Queendom Films

The United Nations set aside March 25 as the day to Remember Slavery around the world. The UN’s approach is: “Remember the victims.” I don’t think of the enslaved African ancestors as victims, even though they were victims in legal terms. And slavery was certainly a crime, even if it was made legal by unjust laws. I don’t see them as weak or docile, as western culture tends to imagine victims.

I spent much of the last decade reading about slavery and thinking about its legacies, while making my film The Price of Memory. I researched slavery around the world in different eras and cultures: Ancient Greece, Rome, Africa, Native Americans, and more. Then, I focused on Trans-Atlantic Slavery and slavery in the Americas. Finally, I focused on the Caribbean, and Jamaica in particular. What I learned about slavery explained Jamaica, the place where I was born and shaped, to me. Just as what I learned about slavery in the US, explained the country I came to love, to me. I visited the places in England that grew wealthy from British Caribbean slavery. I read the books, diaries and records left by people who owned slaves and the narratives of former enslaved people. Surviving slavery required resilience and wherever slavery happened, there was resistance. Resistance could be as simple as spitting in the master’s soup. It could be as bold as running away, or as painful as aborting your own child in order to stop them from being enslaved too.

I have always been intrigued and spooked by slavery because the map of my childhood is dotted with personal brushes with the physical signs of slavery’s past. When I was about five or six, I noticed the crumbling ruins of a wall that looked like packed stones, on an empty lot of land near our house. (Remains of old walls that marked plantations are not uncommon in Jamaica, because much of the island was once cut up into slave plantations.) My neighbor said it was “a wall from slavery days.” She explained further it was “built by slaves.” I didn’t know what a slave was, but the word stuck with me.

When I was around eight old, they changed the name of my town square from Charles Square to Sam Sharpe Square. I remember standing in the hot Jamaican sun for an entire morning at that ceremony in Montego Bay. There were long speeches. I don’t remember the details of what anyone said, or who said it. But that’s the day I learned that this square, which I passed frequently, was the site of a mass killing. Five hundred slaves had rebelled and they had all been hanged there, as punishment. We were naming the square after Sam Sharpe, the thirty-one year old man who led the rebellion. Seeing the spot where he was murdered: just three blocks from where my mother worked at the Post Office, made Sam Sharpe a real person to me. I was only eight and the weight of the number, 500, hit me hard. I remember wondering how long it must have taken to kill 500 people. Did they kill them back to back or was it two or three at a time? After that, I couldn’t walk through Sam Sharpe Square without thinking of Sam Sharpe and the five hundred people. Passing through there brought a heavy feeling, for years. But I kept one other thing. Sam Sharpe was defiant to the end. He declared just before they hanged him: “I would rather die on the gallows, than be a slave.”

Years later as an undergrad student at New York University, I took a class called the Anthropology of Slavery. It examined slavery around the world in different societies and different eras. One thing struck me: only slavery in the Americas from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade made slavery continue across generations, by enslaving the children that enslaved Africans produced. I also read a lot in this class about different people who managed to reach Africa, explorers from Europe, like Vasco Da Gama and others. It raised a question in me; did Africans sail away from Africa and go anywhere else? It seemed remarkable that other people had sailed to Africa, but Africans had not sailed anywhere. One day, before the entire class, I asked my professor, Prof. Beidelman, an expert on African history and an anthropologist. He was then a man of about seventy with a round belly, thinning hair and a very brusque manner. Beidelman spat rather than said, imperiously, “Absolutely not! Africans never built ships. They never sailed anywhere!” I was stunned by the tone and force of his response. He finished with a monologue suggesting that slavery was natural to Africans, not sailing.

But I didn’t believe him. Knowing the ingenuity I had witnessed among people of African descent, even the poorest people, growing up in Jamaica and living in New York; I found it very hard to believe. I knew Beidelman was wrong. About three months later, I stumbled on Ivan Van Sertima’s book “They Came Before Columbus.” Van Sertima details the African presence in the New World, long before Columbus. The first Africans who came to the Americas were not slaves. Van Sertima points to the African-looking Olmec heads in Mexico and outlines detailed evidence to support his argument. Reading the book made me angry. I wondered why Beidelman would have withheld this information. Even if he disagreed, as an academic he should have told me about Van Sertima’s work. He had to have heard of it.

But this is what slavery did. It made me ignorant about the history that Ivan Van Sertima published, i.e. the history of African people before slavery. The overwhelming impact of slavery made all the students in my class take at face value, the idea that Africans did not go anywhere, had not achieved much. Beidelman himself could not discuss African accomplishment or innovation, without putting it in the context of slavery. Slavery made the world forget all the accomplishments of these African societies before. Not only that, most of the written history that we have about slavery is from the viewpoint of enslavers. We don’t know the details about the Africans who resisted, unless the colonial society or enslavers wrote about hunting or killing them.

The narrative of slavery must change. I want to see a basic curriculum, before high school, which talks about the actions of the African people and the societies they came from. The ways in which Africans maintained their humanity during slavery must become common knowledge. We must hear the ways in which Africans sought to rebel. We must hear about the societies these Africans came from and why they were chosen. Africans who came to the Americas in chains were often highly skilled. The businessmen engaged in slavery acquired specific ethnic groups for this free, forced labor, because they were known for particular skills. This institution, slavery, which generated enormous profits, is a key building block to present day US, Western Europe and Latin America. A day to remember slavery is hardly enough.

I showed my film The Price of Memory to schools in Jamaica last year on the UN’s day to commemorate slavery. The film does not spend a long time on slavery. Its focus is the legacies of slavery and the actions that African descendants in Jamaica took to repair themselves. There were high school students there, but about half of them were younger children. I was worried that the audience may be too young. After the screening, I was talking to an adult when a little girl of about ten years old tapped me on my arm. I looked down at this little girl who I didn’t know. She said, “Aunty Karen, I just want to thank you for your film. I wanted to give you something.” She removed a plastic bracelet from her hand and put it on mine. I have traveled to several countries showing this film and that moment still means the most to me.

Recently, while attending an event at UN Headquarters in New York on March 25, I noticed an exhibition in the lobby called “Africans in India: From slaves to generals and rulers.” Imagine my glee to see in print that Africans reached India 2,000 years ago, not as captives, but as merchants. They went there on their own. Take that, Beidelman.