FEATURE: SAINTS OR SINNERS?
SAINTS OR SINNERS?
In July 2020, the First Minister commissioned an audit of public monuments, street and building names associated with the slave trade and the British Empire. Gaynor Legall, the chair of the Task and Finish Group, and researcher Peter Wakelin, talk about the early findings. Left: A family at the broken plinth of the toppled statue of Edward Colston in Bristol. © Adrian Sherratt / Alamy Stock Photo. Below: Peter Wakelin and Gaynor Legall.
When demonstrators threw the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour it showed that monuments have powerful meanings. For Bristolian families with ancestors who were enslaved in Africa and trafficked to the West Indies, Colston’s statue felt like an insult. Years of discussion about putting a plaque under it to explain Colston’s past had come to nothing and frustration finally boiled over. Meanwhile, in America, Black Lives Matter protesters and local governments are felling statutes of pro-slavery Confederate leaders: monuments put up long after the Civil War as propaganda for the ‘Jim Crow laws’ that enforced racial segregation and made African Americans second-class citizens. The systematic enslavement of a civilian population is now recognised internationally as a crime against humanity. Slavery may be age-old but the Atlantic slave trade of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries was unique for its vast scale and its basis in race. Its consequences are still apparent in destabilisation and impoverishment in Africa and world-wide racism and inequality.
Wales did not stand apart from this abuse. Welsh mariners and investors took part in the slave trade and Welsh people invested in slave-worked plantations. Welsh trades and industries made cloth, copper and iron for markets that were dependent on slavery in Africa and the Caribbean and Welsh consumers bought tobacco, coffee and sugar grown by enslaved people. 11
