The racism of the present is rooted in the racism of the past

But perhaps the prescience of this issue is best summed up in the understandable rage that led to the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol (even if it had been officially scheduled for removal) and it is only a matter of time before Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford.

Given the hasty removal of Robert Milligan’s statue in London’s West India Docks on June 9 it might be wise for Glasgow City Council to consider removing that statue of Robert Clive (the murderer of India) from his exulted place in Kelvingrove Park, as campaigners asked last year – before it is brought down for us.

I’m more than happy that people in Glasgow and throughout the country are raising awareness around the issue of our city’s and Scotland’s need to recognise its slavery past.

The people of Glasgow need to be actively involved in an ongoing public discussion and formal consultation on their slavery legacy in a way that ensures we own it – as a city and as a country – not sweep it further under the carpet. There’s a danger of that if we simply removed the signs without consultation or without an established programme of public education and awareness raising to acknowledge the slavery legacy.

The need for reparative justice here in Scotland (in terms of tackling institutionalised racism) and in those Caribbean and African countries Scotland exploited is best served by us taking the time to discuss, explain, convince and then implement changes as agreed with the consent of the Glasgow public.

There needs to be a way to mark that legacy on our streets without glorifying the slavery owners and traders but equally remembering our African resistance to slavery, Afro Scots historical figures (Mary Seacole, Andrew Watson, James McCune Smith, Frederick Douglass). But it also needs to be done in a way that doesn’t remove all the evidence from the “crime scene”.

We should support the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER) in their campaign to have a statue graveyard instituted so that these images can be sited in an historical context that tells the full story of their crimes. It could even be a physical part of a future museum of slavery empire and colonialism which many of us have been working for over decades and which is long overdue.

This obviously raises many important questions about names, statues and the slavery legacy that we’ve already been asking in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and it helps moves the national debate about that legacy onto to a necessarily heightened level.

The very naming of the eastern city centre Heritage Quarter as Merchant City stemmed partly from a 1970s book about the Tobacco Lords by Professor Sir Tom Devine – Scotland’s most eminent popular historian. This seminal work however failed to recognise the central role of slavery in the development of mercantile trade, shipping and all the associated trades in the wider economy – including the starting capital for banks, textile, engineering, manufacturing and railway industries.

This then went into the school and college and university curriculum for the next decades thus ensuring that whilst the slave trade was covered in history classes, Scotland’s role in – especially Glasgow’s – was not.

Professor Devine made a 180 degree about turn acknowledging the validity of the “Williams thesis” from Dr Eric Williams’ 1944 work Capitalism and Slavery. This states the pivotal role of slavery in the development of the British and American economies and of the foundational capital for their industrial revolutions and development of agricultural estates.

His work since then in his 2014 essay Did Slavery make Scotia Great? in his 2015 compendium Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past – The Caribbean Connection, which he edited, openly acknowledged the central importance of slavery in the development of the industrial revolution that spearheaded the development of capitalist manufacturing and agriculture in Scotland.

Slavery-derived wealth – drawn from three main commodities (tobacco, sugar and cotton) grown almost exclusively by enslaved Africans forcibly transported to the American and Caribbean plantations – helped Scots merchants to develop the founding capital for banks, shipbuilding and textile firms and to develop real estate in the city centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh whilst enabling the then-nouveau riche tobacco lords, sugar barons, and cotton kings to buy aristocratic landed estates and country houses – many of them today’s National Trust for Scotland sites.

Many younger Black Scots – increasingly aware of their newly developed specific identity as both African or African-Caribbean and Scottish in equal measure as evidenced by Stewart Kyasimire’s recent BBC Scotland documentary Black and Scottish – are only finding out about this slavery legacy now in the wake of Black Lives Matter and the deaths of George Floyd, Sheku Bayoh and so many (way too many others).

For many Scots generally – not just Black Scots – Scotland’s deep involvement in chattel slavery will have been a shocking and new revelation. But we shouldn’t be surprised that the racist brutalisation of enslaved Africans in bondage under chattel slavery has a distinct echo today in policing tactics towards black people. The racism of the present is always rooted in the racism of the past.

Yet Glasgow already had a reparative justice discussion and movement going on, so I think the BLM movement has catapulted all these issues of naming streets and districts, statues a slavery museum, and acknowledging Scotland’s past.

You may say “what’s in a name? If we remove the names aren’t we in danger of erasing the past history of Glasgow?” However the fact is that this very week Barclays has agreed not to name their riverside development Buchanan Wharf under pressure from constituent campaigners and from councillors like myself supported by depute leader Councillor David McDonald.

Naming therefore is a live ongoing issue about what we want our city scape to say – and what stories we want to tell our citizens and visitors alike. Slavery and its legacy must be part of that story, otherwise we will be compounding the errors of the past. That legacy still needs to be visible in some way on our streets (through signage, commutative plaques, community arts etc).

To continue to name things, indeed continuing to market and brand the eastern city centre as “Merchant” City, is no longer acceptable. However, obliterating all traces of that past would be to make the evidence of slavery no longer visible. That too would be to continue the city’s past record of “organised forgetting” of our slavery past. The time has come not just for new names for some of Scotland’s major streets, but also for Glasgow’s entire Historic Quarter, the Trongate/Saltmarket Area.

By making such changes we can most importantly make reparation (make amends) by both explaining the origins of today’s racism in yesterday’s slavery and colonialism and by being extra motivated to tackle the institutionalised racism in Scotland that blights our daily lives.

Councillor Graham Campbell

Glasgow