world owes the third world a climate debt. Of course it does. But it owes it on the basis of our common humanity. To seek to generate this sense of indebtedness on the basis of a guilt which all do not accept in the first place is to undermine the truth which should be the powerful basis for the actions we need to take.
These two examples of guilt-inducement – one using a dodgy book, the other using a shaky scientific theory on the causes of global warming – will do nothing to restore the balance which humanity needs.
Michael Kirke, Dublin, Ireland
Because one African-American wrote a "dodgy book" - dodgy presumably because he invented personal details about the main protagonist and his connection to the author, not because the trade and treatment ofAfricans he describes is wrong, the case for an apology for the slave trade becomes less strong?
Come on. You have to do better than that.
Saad H. Bashir, Karachi, Pakistani
The notion of making an apology for the slave trade evidently appeals as a political gesture to cheap politicians.
In humanitarian terms the trade was horrible - and any current manifestation remains so. But therein lies its appeal: an 'apology' for events that took place hundreds of years ago, and against a wholly different moral background, serves to obscure how little is being done now to stop modern slavery in all its forms.
Britain should be proud that it opposed the trade in the teeth of bitter opposition from the Ameriacas and the rest of Europe. Any political effort to build on that would be worthy of support - but the brutal fact is, it seems beyond any national government's capacity to do so.
C Evans, BALZAN, Malta