NTS 'augmented reality' artwork takes audience through Glasgow's slave-trading past

The piece is written and directed by Glasgow-based theatre-maker and actor Adura Onashile. Presented through an app on the audience member’s smartphone, it addresses the anguished ­subject of the involvement of Scots in the ­genocidal horrors of the colonial enslavement of African people.

Assisted by researcher ­Adebusola ­Ramsay and historian Dr Peggy Brunache, Onashile has created a ­dramatic art work in which a young, 18th-century African man, played by Reuben Joseph, (one of the titular “ghosts” of Glasgow’s past) guides us around the Merchant City. As the journey unfolds, Joseph is joined by a supporting cast of Lisa Livingstone, ­Fiona MacNeil and Simon Donaldson.

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Together, they tell a story that ­Scotland is beginning, finally, to wake up to. ­Namely, the role that Scots, ­principally tobacco merchants, played in the ­murderous so-called “African slave trade”. In reality, the human beings “traded” were treated with a brutal ­disregard that the European slavers would not have visited upon livestock.

Lest we need to be reminded of the hellish realities of African slavery, we need only turn to The Black Jacobins, the classic account of the successful slaves’ uprising in the late-18th and ­early-19th centuries in what are now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, written by the great African-Caribbean historian CLR James. “The slaves were… fastened one to the other in columns, loaded with heavy stones of forty or fifty pounds in weight to prevent attempts at escape, and then marched the long journey to the sea, sometimes hundreds of miles, the weakly and sick dropping to die in the African jungle…

“At the slave ports they were penned into ‘trunks’ for the inspection of the buyers. Night and day thousands of ­human beings were packed into ‘dens of putrefaction’ so that no European could stay in them for longer than quarter of an hour without fainting.”

Britain’s central role in this slave trade became connected with the international outpouring of anger over the killing of African-American man George Floyd by Minneapolis Police in May of last year. Following the spectacular toppling of the statue of the notorious slaver Edward Colston by Black Lives Matter protestors in Bristol, calls increased for Scotland to face up to its own role in African slavery.

In Edinburgh there were demands for the removal of the statue of Henry ­Dundas, whose parliamentary manoeuvre delayed the abolition of slavery by Britain by 15 years, from 1792 to 1807. In November of last year, Edinburgh City Council appointed Sir Geoff Palmer (below), Scotland’s first black professor, to head a review of the statues and street names in the city that are connected to slavery.

Meanwhile, in Glasgow, activists placed signs carrying the names of black liberation fighters alongside those of the merchants who traded so profitably in tobacco and African blood. It was a long-overdue reminder that the great ­architecture of the city, from the marble staircases of the City Chambers to the splendour of the Merchant City, was paid for in the anguish, torture and, often, brutal murder of African slaves.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who demands that we venerate the British Empire, would have us forget that the Empire was built, in large part, on such dehumanising and brutalising of African people. Indeed, Johnson’s pushback against the anti-racist movement in Britain found expression in the publication last week of the UK government’s Sewell Report into “race and ethnic disparities”.

The report, effectively, denies the existence of institutional racism in the UK. It has been widely decried by anti-racism campaigners and experts in the field.

When Johnson appointed black academic Dr Tony Sewell to head up the report, he knew that Sewell had already said that evidence for institutional racism in the UK was “somewhat flimsy” and that Black Lives Matter protests were a “sideshow”. It came as little surprise, therefore, that his report sought to downplay the impact of racism in Britain.

Dame Doreen Lawrence, mother of Stephen Lawrence, the Black teenager murdered by racists in London in 1993, was scathing of the Sewell Report.

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“They [the report’s authors] are not in touch with reality,” she said. “[They] need to speak to the young boys who are stopped and searched [by the police] constantly on the street.”

By contrast with the authors of the Sewell Report, the people at the National Theatre of Scotland are determined to ­acknowledge just how closely 21st-century Britain, Scotland included, is tied up with the history of African slavery, ­colonialism and racism. After all, the NTS’s Glasgow headquarters are ­situated beside Speirs Wharf, which is named ­after the 18th-century tobacco baron – and, of course, large-scale slave owner – Alexander Speirs.

FOR her part, Onashile wants to focus minds on the perversions of ­colonialist historiography, which reveres the ­perpetrators of slavery, such as Speirs, Andrew Cochrane and John Glassford. The ­central character of Ghosts, she says, comes to us from the nameless margins of that history.

“The young man that audiences will follow is our attempt to make real over 500 years of history, rebellion, resistance and protest”, the writer explains. “When enslaved Africans liberated themselves from their masters, they started a process that continues today.

“We don’t know what happened to him, and history hasn’t afforded him a name or presence, but this is our attempt at saying that he existed, and though we can’t be sure whether he ever found the refuge he was seeking, this is our attempt to put his ghost to rest.”

Ghosts can be experienced in Glasgow between April 26 and May 9. For more information, visit: nationaltheatrescotland.com