Undoing 2007; Preparing for 2038

A day-long, co-productive community conversation, about Abolition, Birmingham, and Commemoration, convened and chaired by Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman (University of Birmingham). 

Motivation

‘We greatly deceived ourselves’,  confessed William Wilberforce (1823), in his fourth and final book, ’by expecting much more benefit to the plantation Negroes from the abolition of the Slave Trade than has actually resulted from that measure’. If, in 1824, even Wilberforce, the life-long leader of anti-slave-trade activism, felt ‘greatly deceived’ by the ‘abolition’ of 1807, then We, Too, in 2024, should feel ‘greatly deceived’ by the state-sponsored jingoistic jamboree that, in 2007, was the British commemoration of that ‘abolition’s’ bicentenary (Cultural Brokers & Alchemy 2009, Smith, Cubitt, Fouseki, & Wilson 2011 & Antislavery Usable Past 2019). 

This great deception has been denounced (Sherwood 2007). First, the bicentenary was mere ‘maritimisation’ (Beech 2008 & Moody 2016) and wilful ‘Wilberfarce’ (Agbetu 2011). Second, even on its own terms, the ‘abolition’ was a failure, rescuing only six per cent of the African peoples trafficked over sixty years (Domingues, Eltis, Misevich & Ojo 2014) and, ironically, forcing the people rescued to work against their will as ‘negro apprentices’ (Richards 2020; Ryan 2022; & Anderson 2022). Third, and most crucially, this so-called ‘abolition’ was actually ‘amelioration’ (Fergus 2013; Spence 2014; Dierksheide 2014; Turner 2017; & Burnard 2018). This policy of ‘Stop The Boats!’ was less ‘End Slavery Now!’ than ‘Make Slavery Better (Again)!’—a ‘satanic policy’, as Elizabeth Heyrick (1824) put it, two hundred years ago this very spring, ‘revolting to the common sense of justice’. For Heyrick, Wilberforce was a false prophet and ’[t]he father of lies, the grand artificer of fraud and imposture, transformed himself […], on this occasion, pre-eminently, “into an angel of light”—and deceived’. 

How d’you repair a damage like this great deception? Or ‘how might the array of new empirical evidence and research insights that have emerged since 2007 be incorporated effectively into the process of national and local memorialisation’ in the future (Bennett and Dawkins 2023)? One such key insight, published five years before, but curiously overlooked, in 2007, was that ‘the campaign was led from Birmingham, dominated by the provinces and dissent, with no major supporting group in London’ (Hall 2002 & Cook & Hall 2007). Indeed, for this very reason, in Jamaica, the first ‘free village’ founded after ‘Full Free’—i.e. the abolition of British ‘negro apprenticeship’ on 1st August 1838—was called ‘New Birmingham’ (Besson 1984; Hall 1993; & Besson 2002).  

New memories cost money. Indeed, ‘an important variable in determining the scale of remembrance [in the 2030s] will be whether the National Lottery Heritage Fund, or another organisation, decides to make a significant financial commitment to support a programme of memorialisation like the 2007 bicentenary’ (Bennett and Dawkins 2023). £27 million of public money was spent on the 2007 bicentenary, around 85% of which was disbursed by the Heritage Lottery Fund (UK Minister of State for Culture 2007). This figure is significant: ‘apprenticeship was a form of compensation for enslavers: […] £27 million [in kind] in the form of the apprenticeship system was in addition to the £20 million [in cash] paid out to enslavers by the British government as compensation’ (Shepherd and Hemmings 2022).  

How do we hold the funders of this great deception to account? How do we offer them an opportunity to repair the epistemic damage they have done? How, across the borders and boundaries that divide us, do we partner together, to provoke a paradigm shift in public memory, away from this fanatic fixation on a ‘faux-bolition’/‘false abolition’ (Gilmore 2023) and onto precisely how we got free (if we got free)? To answer these questions, on Saturday 1st June 2024, the bicentenary of the publication of Heyrick’s seismic text, ‘Immediate, not gradual abolition; or, an inquiry into the shortest, safest, and most effectual means of getting rid of West Indian Slavery’,  Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman will convene, at the University of Birmingham’s ‘enviable city-centre location’, for ‘communities to shape ideas and solutions together’, a potential partnership of academic, denominational, and GLAM (Gallery, Library, Archive, and Museum) institutions, in Britain and Jamaica, for a co-productive workshop on how best to undo the deceptive legacies of 2007 and prepare the evidential bases for fresh abolitionist bicentennial commemorations during the 2030s. 

Schedule 

09:00 - 10:00, Shared Catering Lounge, The Exchange 

Morning Refreshments

10:00 - 12:00, Assembly Room, The Exchange

A collective conversation framed by potential partners in Britain. Speakers include: 

• Gabrielle Hemmings (University of the West Indies and University of Birmingham) 

• Dr Toyin Agbetu (University College London) 

• Professor Trevor Burnard (Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull) 

• Professor Catherine Hall (Legacies of British Slavery, University College London) 

12:00 - 12:30, Shared Catering Lounge, The Exchange 

Caribbean Lunch

12:30 - 14:00, The Wolfson Centre for Archival Research, Library of Birmingham 

A consultation of archival material relating to Abolition, Birmingham, and Commemorations possible during the 2030s. 

14:00 - 14:30, Shared Catering Lounge, The Exchange 

Afternoon Refreshments

14:30 - 16:30, Assembly Room, The Exchange  

A conversation framed by potential partners in Jamaica. Speakers include:  

• Residents of The Alps, Trelawney (formerly ‘New Birmingham’) 

• John Shorter, co-author of Appleton Estate: From The Dickinson Family to the Campari Group, A Short History 

• Colleagues at the University of the West Indies, Mona Library 

16:30 - 17:00 

Preliminary Conclusions