MICHAEL WOOD ON… SLAVERY’S ONGOING LEGACY Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. He has presented numerous BBC series, and is the author of several books including The Story of China (Simon & Schuster, 2021). His Twitter handle is@mayavision
SOMETIMES AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND CAN open a window onto the past so vivid, so immediate, that it comes like a flash of lightning.
This summer, a discovery was made at an archaeological dig in the small town of Abandze on the coast of Ghana, 70 miles west of Accra. The dig was inside the ruins of Fort Amsterdam, built by the Dutch in the 17th century on a hill above a beach fringed with coconut palms, where Atlantic rollers crash and painted fishing boats with long, curved prows bob in the surf. The fort was a brutalist rectangle with circular and square corner towers, and for more than 200 years it was used for the slave trade. But now, under its earth floor, traces have been uncovered of an earlier fort built by the British from 1638.
The first British entrepôt anywhere in Africa, it bore a famous name, Cormantin. At first it was used for trading gold, ivory and exotica, but then its commerce became people. In 1663, King Charles II granted a charter to the Company of Royal Adventurers (later the Royal African Company), giving it monopoly rights over the slave trade in which Britain would become a key mover. The exact site was long uncertain, but now here it was.
Under the earth were a wall, a brick drain, a gun flint, broken bits of 17th-century tobacco pipes, the spouts and necks of glazed tableware. Everyday fragments from one of history’s greatest crimes. The find took me back nearly 40 years. Back then, I was making a series that told a slavery story – pioneering in those days, when Britain’s role in emancipation was the thing that was stressed.
We were looking at a group of Afro-Caribbean families in Leicester who had come to the UK in the 1950s from the island of Barbuda, a desolate, almost waterless place north of Antigua. From the late 1600s till emancipation, and after, the island was owned by the Codrington family (who founded the All Souls College Library in Oxford, and built a grand country estate at Dodington Park in Gloucestershire). The tiny island was later part of the British Leeward Island Federation and eventually became independent in 1981. But in the 1950s, in the wake of the Windrush, many Barbudan families migrated to Leicester, which was the hometown of the English parish priest on Barbuda, a Father Milburn
