Here’s the problem. Mr Colstons ships were used to transport enslaved people from Africa to the USA. But how did these Slaves find themselves on ships crossing the Atlantic? And it here we are reminded of an uncomfortable truth.
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| Nat Amarteifio (left) |
But either through deliberate amnesia or ignorance, what the protestors in Bristol did on Sunday says something very disturbing for two reasons.
One was obvious. It's not up to a mob to take unilateral action. We elect councils to make decisions and implement them. Indeed Bristol City was debating what to do with the said statue. What we witnessed was deliberate anarchy.
The second, less obvious. Neatly forgetting what respected historians like Nat Amarteifio, a former mayor of Accra, Ghana, have well documented, the Bristol Mob forgot that the suppliers of these Slaves were African ethnic groups that went into the business of trading their sisters and brothers to the USA. Of course, they were already running their own internal slave trade in Africa. But the profit motive took over their senses when the opportunity to trade with the USA came up. Amarteifio says the Europeans weren’t going out and capturing Africans. They couldn’t — they got sick and died from illnesses like malaria. Some African ethnic groups went into business, warring with other groups so they could capture prisoners they sold as slaves to the Europeans. Amarteifio says they were organised and intentional about it.
“To pursue slavery successfully, you need a highly organized group because somebody has to go out there — somebody has to locate the victims; somebody has to lead an army there; somebody has to capture them, transport them to the selling centers; all the time, keeping an eye on them to make sure they don't revolt,” he said. “And then sell them, and move on.”
So the Bristol Mob was not seeking to right a wrong. They were not demanding that African chiefs apologise for their involvement in the slave trade. They were not standing alongside the Nigerian civil rights group that demands tribal leaders whose ancestors sold people to slavers should say sorry like USA and Britain.
No, Sunday's crowd wanted to hold up one part of history and condemn it all the while trying to forget and erase from the libraries the other part of the story they don’t like. The classic tactic of dictators down the generations, from Vladimir Lenin to Kim Il-sung and his successors.
The Bristol Mob doing what they did, seeking to erase all views of history except the one they like, is frighteningly reminiscent of the days of the Soviet newspaper called Truth. Aka, Pravda.
