SLAVERY’S legacy in the Highlands and Islands is to be examined this week in a special programme on BBC Alba.
The stories of Highlanders who profited from colonial slavery are now coming to light and are investigated in the first of a new series of MG ALBA’s European current affairs programme.
Historian and author Dr David Alston, who has been researching the issue for over two decades, is featured in Thursday’s episode which also sees a call for a multi-site national museum across Scotland of the slavery legacy.
Alston has been looking at how places like Inverness were so dependent on the trade and his painstaking research has shed light on the lasting, complex connections between the Highlands and slavery.
Most of the profit came from where Guyana is now – the three British colonies of Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo – and Alston’s work has exposed the extent of Highlanders’ involvement and the traces that exist to this day.
The programme also features SNP councillor Graham Campbell, a Scot of Jamaican heritage, who in May 2017 was elected as Glasgow’s first African Caribbean Councillor and was instrumental in Glasgow City Council holding its first official Black History Month in the same year.
The councillor said his experience of racism was partly due to ignorance about history.
“Here in Scotland the Enlightenment was happening and people were fighting for their civil rights and freedoms but there Highland Gaels, who had been thrown off their lands themselves, did that to Africans on plantations, native Americans and Canadians and all over the Highlands country mansions like Tulloch Castle near Inverness were built from the proceeds of slavery,” he said.
“The life expectancy of a slave on a plantation in Jamaica was about five years. These were torture camps where people were worked to death and this process of torturing and working to death lasted for 200 years and Scots were central to it.
“It took a certain type of person to do that.
“It’s only when you deal with the reality of that past can you then make that step forward to what I’d call reparative justice,” he said.
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