London's dirtiest secret

OneWorld

By Daniel Nelson

At last, Londons dirtiest secret is out in the open, with the launch of a permanent gallery, London, Sugar & Slavery, at the Museum in Docklands.

Britain, generally, has been slow to memorialise slavery in its museums and galleries, though now we have the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. And a lot of exhibition space has been given in London and elsewhere to the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act this year.

But only now is London coming to terms, in the form of a permanent exhibition space, with its key role in the slave trade. At one point, London, Liverpool, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro were the four biggest slave trade ports in the world.

And what better venue than the Docklands Museum: the West India Dock in which it is housed was built and financed by the sugar merchants, plantation owners and slave traders, and sugar produced by African slaves was stored in this very building.

The new gallery is not particularly large, but it packs a punch and tries to give space to many of the issues that still raise controversy:

* Language: exhibits refer to enslaved Africans rather than to slaves, regarded as a dehumanising term, and to African or Caribbean people rather than Blacks, until references to racist attacks in the 1980s

* African participation in the trade: We want to challenge everybody, says co-curator Tom Wareham

* History: the exhibition features a number of African artefacts, to counteract the colonial and racist myth that Africa had no past or civilisation

* African Londoners: exhibits show that their presence goes back hundreds of years

* Resistance: slave revolts and other forms of refusal to comply helped make the trade unviable.

* The beneficiaries: it wasnt just a handful of West Indian plantation owners who reaped the profits, but a wide range of London (and indeed British) families

* Its all history. Whats it got to do with me?: an incalculable proportion of Londons wealth was founded on the profits from slavery; William Beckford, the son of a slave owner who was twice Lord Mayor of London, inherited an estate worth £1 million over £100 million in todays money. The life of Londoners today would be very different had there been no slave trade.

The key message is that London has links with West Africa and the Caribbean because of the slave trade and that link is still with us today, says Wareham. This is not Black history - its our history. We have to reclaim it.

The new gallery also picks its way carefully through controversial issues of presentation. How much of the brutality of slavery should an exhibition show, for example? One preview guest this week said they thought it underplayed the horrors of the trade, but Wareham says, We dont want it to be a negative gallery.

Although all these issues are touched on, many of the references are too indirect for my taste. And of course there are omissions. But any representation of such a far-reaching, complex, shocking and emotional issue is bound to provoke complaints, so its great that the Museum has taken the risk and opened this important Gallery. And its been clever enough to allow space for the inevitable criticisms: a section called Reinterpretations will display viewpoints that are unhappy with the museums interpretations of this cataclysmic event in world history.

Museum in Docklands, No1 Warehouse, West India Quay, E14 4AL; t 0870 444 3857
website: www.museumindocklands.org.uk/ email: info@museumindocklands.org.uk