A Kick in the Belly. Stella Dadzie

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СКАЧАТЬ ramblings, his board cleaner, a vicious block of wood lined on one side with felt, would whizz past your ear, trailing a toxic cloud of chalk dust. There was no window gazing or idle doodling in his class. If you valued your playtime, you gave him your undivided attention as soon as he strode into the room.

      The Toad, as he was dubbed in the playground, terrified me. Aside from his general tyranny, I was the only ‘coloured’ girl in my class, which made me horribly conspicuous. Yet for some reason, I grew to love history. The bizarre antics of kings (and the occasional queen) must have captured my imagination. Plus, learning about the past, albeit about people who were long since dead, beat geography, hands down. ‘Ghana: (capital city Accra): main exports peanuts and cocoa’. Even then, young as I was, that tired old map on the wall with Britain’s colonial conquests marked out in pink left me cold.

      Instead of battles and general mayhem, the Industrial Revolution turned out to be disappointingly bloodless. A whole lesson was devoted to the curious contraption we were instructed to copy into our exercise books. Yet there was no mention of the fact that Mr Hargreaves’s bold new invention relied on a continuous supply of raw cotton; not so much as a whisper about the enforced labour of millions of enslaved and brutalised Africans. The Toad kept quiet about that little piece of the jigsaw. The way he saw it, history was all about Britain and empire. He fed us a diet of glorious white conquest and, in our innocence, we swallowed it whole.

      This wasn’t just happening in our history classes, though – the entire curriculum was biased. Words like ‘primitive’ or ‘underdeveloped’ slipped readily from our teachers’ tongues, whatever their subject. Non-white people, if not invisible, were either savage, stupid or irrelevant. The idea that anyone black or non-white might have contributed to our understanding of maths, science or literature was never even considered. Meanwhile, in music, we were encouraged to sing Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory until we knew the words by heart.

      It was a good ten years before I began to understand the link between Mr Hargreaves’s Spinning Jenny and the slaves captured a mere stone’s throw from the village where my father was born. Like its wars and revolutions, Britain’s industrialisation had been presented as a series of unconnected events in which only powerful or infamous white men played any meaningful part. The Toad never once mentioned anyone brown or female like me, and in a world where knowledge and power were so firmly located behind the teacher’s desk, who was I to ask why?

      It was only with the rise of the American civil rights movement and its more militant alter ego, Black Power, that my understanding of the history I’d been taught began to evolve. I chanced across George Jackson’s Soledad Brother² in a public library one rainy afternoon and became well and truly hooked. Books by Bobby Seale, Malcolm X and (joy of joys!) Angela Davis fed a hunger I didn’t even know I’d possessed. I read everything I could lay my hands on, especially history books. But as I searched for the missing pieces of the jigsaw, my suspicions were confirmed. Black people had literally been airbrushed out of the picture.

      They were not alone. Feminists like Sheila Rowbotham were busy arguing that women had been ‘hidden from history’ almost as successfully, while Marx and Engels had long since come to similar conclusions about the working class. Apparently, the names history had chosen to remember were highly selective – more about who wielded the most political clout at the time.³ No surprise, then, that my efforts to locate black women in this gaping void proved doubly fruitless. If the achievements of working-class white people were peripheral to those of kings and princes, women of African descent with their triple burden of gender, class and race hardly got a look-in. I felt a growing urge to name some names, and maybe pour a libation or two to honour their memory.

      I was a working mother before I could indulge this sentiment in any meaningful way. Armed with a distant ‘O’ Level in history class, a sabbatical year at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies gave me the chance to explore at a postgraduate level questions that had been bothering me since primary school. With the writings of men like Franz Fanon, Eric Williams, C. L. R. James and Walter Rodney tucked under my belt,⁴ I came armed with a healthy Afrocentric take on the subject and a tendency to side with the underdog. Both proved indispensable.

      The challenge, as I saw it then, was to not get sidetracked by all the academic claptrap. My tutors had their clever postmodernist theories to mystify us with, but I could draw from real, lived experience. By then I had visited Saltpond, my father’s village in Ghana, and spent time travelling around Jamaica. Nothing about the vibrant, creative people I’d encountered in either country suggested dumb acquiescence. My thesis seemed pretty straightforward: it was the struggles between white masters and black slaves, oppressors and oppressed, that had led to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, and this in turn had paved the way for the slaves’ eventual emancipation a quarter of a century later. To credit Wilberforce with this victory, as if he alone were responsible, was like crediting Christopher Columbus with the discovery of America – ‘a dyam, blasted lie’.⁵

      Of course, the deeper I delved, the more I realised things weren’t that simple. To view history in terms of absolutes, whether absolute truths or absolute lies, was to oversimplify a complex set of forces and circumstances that historians, if they are honest, can only ever guess at. It made no sense whatsoever to talk of ‘slaves’ or ‘abolitionists’ as homogenous groups who had acted in unison or spoken with a unanimous voice. Even established notions of race, class and gender proved a blur of contradictions. By the end of that sabbatical year, the only conclusion I could embrace with any certainty was that the respective actions of the enslaved and those who championed their emancipation – diverse and disparate as they were – had combined with the economic imperatives of the day to work like a pincer until the abolition of the Africa trade became an increasingly urgent and persuasive option.⁶

      I came to realise that studying history was like detective work. However bloodied or one-sided the evidence, it could be interrogated and interpreted in an infinite number of ways. Then as now, lying by omission was common practice, and nowhere was this more apparent than in regard to black and brown-skinned women. The records, diaries, plantation inventories, abolitionist debates, much of the primary evidence, in fact, had either been written, compiled or interpreted by white males who assumed their experience was not only central but all-embracing. So, despite immersing myself in specialist history texts for months on end, my question continued to rankle: in over 400 years of slavery, with all of its documented horrors, what happened to the women?

      I soon discovered that a growing number of Afrocentric historians, many of them based in the Caribbean, had been asking the selfsame question – women like Lucille Mathurin Mair, Barbara Bush, Pat Bishop, Erna Brodber, Mavis Campbell, Beverly Carey, Elsa Goveia, Olive Senior, Monica Schuler, Verene Shepherd and Sylvia Wynter, to name a few. Men like Hilary Beckles, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, Richard Sheridan and Michael Craton had also been doing invaluable research in this area. By delving into surviving medical and plantation records, reviewing parliamentary reports and newspaper archives, rereading old diaries and trawling through private letters, they had unearthed insights into the experience of enslaved women that not only challenged prevailing stereotypes but might otherwise never have seen the light of day. Their work has also helped to challenge the notion that the experience of enslaved people in the American South was all-encompassing, for while it was similar in many respects, it was by no means the same.

      Thanks to this pioneering research, the extent to which Africa’s enslaved peoples were agents in their own emancipation is finally acknowledged, if only in specialist academic circles. How women contributed to this process is also increasingly documented, although the full extent and precise nature of their role is still debated. Strange, then, that over 200 years after abolition, despite this important sea change, our popular media remain fixated on the achievements of a handful of conscience-stricken white men, with the odd black man thrown in for good measure. If Hollywood is to be believed, enslaved people in the Americas owed their freedom to Abraham Lincoln, William Wilberforce СКАЧАТЬ