(Edited) WOWFest Malik al Nasir
Bryan Biggs, Director of Cultural Legacies - Hello everybody. Can you hear me? Thank you. Right, welcome. My name's Bryan Biggs, I'm the director of Cultural Legacies here at Bluecoat. I'd like to welcome you on behalf of both Bluecoat and also Writing On The Wall, who we’re partnering with on this event tonight. We're coming to the end of the festival, it's the last week I think and Maura Kennedy, one of the trustees, is going to say a little bit about the last few events of the festival, at the very end. But for now, as I say, welcome. This talk tonight by Malik Al Nasir is really linked to our Colonial Legacies project. I'm going to introduce a couple of my staff in a minute to say a bit more about that.
The Echoes and Origins project, which this is all part of, I think is a really timely and actually very important project that we're doing. It takes as its starting point the Bluecoat, this building's original function as a charity school for poor children, going back to 1718. They were here until 1906, when the school moved to its present-day site in Wavertree.
Closely connected to the sea, the school was established by the Anglican Church, which was just over the road, St. Peter's Church, hence Church Street, and also by the maritime merchant Bryan Blundell who, along with others, funded the school. Many of these Liverpool merchants profited from trade with Africa and the British colonies, central to which was the transatlantic slave trade, and all the goods it enabled, such as cotton, sugar and tobacco.
For the Colonial Legacies strand of this Echoes and Origins project, young people from Greenhouse Project in Liverpool 8 have been exploring the 18th century origins of this building, and their echoes today, looking at how these continuing legacies connect to their own lives.
Through research and a programme of workshops, discussions and creative activities with artists, historians and others, the young people have looked at themes including colonialism, empire, slavery, migration, diaspora, independence, race and identity.
We are delighted to welcome Malik al Nasir this evening to reflect on these colonial legacies as well as the project’s second strand, which is called ‘Looked After Children’, because this was a home for orphaned children, and connecting them to each other as part of the same colonial process. We don't see them as any different, looking after children and exploiting enslaved Africans.
I will shortly hand over to our Colonial Legacies Project Assistant Oleta Omar la Cruz and Project Facilitator Tavia Panton who will say a bit more about the project, and then introduce Malik.
The format for this evening after those introductions, Malik is going to do a presentation for about 40 minutes or so, and then after that we will open it out to questions from the audience. We are recording the event so if you ask a question but do not wish to be recorded, let us know and we'll edit that out. Somebody will be coming round with a roving mic, so you can tell them. There's also copies of Malik's excellent book, his memoir Letters To Gil, about his long relationship with Gil Scott Heron. It's fascinating, a fantastic story. Will you touch on that tonight? Not so much! That isn't the real subject. It's a great book, we've got copies and he's happy to sign copies if you do want to buy one.
Before I hand over I'd just like to thank the people who've made this possible in terms of our funders. The National Lottery Heritage Fund have funded the Echoes and Origins project with additional support from Art Friends Merseyside, Garfield Weston Foundation and LCVS; and Bluecoat’s revenue funders, without which none of this would have been possible, Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council through Culture Liverpool. Thanks to them and to our partners in this project, the Greenhouse Project and University of Liverpool.
Those of you that bought a ticket from Eventbrite, if it's OK we're going to e-mail you with an evaluation form, please fill it in if you can. It's an online form, very short, it's always good to get responses from audiences.
Finally, if you have not already seen it, the exhibition that is outside downstairs, about Bluecoat's Colonial Legacies, we've extended it until now the third of July. Plenty of time to see it and do have a look because it is a fascinating exhibition, put together with the co-operation of the young people I mentioned before. Oleta are you ready to come up and say a few words? Thank you.
Oleta Omar la Cruz, Participation Assistant - Hi, my name's Oleta.
Many young people learn one sided stories in schools and we go through life not knowing or understanding important facts about our history. At the Bluecoat we have worked with young people in partnership with The Greenhouse Project to understand how systemic barriers impact their lives today, and we have uncovered a history that has been forgotten. For example, we worked with Michelle Girvan (a PhD student from University of Liverpool) to create the Blundell Family Map that is displayed in our exhibition to show the one hundred and eleven enslaving voyages that the co-founding Blundell family had a stake in. We have been looking into these foundation stories of the Bluecoat and understanding the connections to the legacies today.
In one of our sessions, we explored our heritage and dropped location pins on a map. This workshop helped show how the multiple cultures of our different backgrounds give Liverpool its unique personality. It gives an example of the legacies of living in a historical port city, and it being a gateway to the world!
We hosted an event in the courtyard where young people and artists performed poems. Creating poetry to express our honest feelings about various Colonial Legacies in the Bluecoat’s garden was really powerful and inspirational.
The impact of learning this ‘other side of the story’ has been to empower the young people through their new understanding and roots in their city.
Tavia Panton, Colonial Legacies Project Facilitator - Thanks Oleta. Hi, good evening, I am Tavia, the Project Facilitator for Colonial Legacies.
Our keynote speaker Malik al Nasir is an author, poet and historian whose life experience links closely with the two themes of our Echoes and Origins project. In his 2020 memoir Letters to Gil, he reflects on his early experiences as a black child in care. At 18 years old, a chance encounter with musician Gil Scott Heron, dramatically changes the trajectory of his life. Gil introduced this relatively unlettered young person to the arts, informed him with knowledge, and exposed him to other cultures - three key elements that are still making a difference in the lives of our young people today on our Colonial Legacies and Looked After Children participation projects.
Fast forward to the present, Malik is now undertaking a PhD at Cambridge University to formally research his ancestry, particularly relating to Sandbach, Tinne & Company. This was a prominent Liverpool and Glasgow-based company that was heavily involved in transatlantic slavery. Their members intermarried to create a dynasty of clergy, merchants, politicians, and philanthropists. We even found out very recently thanks to some research by Michelle Girvan that one of the members of this dynasty, who Malik will introduce, was even listed as a trustee of the Blue Coat school in 1882 and treasurer, 1885-1925.
In March last year I read in the Guardian about the extensive research that our invited guest was undertaking. In November I first encountered him during a different Colonial Legacies project I facilitated at The Walker Art Gallery: if you haven’t seen the new permanent display there then I recommend it. The project was led by assistant curator Alex Patterson, and together we worked with a group of local people in their early 20s to reinterpret sculptures and some of that group are here today, so hi!
(Audience members whoop)
Malik gave a talk to this group, and the Walker's audience, and spent time answering their questions with his extensive knowledge. The more I learnt about his journey, the more I respected and recognised the value of his story and its relevance in the lives of the young people on both strands of the Bluecoat’s Echoes and Origins projects.
So we are delighted to invite him here today to talk about this research and its relevance to our collective echoes and origins, please can we welcome to the floor: Malik Al Nasir.
Malik Al Nasir
Thank you to Tavia and Bryan for the wonderful introduction. Thank you all for coming here tonight and taking time out of your busy schedules to come and listen to me, so I'm very grateful for your coming out, thanks to Writing On The Wall as well for the support in co-hosting this event. So, I was asked by the Bluecoat to come along and look at the connections between my own experience as a young person growing up in Liverpool, going through the care system, and my journey back through my colonial past to the links to my origins, if you like, that I've been involved in with my research.
So, why did I start to research where I came from? As a kid, growing up in Liverpool, on a council estate in Netherley, I was constantly being told to 'go back to where you came from.' It's one of my earliest childhood memories, but I had really no idea about where that was. My father had come from British Guyana, he was a merchant seaman like many of the black people that came, colonial seamen. He was born in 1918, in a place called Grove in East Bank Demerara in what is today present day British Guyana. I knew this about him, but when I was eight years old, unfortunately my father had a stroke. He got paralysed from the neck downwards, he became a quadriplegic. He went into hospital as a geriatric, soon after that he died, I was taken into Local Authority Care at the age of nine. So, having gone through the care experience, I started to question why I was being treated in the way I was being treated. What I didn't realise at that time is how that system, the care system as we know it today, actually evolved and what were its origins? It's funny but I never really put it all together until they asked me to do this project, because the Echoes and Origins, the idea of looking at the origins and how they echo into the now, is really what's caused me to have some revelations about my own care experience and how it evolved. That's going to be really the subject of what I'm going to be looking at here today.
I'm currently doing a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, I wouldn't have been doing that if Liverpool City Council had anything to do with it, because when I left the care system at the age of 18, I was semi-literate, I was homeless, I was traumatised from my experience, I was bereft of hope and without any qualifications. I was very fortunate to encounter a kind and generous spirit, a man called Gil Scott Heron in Liverpool in 1984 when I was 18 years old. He took me on the road with his band, taught me poetry and through poetry I became literate, went on to college and university, and got to where I am today, so... thank you.
(Audience applauds)
The thing about Gil was, he had no parental responsibility for me, had no duty of care to me, he was not responsible for me in any way, he was not even from my country. He didn't have to come here and do what he did. He chose to do that because his grandmother, who had grown up in the Jim Crow southern states of America, had taught him some simple values that if you could help someone, why wouldn't you? On that simple basis, that little maxim that he had inculcated in him as a child, he was in a position where he could help me and he did, and this was the result.
I'd just like to go back a bit - obviously Bryan's explained a bit about the history of the Bluecoat and its links to the slave trade. I like this picture [referring to his fist slide] because it goes right back to the origins of the Bluecoat, you can even tell by the way they've spelt it. Look how they've spelt Liverpool - Leverpoole. Anyone ever seen it spelt like that before? It just shows you how things change. Obviously, the Echoes and Origins project have been looking into the whole concept of looked after children, how that evolved and why that was important in this city, and why the Bluecoat evolved around it. I wanted to look at the whole concept of indentureship, because indentureship was the principle upon which the Bluecoat was operating from its origins, as I understand it. There are other people doing research into this, I'm not an expert on the Bluecoat by any means and wouldn't profess to be. The basic idea of indentureship is, people either voluntarily entering into some form of bonded labour, or servitude, for a fixed period of time, so they could sign a contract, an indenture. It would be authorised and they would give themselves over to an employer, who would hold that bond, and they would feed them and clothe them and maybe educate them or whatever it was that was agreed under the terms of the indentureship to do for them. In return, they would extract labour from them for a given period of time. People often use indentureship interchangeably with enslavement but there's clear distinctions. You can pass on an indentureship, to someone else, just like if I owe you money and I don't pay you, I can sell the debt and someone else can collect the money. So there's things like that. But obviously, the buying and selling of human souls that was done with enslavement was not as easily done with indentureship. So there is very clear distinctions between indentureship and enslavement, but many people would argue that the manner in which the indentured people were treated was not dissimilar to the manner in which those that were enslaved were treated. In return they were promised transportation, in some cases to the colonies, they would be given food, clothing, shelter, in the case of the Bluecoat, education. The kinds of people that were generally indentured were people who were impoverished and they didn't have an opportunity to be able to get basic things like food, and education wasn't even really on the menu for most people, it was simply a matter of survival. In some cases that I came across in my research I was finding that in particular cultures like in China, for instance, you would become indebted and as a consequence of your debt, through gambling, you would indenture your child. So there were people who used to go from England to Shanghai and hang around outside the gambling houses, and wait for a Chinaman to get so in debt that he couldn't pay and they were going to kill them. Then they would go in and offer to settle the debt in return for him to indenture the children. He would indenture them on the spot and they'd never see their children again, they'd be shipped off to the Caribbean, that's how we get the Jamaican Chinese and so on. Once they got there they would never earn enough to be able to get themselves back so invariably they stayed there and it affected the demographic of that whole place.
This place here that you see is the Liverpool children's admission unit on Acrefield Road, in Woolton. This was my experience of being brought into the care system. I was taken here in 1975 at the age of nine, having committed no crime, having done nothing wrong. I was only nine, what could I have done? The house itself was built by Henry Tate of Tate & Lyle fame, the sugar baron. It was a wedding gift for his daughter when she got married. Some kind of way, it found its way into the hands of what was then called the Liverpool Corporation, which we would now call the City Council. They had it as a place called Aymestrey Court first, which was some kind of children's home, and then they changed it to the Liverpool children's admission unit, when in 1975 I was admitted there. That's still what it was. My reception into this place in 1975 was to be taken into a room, stripped naked, put in a shower, washed, dressed in striped pyjamas, marched into a room, doors locked behind me, bars on the windows, solitary confinement, for two weeks. Food was pushed under the door, plates were collected, no one would speak to me. Basically, I cried myself to sleep every night. That was my reception into the care system. I was told at the time that it was the principle of a homing pigeon, you lock it up in a loft for two weeks and feed it, and when it flies off it will always fly back to the loft. What they were trying to do was to acclimatise me to being away from my family, to say your family is no longer your family, the state is now your family, you do not have freedom anymore. This was the principle that was enshrined, if you like, in the Children & Young Person's Act of 1969. So my care order, which was issued by the juvenile court in Liverpool, was issued under the provisions of that act. I started to ask myself, as well - who makes these laws that take away not only the freedom of the individual but the right of the parent over that individual? Where do those laws come from? It's ironic that this particular building was gifted by a sugar baron and I'll get to the reason why that is of interest in a moment.
Under the provisions of that act, in my case, it was that I was classed as beyond parental control. Who made that determination? A social worker, came to our house, told my mother, who was a white woman with four black kids - 'why don't you let us take all the kids into care, go and find yourself a nice white man and have a proper family?' Eventually they managed to get two of us off her, me and my brother. We're taken into the care system, that was my reception and I ended up under the care of the local authority, Liverpool City Council, for the next nine years. So the Children's & Young Person's Act of 1969 has now been repealed by the Children's Act of 1989 so any child taken into care now is taken under the provisions of the Children's act of 1989. So this concept of being in loco parentis, a Latin term, in lieu of the parent, is the process by which legally those rights are taken away from the parent and enshrined with another body, in this case, the state. So, who are the state, in this case? When you think about the state you think about the city council, the local authority, who are the local authority? They're made up of councillors. Who are those councillors? They're merchants. Who are those merchants? In this period, when these guys started off, when these houses were built, they're slave traders or were heavily involved in the British Empire, in colonialism, in the case of this particular house which was built in the late colonial period, you're talking about indenture as being endemic within the British Empire at that time. So the system of taking away the legal rights of a human soul, taking away the freedom of a human soul for no reason, no crime, and then rendering this person into this state where you have control over every aspect of their life for a given period of time, is a very interesting concept when the people who are making the laws in the council chambers, that make these determinations, are themselves beneficiaries of enslavement, colonialism, apprenticeship and indenture.
The second place I was placed in was, you might not recognise this because it doesn't look like this anymore, but that's Menlove Avenue, when they had trams. That building on the right is what we called Woolton Vale assessment centre. Anyone who went in care in the 1970s would have known it as Menlove. It was a remand centre. What was ironic about this was, it was Gladstone's House. We all know Gladstone was born on Rodney Street but what people don't know or many people don't know is that this house in Woolton was his suburban house, his suburban residence. And Gladstone's an important character in this, because not only is he the prime minister, the longest serving prime minister in British history, he has four terms in office as prime minister. But as well as being prime minister he has lots of other roles as well, and those roles all happen at critical periods from 1833 onwards. 1833 as you all know is the year that slavery was officially abolished. So the Woolton Vale assessment centre, I ran away from the other place as soon as they let me out of solitary confinement. I just ran away. They brought me back, I ran away. They brought me back, I ran away. And then they said, right, let's put him somewhere he can't run, and they put me in there so there's bars on the windows, every door's locked behind you, I'm escorted to the toilet for my own protection because there's kids in there up to the age of 18. Many years later I sued them for my experiences there. One of the things that I encountered whilst I was there was some documentation about who was in there and for what crimes. There was things like discharging a firearm in public, rape, murder, a whole range of things that people up to the age of 18 had been committed there for. I'm nine years old and I'm committed there for running away from a place that put me in solitary confinement because I lost me dad, you know? When you look at this, you think, there's an institution here that is really exploiting young people, poor people, black people, for its own gains, for whatever reason, whether that is the exploitation of labour or the diversion of taxpayer's funds into a system, what they now call in America the ‘prison-industrial complex’. You see that it has roots in colonialism and slavery. One of the things you'll recognise when you look at the constitution of the United States; first amendment, everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So how come black people didn't? Firstly, because black people weren't classed as people, they were property. So they didn't have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in 1776, they didn't get that until 1867. Even then it was questionable. Even now it's questionable! When they did the 14th amendment to the constitution, they basically enshrined that black people should have the same rights as others to all of these constitutional freedoms etc. But still, black people were left in a situation where they were treated as second class citizens, they were disproportionately represented in the prison system. If you look at the statistics of prisoners directly after emancipation in 1867, you find that the prison population spikes massively. The reason the prison population spiked massively is because when they made these proclamations, they always put caveats in the law to exclude prisoners. Prisoners did not have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So if we can't enslave black people, let's put them all in prison, and then get the prisoners to provide services, to build the roads, the railroads, to do all this other stuff. Or we can just sentence them to hard labour and then through their hard labour, we'll populate the colonies in Australia, Canada and these other places. So these people who are sitting in parliament, who were slave traders, who are making all these rules, were trying to find ways to subvert the rules that they themselves were making. So every time they were like, OK, we've got to abolish slavery, what are we going to do? Let's apprentice them. So we'll give them their freedom in 1834 but they'll have to be apprentices until 1838. And then after 1838, we'll indenture them, so then they can voluntarily put themselves in servitude. Then you're getting these same people sitting in parliament and writing the laws like the Poor Laws, the laws that relate to the kinds of frameworks that would allow someone to indenture themselves in a place like the Bluecoat. Those same people, with that same mentality, are the ones who are crafting those laws in parliament, and the delegated legislation that comes from those statutes, in local authorities like Liverpool Corporation.
This particular institution was a remand home, so people awaiting trial for crimes would go there on remand. In 1973 it became an assessment and observation centre, meaning that children being admitted to the care system go in there for assessment and observation, but Risley was the local remand centre, it was full. So they used this as an overspill. As a consequence of it being used as an overspill, children who were entering the care system like me were being mixed up with the criminals, so we were all being criminalised. We were all being held behind bars, and we were all having doors locked behind us. They didn't have the requisite authority at the time to lock children behind doors because the secretary of state gives that through statute. Under the remand home rules, when they ceased to be a remand home and became an assessment and observation centre, they were operating under community home rules, which do not give the requisite authority to lock children behind doors. So we were being locked behind doors illegally from 1973 onwards, in my case from 1975. That's part of the course of action I took when I sued Liverpool City Council for my time in care.
So what does Henry Tate of Tate & Lyle fame, Prime Minister Gladstone, and the Bluecoat all have in common? They all have links to sugar barons, because as we found out, as Tavia mentioned before, we found links recently to members of my own slave owner ancestors, who were sugar barons from Demerara and who sat as trustees and treasurers of the Bluecoat for many years. Prime Minister Gladstone, W.E. Gladstone, his father was John Gladstone MP, who was the single largest recipient of slavery compensation in 1834. He's also the person who is largely credited with negotiating the terms of that deal. Many of you will know that 20 million pounds was given to slave owners at the end of 1833 by way of compensation for the loss of their slaves upon emancipation. It was John Gladstone who was the chair of the West India committee at the time that negotiated that deal on behalf of the planters. He was presented with a silver salver from the West India committee for his services in rendering favourable terms for the abolition of slavery. I'm now becoming increasingly of the opinion that the abolition of slavery did nothing for black people at all, that the abolition of slavery was purely a mechanism for the white slave owners to pay themselves money and black people have continued to suffer ever since. Technically we're still not free. So, links to enslavement, as I say, Gladstone's father had four plantations in Demerara, he had some across the Caribbean as well. Literally thousands of slaves on them. Links to indentureship, because after slavery, everything switched to Calcutta and Shanghai, and the whole process of bringing in Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas, when that had ceased, they were bringing in Chinese and Indians, what they called 'coolie' which is a derogatory term, they called them coolie labourers. They brought them in and indentured them and that shifted the demographic in the Americas to what it is today. You go to a place like Guyana, 50% of the population is South Asian, and that's as a direct consequence of this process of filling up those plantations once the slaves refused to work them, after emancipation, with indentured labourers.
This [indicating the next slide], based on my research now, this is a character called Samuel Sandbach. When I was tracing my slave owner ancestors, back through Guyanese slavery, I came across this guy and he kept popping up. He was Mayor of Liverpool from 1830 to 1831, High Sheriff of Denbighshire, he had a lovely stately home in Denbighshire called Hafodunos Hall which was a huge estate that he built entirely with the proceeds of slavery. He was a magistrate, he had a house in Everton which at the time was a gated community, Everton wasn't what it is now. Literally all the merchants lived in Everton because they had a high vantage point, they could see their slave ships coming in and it was a private and exclusive community, right up to the potato famine and then it became a refugee camp and then they all moved out and decanted to Aigburth. At that point, Everton evolves into more or less a polarised Catholic / Protestant Irish community. But Samuel Sandbach was a magistrate, he also used to have his house up in Everton when they used to have the assize courts, they would send judges to hear cases and he would allow all the judges to stay in his house at Everton. We have a thing in England called the separation of powers where the judiciary doesn't involve themselves with the executive, i.e. the government, and so on and so forth. Here you have on a local government level, he's putting the judges up in his house, when they're hearing the cases, and he's the Lord Mayor so he's running the council as well. So that kind of like, flies in the face of the whole concept of the separation of powers. There was a lot of quid pro quos going on.
He was the namesake of Sandbach Tinne & Co, the mercantile conglomerate. Their origins started in Grenada in 1780, but they became known as Sandbach Tinne in 1813 when they were joined by a guy called Philip Frederick Tinne. He was a Dutchman. They formed the company, they moved the headquarters to Liverpool, they had operations in Glasgow and Demerara and they became collectively the biggest recipient of slavery compensation. And they're actually related to Gladstone, John Gladstone's second wife, Anne McKenzie Robertson, was third cousin to Samuel Sandbach's wife. So as a consequence of that they were family and they did a lot of business together, because he had plantations in Demerara, they had plantations in Demerara, the Gladstones and them both owned shipping lines and they made so much money in slavery they came back to Liverpool and formed a bank. Gladstone had his own bank as well as his own shipping line, and Samuel Sandbach had his own bank as well called the Bank of Liverpool. The first chairman of that was William Brown, namesake of William Brown Street. So, High Sheriff of Denbighshire when he was out at Hafodunos Hall, co-founded the Bank of Liverpool, obviously was trading in what they called rum, molasses and prime Gold Coast Negroes, when they couldn't go to the Gold Coast to trade in that sense, they bred slaves on the plantations. They also were involved in doing some illegal deals as well, because I found evidence of one slave ship arriving full of slaves into Demerara in 1847 and being received by them. I actually have a copy of the original letter of that, when they've received them in. People were smuggling, the Portugese were still smuggling slaves into Brazil because Brazil didn't abolish slavery until I think 1888, so they were still getting past the British blockade and bringing the slaves into Brazil, then probably coming along the coast and depositing them in Demerara. So, officially they weren't bringing slaves from 1807 onwards but unofficially, they were bringing slaves.
He was a sugar baron but then unusually he became a patron of the arts. This is one of the interesting concepts that I start to understand about these guys. Why did they start to become patrons of the arts? Why were they suddenly commissioning all these artworks, why were they suddenly naming streets after themselves? Why were they suddenly erecting statues to themselves? Why were they suddenly building churches and endowing all these institutions and doing all this philanthropic work? I looked into this a little bit and the only thing I could conclude, what was different between the British slave traders and the Americans, was that in America, they were brazen. We're slave traders, slavery is legal, as far as we're concerned we've done nothing wrong, black people deserved it, they're subhuman animals anyway, as far as we're concerned we're unashamedly slave traders. But in Britain, when they asked for the compensation, 20 million pounds was 40% of the GDP of Britain that year. So to extract that amount of money from the exchequer, Peel's government had to make a case to the British people. So he argued, and this you can check it, it's in Hansard. He argued at the time that if you want to take this money out of the exchequer and in-debt the British people for the next 150 or so years to pay back this compensation that we're giving to you, because most of these guys, the parliamentarians sitting there, were slave traders themselves or beneficiaries through third parties as agents, or they had plantations. So these guys were told, you can't have it both ways. You can't get the good publicity and the good press and everyone thinking you're wonderful guys, and get the 20 million as well. If you get the 20 million, we have to convince the British people that it's worth giving up this money, and the only way we can do that is to tell them how odious slavery is. That's going to make you guys look bad. So they responded to that by doing all this philanthropy, opening up schools, opening up hospitals and poor houses, putting up these statues and naming streets after themselves, doing all their philanthropy. They even set up organisations to finance converting the slaves to Christianity. They built all these churches, and the church was very complicit in this right the way along. This was kind of a PR exercise, a rebranding thing. It was nothing to do with these guys having epiphanies and deciding that they just wanted to do good. There's maybe a notion that they built churches because they thought, you know, if we commit all this sin, at the end of the day if we build a church before we die, we can absolve ourselves. So in every branch of his family, there's at least one clergyman, and not low level clergymen, they're all very senior clergy like doctors of divinity and stuff. People who are writing books on ecclesiastical jurisprudence.
So, relationship of this guy, to the corporation. When we talk of Liverpool Corporation today, think of Liverpool City Council, because this is the equivalent of
what that was. In 1835 when the municipal reform bill was passing through the House of Lords, proposing to make municipalities more accountable by stamping out corruption, the bill was opposed by Liverpool Corporation. That actually rings true, sort of now, doesn't it? I wonder if Max Caller [independent inspector sent by the government to review Liverpool City Council’s compliance with its Best Value Duty] is like, an echo from the past. Yeah, so they said no, we're not having that. Their bankers at the time were Leyland and Bullins, so everyone knows Thomas Leyland, big slave trader, Leyland and Bullins was a huge slave-trading bank. They were bankers for the corporation, represented by Alderman Leyland who was Thomas Leyland's son. So they feared that unless the act could be modified locally, as it stood it posed a risk to the corporation, corporation estates, and alarm to the bond holders. So Liverpool City Council, the Liverpool Corporation, had bond holders. People put their money into the local government. The people who were able to do that were the traders and merchants. So they had sway over the local government, anything in terms of the legislation that was passed. If they didn't like something, they would just block it. So in this case, because something has passed and the corporation failed to stop it from passing in the House of Lords, their bankers, who are slave traders and fully engaged in the corruption that's being talked about, decide that they're pulling the plug on the corporation. They technically rendered Liverpool Corporation insolvent. So Samuel Sandbach, who was also an alderman at the time, steps in.
At a meeting of the finance committee on 19th June, Alderman Leyland announced that he would make no further advances to the corporation. The account then standing in their debt at the amount of £12,800 which is huge money in those days. Alderman Sandbach, conservative though he may be, was jealous of the honour for the corporation and immediately signed a cheque on his bankers, Messrs. Heywood & Co, for that amount. So people will know Messrs. Heywood & Co as being Arthur Heywood and sons, massive slave owner enterprise, had a bank in Liverpool, also opened a branch in Manchester as well, one of the brothers went off and sent up Heywood's bank in Manchester and their bank ended up becoming the thing that was a thorn in the side of Barclay's, when Barclay's were getting told that they need to pay slavery reparations because of the fact that they eventually swallowed up Arthur Heywood & Sons. So Samuel Sandbach at this time is banking with Heywood & Sons because one of his nephews, Robert Gladstone, William H Gladstone's brother, was married to one of the partners of Heywood’s bank. So all the Sandbach Tinne accounts were banked with them. But Samuel Sandbach had already, in 1831, initiated his own bank called the Bank of Liverpool which eventually went on to swallow up Heywood's bank and about 30 other banks and became the sixth largest bank in Britain. In 1969, it was subsumed into Barclay's and became 40% of Barclay's entire global portfolio. Anyone who's seen the Martin's Bank building next door to the town hall, the big massive white building with the slave boys carved into the wall, that was their bank because they swallowed up Martin's Bank as well. It became Bank of Liverpool Martin's Bank Ltd, then just Martin's Bank, then Barclay's. So Barclay's were fighting off allegations of their complicity in slavery by arguing about Arthur Heywood & Sons, but they were a tiny bit of the portfolio. They were part of Bank of Liverpool and that was almost half of Barclay's entire portfolio. That was all initiated by Samuel Sandbach and this family that owned my ancestors, and who are also my ancestors, because they all had black kids, and that's how I come into the picture.
Samuel Sandbach's business partner was Philip Frederick Tinne, a Dutchman in the Dutch Diplomatic Corps, who was sent out to Demerara as a young man. When Demerara was attacked by privateers, when it was under Dutch control in 1803, they realised they couldn't defend the colony and they capitulated. It was Philip Frederick Tinne who drafted the capitulation document, and he's one of the signatories. It continued until 1813 as a Dutch - everything continued in Dutch, the courts, the laws, policies, everything carried on in Dutch but it was essentially a British colony but it hadn't been formalised. Ten years later, in 1813, Holland formally ceded the territory of Demerara to Britain, it became a formal British colony. That same year, Philip Frederick Tinne joined with Samuel Sandbach in forming Sandbach, Tinne & Company, which was to go on to become one of the biggest slave trading operations in British history. They continued trading until 1975. So who is John Ernest Tinne? He was the gentleman that the research here at the Bluecoat, the Colonial Legacies project, has unearthed as having been trustee of the Bluecoat, and also treasurer. He's treasurer for like, 40 years, so obviously he's got a massive input into what's going on in the Bluecoat. This is a recent discovery so no one's had the time to go into this and find out, really, what the true nature of that relationship was. I'll be really interested to see what research the Bluecoat do on this now, because it's now crossed over with my research. This guy is also in my family. So, Philip Frederick Tinne, the one who signed the capitulation in Demerara from the Dutch to the British, is his grandfather. John Abram Tinne is his father. If you look on the UCL website, at the legacy of British slave owners where you can see who got what compensation at the end of slavery, this guy is the second biggest recipient of slavery compensation in Britain in 1833. The first being John Gladstone, who as we have already said is related in the family as well. When you take all these family members and you aggregate everything they got collectively, they get a massive chunk of the slavery compensation, more than any other family... and John Abram Tinne was married to Margaret Sandbach, the daughter of Samuel Sandbach. Their relationships were incestuous. There was so much money. These guys were called at the time - and this is a bit of a trope now but don't hold me to it, I'm just quoting what was said at the time - they were described as the Rothschilds of Demerara.
So Margaret Sandbach was the daughter of Samuel Sandbach, and Elizabeth Robertson. Elizabeth Robertson's sister, Christian Robertson, I am a direct descendant of her, through slavery. So I'm descendant of both their slaves and them.
They begat John Ernest Tinne, which links my research now and myself, personally, to this institution. Up until last week I didn't know of that link, so this is revelatory stuff. This is why it's really important to research, not only to research but to engage young people locally in the research. The stuff that these people find out is really, really important. Oftentimes, it is about how we look at it. Academics are out there looking for certain things and they look at things in certain ways, so they see things within a certain paradigm. The reason I've discovered what I've discovered because I've traced my family history, I wasn't looking at slavery as a thing, or indentureship as a thing, or the early modern period, I wasn't looking at any of that. I was just looking at who is my family and these guys were in it. Every time I found someone that was in the family I wanted to know everything about them and what they did and what their relationships were and what they were involved in, and it all came together and told an epic story of empire that wouldn't have otherwise been visible. It was only visible because I was looking at it through a very narrow prism: my family.
They had plantations in Grenada, which is where the operation started. In 1780, George Robertson, who was a kind of Daddy to all of this, if you like. He was a Scotsman from the Highlands who come from a clan who were given their name by Robert the Bruce. So, they turned out for the Bruce of Bannockburn and Bannockburn, Robert Bruce, was so pleased with their performance that the head of the clan, he said to him, I want you to name your son after me. So he named him Robertson, as in, the son of Robert the Bruce. Only he wasn't the son of Robert the Bruce, he was his son, but that's what he named him. And the clan's name then changed to Robertson. They're also involved in Scottish history, the history of King James, because the clan before it became Robertson, King James I was assassinated. Their clan caught the assassins, not only caught them but they dragged them naked on the back of a donkey through the town, torturing them with pincers as they did, and when they got them up to the main square, they beheaded them, so some years later, I think about 200 years later, James II came to the throne. I think we're talking James Stuart now, the whole argy bargy between the Stuarts and the Tudors. He created a Baronet specifically for them, as a consequence, he brought all these lands together, created this Baronet and granted them the land and title because of that. So they were already a powerful clan but they became an even more powerful clan. So by the time we get to the late 18th Century, Liverpool and slavery, Glasgow and slavery, starting to rise, Bristol starting in the early part of the 18th Century and then by the 1840s, Liverpool emerges, Glasgow emerges. So now by 1880, these guys are right in the thick of it. So he's one of the main financiers. To give you an idea, he dies in 1799, and he's got £250,000 on day of death in 1799, which is billions in today's money. So, Samuel Sandbach's wife is directly descended from his brother. As is William Hubert Gladstone, the prime minister's mother. That's the connection of all these guys. So you're not just talking about local government connection you're talking national government connection, royal connections because there were other marriages that linked this family to King Phillip of France and one of the British monarchs as well, through the Bruces’ line. So they all inter-married and maintained this power base for generations. To give you an idea, Antoinette Sandbach only lost the whip in the Tory party under Boris Johnson. So they've had generational wealth which has been passed on and generational power that's been passed on. The Tinnes sat in parliament and there are many others that were inter-related with this family also, sat in local and national government. Andrew Watson, some of you may know about the black footballer, he's the world's first black international footballer, he was the captain of the Scottish national side in 1880. He played for Queen's Park, he came to Liverpool and played for Bootle FC, London Swifts, the Corinthians - he managed the Corinthians - and Andrew Watson was the son of Peter Miller Watson who was the son of Christian Robertson, who was the niece of the guy with the 250 grand who died on day of death with all of that money.
So there's a whole transition of wealth that comes down but when you get to Andrew Watson, you're getting into the black kids. His mother, Anna Rose, was born enslaved and her mother was a slave called Minky. She had a child with a man called Andrew Rose and Andrew Rose was the business partner of his father, Peter Miller Watson, who ran all the Sandbach Tinne operations in Demerara including carrying goods for John Gladstone and others. So when 1833 came along, and these guys were all going to lose their slaves officially, they bought up a load of the plantations, everyone else was abandoning the colonies, running away, thinking oh god - slavery is over, who's going to cut the cane? They just bought up all the best plantations and once they had them all they just moved their ships, turned them to Calcutta and Shanghai, and started bringing in indentured labourers. That was how they were able to continue to profiteer from their plantation, slavery model right the way up until Guyanese Independence in 1966. When Guyana was independent in 1966 and they nationalised the sugar industry, they were accused of being communist, sanctions were put on them and those sanctions still exist. If you go to Guyana today, you change your money into Guyanese dollars. You leave, you try to change your money back into pounds, no one will accept it anywhere in the world. Because they're still being punished for declaring their independence and taking the rights to the sugar industry away. So after all the compensation that these guys got, all these sugar barons, for all the money that they made, all the enslavement they did and the indentureship and free labour and all the power and everything that they had, as they're leaving, going out at the end of the day, they still want to twist the screw on the way out and make sure if we're not running this, you're not getting anywhere. They've been doing that to this very day.
That is a really summarised version of my history, slavery in Liverpool and some of its legacies. Not just of slavery itself but the colonial model which continued afterwards, which was inadvertently slavery in another form. So when you look at indentureship, apprenticeship, these are just other forms of enslavement, to different degrees, slavery being the ultimate. You own the person outright. You can rape them, it's not rape. You can murder them, it's not murder. You can dismember them, it's not dismemberment. You're not going to get charged with assault. You can buy them, you can sell them, you can do what you want with them. They're your property. Indentureship, well you can work them to death, you know, no one's really going to say anything. You can keep them and treat them like a slave for five years or ten years or however long they're indentured for. But sooner or later you're going to have to let them go. You can sell the debt but you can't sell the person. So there was a few different alternatives and then when you get down to penal colonies you get this opportunity to create laws because these slave traders are all parliamentarians, they're all the recipients of the benefits, all of the bells and whistles that go along with sitting on city councils, government legislatures, having the mercantile power over corporations to bail them out when they're bankrupt and so on. They have the power to be able to make the laws be what they want them to be. The mentality of these people is, how do we exploit people? How do we extract labour without paying for it? If we can't do it like this, can we do it like that? They're constantly looking for loopholes. It's like the Tories when they're like - can't we just prorogue parliament so we don't have to do this? Can't we just, you know, they'll find little ways to get around things so they can continue to do the thing that they've been doing all along, which is exploiting people. They're just trying to find more and more creative ways of doing it. When you see the amount of disproportionate numbers of Afro-Caribbean people represented within the prison system, it's because the laws relating to the prisoners deprive people of that freedom. Once they're deprived of that freedom, they no longer have the rights to be able to say I'm not going to work. If they say you're on a chain gang and you're going to go and build a railroad, and you're in prison, you have to build the railroad. Essentially, they've taken you through the mechanism of criminalising you. They've re-enslaved you, and if they give you long sentences, disproportionately long for the thing that you've supposedly done, they can keep you in there and continue to extract free labour from you for a really long period of time. These guys went out to the Empire, they went to Tasmania and New Zealand and they went to Australia, and they were doing the same thing there, by bringing prisoners - in this case, they were indenturing Irish people and taking them out there, or they were sentencing them to indentureship in the colonies. So they were saying to someone, you've committed - I don't know, stolen a loaf of bread or something - five years in Australia! They would send them out to Australia and they'd have to be out there, and work for nothing for five years to work off their sentence. So, this whole thing comes as a consequence of a mentality which is rooted in slavery and colonialism.
So just to round up now, the wealth continues, but slavery gets a bad press. So you know, there's this constant rebranding going on. We see all the philanthropy including in schools like the Bluecoat and so on. That came obviously earlier, before... that was 1717, we don't get the slavery compensation until 1834. We'll see the churches getting funded, we see a lot of opportunities to make themselves look better emerging around this period, in order to really make the proceeds of enslavement slip from memory. People will look at a bank like Barclay's and they won't think slavery, or they'll look at Lloyd's of London and they don't think slavery. Or they look at Axa Insurance and they don't see slavery. A lot of these things emerged from slavery and colonialism, but unless we do the research and we seek to understand these narratives and bring them forward, they will continue to exploit us. Here endeth the talk!
(Audience applauds)
Bryan - Thank you Malik, that was incredibly powerful. Incredibly powerful and lots we could talk about. So many strands of research. I'd like to open it up to the audience so please have your questions ready. We haven't got a huge amount of time but just one question I wanted to ask you, that realisation, that moment that you realised you've got this twin ancestry of the enslaved and enslaver, what impact did that have on you and did that really drive you on to do the research?
Malik - I’ve said this to people before, I always use this example. Someone got onto me on Twitter and was like, oh, look how terrible it is when a black man claims kinship with these white rapist murdering slave traders, and all this kind of stuff. I went back to them and I said look, I don't claim kinship with anyone. I looked at my ancestry and these guys were in it. My ancestors didn't ask to be raped on the plantation, or enslaved and dragged from Africa, treated in the way they were. But it's the reality of what happened. When I was researching my own life for the purposes of suing Liverpool City Council, for the traumatic experiences I had in the care system, I had to act like a researcher so I had to forget it was me I was researching. I had to detach myself emotionally from the subject matter, in order to be objective in the research so it could be presented in a court of law and a barrister, a lawyer, a judge, could look at it objectively and it wasn't just a rant from a victim. It was a considered piece of research that they couldn't deny. And I won my case, after ten years of litigation. I got 120 grand and a public apology from the Lord Mayor on Town Hall letterhead. You know, that came as a direct consequence of being able to do that. I'd already got myself into a situation where I knew as a researcher, I did social sciences for my undergrad and that helped me a lot doing sociology and learning those research methods, social theory. But what it gave me was the ability to take a step back from the subject matter and try to look at it as objectively as possible. There were two reasons for that, one was obviously to produce something that was credible, but the other aspect of it was to try and limit the secondary trauma that you go through of reliving the things you went through, and having to be in a situation where you have to go through it all over again in forensic detail. You wouldn't go into anymore forensic detail than you have to do for a legal case because you get picked apart, everyone goes over your stuff, lawyers, third parties, strangers. All poring over the detail of your life, you know. It's a very intrusive process. You have to develop mechanisms to cope with that or you'd just crumble under it. So when you're looking at a thing like slavery, I'll give you an example. They brought out this thing, I mentioned this with the young people when we did the Sandbach research project. There was a case in the latter part of British slavery where they brought in this thing called the office for the protection of slaves. They were just about to free the slaves so they're trying to do this transitional arrangement for them. It was the first time slaves could bring cases against the masters. One of the cases that was brought in Demerara was a pregnant woman, and her master had commanded her to come to his bed. She was heavily pregnant, so she refused. So he whipped her for insubordination, and at that time, you could whip a slave legally with 39 lashes with a cat o' nine tails, which is a leather whip with nine strands with knots in it. He stripped her naked, tied her to a tree and whipped her, and she was so heavily pregnant that he broke every bone in the baby's body and the baby was still born alive. The case was not being brought on the basis of what he did to the baby. The case was not brought on the basis of what he was trying to do by taking her against her will for his own sexual gratification. The case was brought as to whether or not he gave her more than 39 lashes. Because she passed out during the process, she could not testify to exactly how many lashes she had, and because there was no other witness, he was acquitted. So these are the kind of narratives you come across when you go into this and if you don't detach yourself emotionally from the subject matter you won't get to the end of the research, you'll never publish your work. You'll be too traumatised by what you read. When you see these people all being eulogised in churches like Philip Frederick Tinne and John Abram Tinne, Ernest Tinne's grandfather and his father, they're eulogised in Holland. There is the Church of Saint Philip and Saint John. It is the British, Church of England in the Hague. You can google it. It's called the Church of Saint Philip and Saint John, because Philip Frederick Tinne and John Abram Tinne put the money for that church and they made them saints. So when you consider the narrative that we have in the history that's being presented to us, then you look back at the reality of what these people were doing in those colonies to black people, the dichotomy is beyond human conception. These people were monsters. Yet they were city councillors, prime ministers, MPs, bankers. All these structures of colonial societies which have excluded us for so long, have treated us so bad for so long, have exploited us for so long and continue to treat us this way, do so in the full knowledge of what they've done to us. And we're still their victims, which is why I said at the very outset, I question as to whether or not we were ever emancipated. To me, emancipation was just a mechanism for them to take care of themselves. We were no better off as a consequence of it.
Bryan - OK, right. Any questions? There's a mic coming round...
- Thank you Malik, great to see you again. I think you didn't say that you were a Watson...
Malik - Oh yeah, I was, my father was a Watson, I changed my name. I became a Muslim and I changed my name. But I was Mark Watson, my father was Reginald Wilcox Watson, my grandfather was George Edward Watson, we come from William Robertson Watson, the brother of Peter Miller Watson, who was the son of Christian Robertson who was the third cousin of the mother of Prime Minister William Hubert Gladstone. Just in case you wanted to know!
- ...So my question is, if and when reparations happens, what would that mean for the Bluecoat specifically, in your opinion?
Malik - I was actually at a meeting yesterday at National Museums Liverpool, we were having a forum about the Canning Dock development and there was someone there who was better placed to answer that question than me. If anyone of you care to look her up, her name is Esther Stanford-Xosei, and she is right at the forefront of the reparations movement in this country. I have done some work around the issue of reparations with Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, who is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, and the chair of the CARICOM Commission on Reparations. I presented a paper in Antigua with the Prime Minister of Antigua in 2019 on Western Banking, Colonialism and Reparations. I made a case through Samuel Sandbach and the bank of Liverpool that there was a direct chain of liability with Barclay's Bank. We presented our findings to the Chairman of Barclay's Bank, also the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chair of Lloyd's of London through an article we did in the Wall Street Journal. So they had the Wall Street Journal banging on their door... you know, '...Malik said...', they all had to answer. They were all like, you know, this is our story and we're sticking with it. We're going to do more for diversity, blah blah blah. The idea about reparations, going to these big corporations and talking about reparations is, let's flip it and look at it a different way. Imagine if you're the victim of a crime, so you're the plaintiff in the action. You're the person bringing the action against the perpetrator. The first thing the lawyers look at, do you have a cause of action? Is there a victim? Yes, we're the victims, black people. Is there a cause of action? Yes, slavery happened, we are the product of slavery. Then they would look at, is there a perpetrator, yeah, the British Government, all these guys, individuals, collectives, institutions, so on. Then they would look at, is there causation? Did A cause B? Did the condition I'm in today, was that caused by what was done to me by those people? Is there a direct causal link, what they call causation? If that can be established, that there is a victim, a perpetrator, a cause of action, a direct causal link between A and B, the only thing that's left to determine is liability and quantum. Liability is, who specifically is liable? And quantum - what is the value of the liability in terms of the compensation that should be paid? I did a thing at a Sunday Papers Live at Cecil Sharp House a couple of months ago. We had a question on this reparations thing. The guy was being a little bit belligerent, he was like 'well, you know, I've never enslaved anyone, why should we pay reparations for something our ancestors did?' and I said well, because the taxpayers here have been paying for the reparations for the slave traders since 1834 until 2015 - so there's a model for it!
(Audience laughter)
...do you know what I mean? The last bond, for the slavery compensation scheme, was redeemed against the West India account at the exchequer at the Bank of England in 2015! Meaning that people have been enjoying the benefits of those bonds that have been yielding year on year on year for the last 170 years! The British taxpayers - including ME - have been paying for that! So we're paying reparations and Antoinette Sandbach is still sitting, up until Boris Johnson took the whip off her, was sitting in parliament enjoying the fruits of that as a direct descendant of Samuel Sandbach! Still farming his estate that was built on the blood of my ancestors! This whole thing about reparations, it's a big debate and it's a very nuanced debate and it's a debate that needs to be had. I don't think there's a magic bullet or a simple equation that can really say, reparations is this. If you are the indigenous Arawak people or Carib people or what they call the Buck people, which is another derogatory term actually, because they said that the Buck was a red man. They used to have - in Guyana my mix is what they would call Black and Buck in Guyana. You're black mixed with indigenous Amerindian, because my mother was Amerindian. So the Buck came from when they went out, the pilgrims and whatever, they went out to America and they saw the Indian people and they said their skin was red like a roebuck, like a deer. They called them buckskins or redskins, so the currency they used to trade with them, the beads and all that kind of thing, became known as bucks. That's why in America, the dollar, they still call it bucks, 50 bucks or whatever. That's where all that comes from. It's actually a derogatory term in a sense but it's another thing we use and don't really think about where it came from or what the origins of it were or the significance. What was done to them requires reparations. There has been some with the indigenous people in certain places, there's been land rights issues and so on where they've had some form of reparations. The Jews got reparations after World War II, you know. Truth and reconciliation is another part, a big part, can we have an open debate about what happened? Who got what, who suffered what? Even to have that, De Chastelain did that with Bishop Tutu, they managed to pull that together for the Irish in a contemporary thing. The Irish conflict, OK, that's a hundred years old or whatever. Our conflict is four times that and we still haven't had even a debate about it. We are still voiceless in that whole thing. The people who perpetuated slavery and colonialism did it from start to finish, they enacted the legislation that permitted it with the royal charters and so on. They enacted the legislation that so-called brought it to an end. They did the colonial international laws that allowed them to continue to exploit black people, and they enacted all of the trade agreements, like the Uruguay Round and the Gatt Agreement, the Lomé Convention and all these other things that continued to be able to operate in an extractive manner, taking stuff out of the Caribbean, out of Africa, rare Earth minerals, all this kind of stuff. And not paying them their due for it, dumping their waste and polluting their environment in the process. They enacted all of that. We're absent in that conversation from 1492 until now.
Q - Hi, thank you. I've found everything you've said really interesting. My name's Esther, I'm from The World Reimagined. I think you might know about the work we're doing...
Malik - They were supposed to be asking me to write a poem to go on one of your globes! I don't know what happened about that, they never got back to me... but I'd be happy to do that if you want me to, still.
Q - ...my question, because you've talked about these complex legacies and connections, particularly the church and those institutions that were supported by slavery. I notice that you are a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, which itself has its own complicated history with prime ministers and leaders. How did you come to approach the University of Cambridge about it, how was their reaction to this, in terms of the work that you're doing, and also what role or responsibility do you think that our educational institutions have around teaching this and ensuring it is part of university education as well as education at other areas?
Malik - It's a really good question, actually I never approached them, they approached me. In 2011, Gil Scott Heron passed away and I wrote a story, I was asked by Simon Hattenstone at the Guardian, could you give me 400 words and I started spilling my guts about my whole life and Gil Scott Heron and blah blah blah. Then after about an hour he said, my hand hurts, can I phone you back? I can't write anymore. Which he then took about an hour, he phoned me back, I give him the rest of the story and they published it over four pages in the Guardian, it was like a big article. It was called Gil Scott Heron Saved My Life. You can read it, it kind of went viral and there was a few groups within Cambridge University, the Muslim Students Association, the Black Students Association and a group of learners at the faculty of English. They all came together through their student groups, clubbed the money together and said, let's get him here as a speaker. They also asked me to perform, so I got Gil Scott Heron's drummer, a couple of local musicians as well, and we came together at the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio and Faculty of English, and did a live performance of poetry with a band. Then I did a Q and A like this but everyone in the room was like, professors of English. I'm sitting here thinking, they're asking me about poetry and I'm like, I don't even have a GCSE in English. I don't have any low-level qualifications. I've got no GCSEs, no A levels, I missed all of that. I was completely out of school during my nine years in care. I missed 18 months of primary education and I only had 18 months of actual secondary education, the rest of it I was completely out of it. Literally I left care and I was barely able to read and write. I was semi-literate. Through poetry I learnt how to read and white. Under Gil's mentorship I was able to do that over a period of time. He saw my potential and he gave me the opportunity to really grow, paid my fares to travel round the world with him, I helped out on the road with him and he taught me the industry and so on. I became literate through that process and then I went on to college and university. When you ask about Cambridge University itself, and the institution goes back to the 11th Century or 12th or whatever. Along with Liverpool University. I've graduated from every University in Liverpool - Hope, Liverpool University, I did my undergraduate at Hope, I did a post-graduate diploma at Liverpool University and I did a Master's Degree at John Moores. So I've graduated from all three of them now, but they're all bad actors. Liverpool City Council is a bad actor. The Bluecoat is a bad actor. You know, when you look at the history of any of these places, Britain itself is a bad actor and we're sitting here in Britain. We interact with the tax credits, we interact with the government, local government, we go to the institutions, we put our kids in the schools. They're all bad actors, every single one of them is a bad actor and you have to find a way to navigate that terrain in order to achieve something to change it. If you just adopt the position, oh, they did this then, so therefore I'm not going to do nothing with them and you just boycott... You have to boycott basically the whole western hemisphere. And I tried to do that, I went to Africa, I spent a month in Kanu and I ended up with dysentery and had to come back. In Northern Nigeria, it was great, it was out of it, the British were only in there from 1920 and they left in 1960. It was unadulterated. They couldn't get down from the Sahara, they couldn't get up across the Malaria belt. Then suddenly they discovered quinine and they were like, OK now we'll conquer them! But their influence there was only like, 40 years. I wanted to go there. I went down almost to the South Pole, I was in the Falkland Islands, twice! I went everywhere to try and get away from this place and these people, and everything that was done to me. Everywhere I went, they'd been there before me and messed it up. I lived for three years in Dubai, I lived for a year in Saudi Arabia, I spent ages in America, I even went to the Isle of Man, for my sins. I was working on the Isle of Man boats to be fair, Manx tax was just 10% less than the tax over here, because they've got more millionaires per square mile than anywhere in Europe outside Zurich. But I've been all round the world, trying to find a place to be where I'm not part of this, and there is nowhere. Everywhere you could go and see the nature, the beauty and all of it, the system is so mashed up by the legacy of colonialism that you just can't function there so I ended up coming back and saying, I need to take another look at this, I need to think about it a different way. I can't escape the history. What I need to do is allow it to emerge and show what I see, and don't try to manicure it to something that's going to fit my sensibilities about whether I'm a slave trader's descendant or a slave's descendant. Whether I'm a part of this because I'm half-white, half-black, whatever. All of those dilemmas and dichotomies that I face, whether the institution that I'm in has been involved in whatever in some nefarious way. I just have to navigate that terrain, do the research, find the stories, bring them out, put it in the public domain and just let people know. So that will be my legacy, that I'll leave something behind that people didn't know before I was here and they might not have known had I not done the work and left it. That to me is like a fiduciary responsibility, because we're not owners of knowledge, we're custodians of knowledge. We are the trustees of it. We assume it, we assimilate it, we understand it and then we pass it on. That's why it's important to work with the young people, like we did the Sandbach learning group and the stuff that Tavia's doing and others. It's really important to get into this kind of work and to do it because we'll die, you know? We'll pass on, and it's up to those young people to pick up that mantle and take it to another level but we've got to give them a solid foundation to work from. As far as institutions are concerned, people recognise Cambridge University as the top one or two universities on planet earth. So a myriad of doors open to me because I'm at Cambridge, you know what I mean? I understand that, which is why I'm at Cambridge. I need them doors to open because I need a seat at those tables. They would not give me a seat at those tables otherwise. It's a matter of knowing their game and playing their game and trying to be better at it than they are. But whilst you're there, to the second part of your point, you can make changes. So I'm working with a group of institutions at the moment, to try and decolonise the archives. There's a lot of stuff, at first Cambridge opened their books, some of them. Some of the colleges, not all, to look at slavery and they found stuff with the Rustat thing at Jesus College and the slavery enquiry has been going across several colleges but it hasn't gone across all of the colleges, and they found Sandbach Tinne. Sandbach Tinne were in Cambridge, was it Homerton College?
Bryan - That’s a woman's college.
Malik - Yeah, it was established by Clough, the woman Clough, her name's Clough. There's a plaque to her brother on 9 Rodney Street, because he was born there and his father owned plantations in Virginia. Is it Jemima Clough? I can't remember her first name, I think it's Jemima, I might be wrong. She founded Homerton College as the first college for women at Cambridge. She used her father's money and her father, as a plantation owner in Virginia, brought in his mates, one of whom was Samuel Sandbach. There were a group of students that did research there and when they found the Sandbach name kept popping up on the receipts for the money, they came to me and said look, we know you're doing Sandbach Tinne research, this is what we've found. There's a connection there as well, because they sent all their kids to these colleges and universities and they endowed them. It wasn't just the money they were given, they were given botanical samples. If you were a botanist in those days, how would you get into the interior of Africa to get your samples? Or the rainforests of South America or the Mangroves in the Southern States? You were going to the slave traders on the slave ships, there was no commercial traffic to Africa or the Americas at that point, you would have to go on the slave ships and they would take you, because they had deals with the tribes, into the interior to get these botanical samples and animal samples. Then they would ship them back. One of them, I've got some letters for a guy called Thomas Stuart Trail, he's another one who married into this family and he's one of the founders of the Athenaeum across the street. On the letters he's talking about one of the Robertson family here, writing to him because it's his step-father, and telling him I've sent you a toucan. I've found a blue spider, a blue tarantula. I've found you this, that, he's sending all these things back - all these inverterbrates and all these samples and seeds. Thomas Stuart Trail founded the Royal Institute on Colquitt Street as well as the Athenaeum! These guys were sending samples to the gardens at Kew, the Botanical Gardens at Kew! A lot of the natural sciences that we have today, at their inception, the evolution of them through these institutions was being financed or facilitated by these guys. Lord Kelvin was testing his gyro-compass on Sandbach Tinne ships, captained by a guy called Captain Angel who wrote a book about the ships and left an account of his personal experience of having Lord Kelvin ride with him for two weeks testing his gyro-compass. A gyro-compass is like, when they had the magnetic compasses, once they had metal hulls on the ships it affected the magnetism. So they had to come up with a different way, so Lord Kelvin came up with the gyro-compass which wasn't adversely affected by the metal hulls of the ships. So when they built steam ships and they were building metal hulls instead of wooden hulls, he tested the gyro-compass on those ships and I know, as a former merchant seaman, we still use the gyro-compass to this day. That was tested and developed on a Sandbach Tinne coolie ship. This relationship between these people, not just the laws and the legislation and the banking and the finance, but also the academic institutions and the scientific bodies of work. So if they wanted to come up with some eugenicist narrative that black people were somehow inferior to white people, or that black people were infantile or incapable of learning or closer in the evolutionary chain to monkeys than Europeans, or they had smaller brains, all these tropes and stupid narratives were all coming out of those institutions because they were being financed by the people who needed to perpetuate those narratives. We live with those narratives to this day.
(Audience applauds)
Bryan - We're going to have to finish in a minute but there was two people at the back, the gentleman at the back had his hand up, is that OK? And we'll come to you if we have time, but we're running out of time.
Q - Thank you, thanks for that Malik, really fascinating and inspirational as well. Probably the most account I've seen of a personal connection to slavery so that was really useful, thank you. We've such a similar journey in as much as I spent most of my childhood in care, when you said white mother, four black kids, I was like, woah. And then, two went into care and two didn't, that was us as well. One of the things I've done, I expect you've done it but tell me if you haven't, is I secured my records. So at the time we were living in Kirkby, so I went to Knowsley Council, and went to the National Children's Home because that was the home that we were in, and got two sets of records. There's a lot of stuff in there, it's an emotional rollercoaster when you read them. The question I wanted to ask you, was there anything really salient or revelatory that stood out when you read those records?
Malik - I've gotta be honest, I've got them, I haven't read them all. What I did was pass them over to the lawyers and let the lawyers read them. So that they could extrapolate as much as they needed to validate my story, because I didn't want to know everything. I've got to be honest. This is a conversation I've had with other people who've been in care. I talk regularly with Lemn Sissay for instance, and one of the things that Lemn said to me was that when he got his file, he was so apprehensive about what he was going to find that he couldn't read it on his own. He booked a venue, brought an audience and actually read the file with the audience so that he could have people with him and he wouldn't be on his own when he went through that and the discoveries that he made. And of course his book, My Name Is Why, is great, if anyone hasn't heard of Lemn or hasn't got that book, it's a great book to get. He put excerpts from his file in it. The bits I know about what's in my file are the bits the lawyers felt were important to extrapolate or the barrister or the QC to validate the point. Because I know what happened to me, I know where I was and what my understanding was. As far as the background information behind it, I know the things that validated the things that I needed to know. At some point I will sit down and read the whole damn thing, but I didn't feel the need to do that at that time because I was so deep in the legal case, much of the time was spent fighting my own lawyers and fighting the legal system itself. When we first brought cases we were told we wouldn't get legal aid because these were historic cases, we had to fight that to get the legal aid. We were time-barred by the limitation. There was a whole range of different legal things. The City Council put up multiple obstacles to us getting anywhere, ground us down, a couple of people committed suicide. People got - oh just give us a grand and I'll see you later, they just couldn't deal with it. It was a lot to deal with. So while I was trying to deal with that, there was no way that I was going to sit down and immerse myself in my file at the same time, dealing with all that external stuff. I was trying to keep my eye on the prize and force everything through to a conclusion, which is, I'll win the case and they'll have to compensate me. They'll be held to account. That's where I came from, so if I'm 100% honest I'd say I've maybe read 10% of the file. At some point, maybe when I retire or I've got nothing better to do, I'll sit down and read the rest of it and be totally traumatised in my old age.
Bryan - One final question and keep your answer short!
Q - When I was watching all that, first of all it was like I was watching the Sopranos, do you know what I mean? These people are just like, some mafia hoods, and they gone off and done all this stuff... you hear all this stuff you know like, University of Cambridge, we did make our mistakes, we're doing what we can to address... but when you break down the facts like that, oh yeah, homeboy was down there, Dad I want to go to Cambridge will you pay for me? When you play it like that you're like oh, it's not so complicated, it's pretty simple, so that's a really good thing. And it's like you're the conduit for all of this stuff that is hidden away in all of these boffins' archives. You're bringing it to the hood so your ancestors, my ancestors, we are grateful to you. I just have to say that comment, thank you.
Malik - You're welcome! Thank you. The important thing to note is this - every single one of us is a conduit. The question is whether or not you choose to apply the time necessary to go into yours. There's a massive story behind every one of us who is a descendant of a slave and it's just a question of going in. That's why I'm really pleased with the Bluecoat, what they've done here, they could have hid behind, we're an institution, a brand, and so on. And they haven't, they've brought the kids in and gone, look, lay it out on the table what we find. We've just found a massive connection to slavery that they didn't know about. Now that's come out and I'm going to research that, others here will research that. It's about having these open discussions, honest debates. Liverpool University have still not launched a slavery enquiry. I mean, it's getting to the point where when they do, people are going to be like... really?
Q - Outing themselves as a you-know-what! Hilarious...
Malik - Bristol have got theirs, Cambridge have got theirs, Glasgow have got theirs, and paid reparations, they're in the process of doing it in their own little special £20million way. That's all the question about how that went about. It's further down the line than anyone else. Some others are doing it in America, Georgetown University were going to be bankrupt so they sold I think 150 slaves or something so that they wouldn't be bankrupt. So now, the reparations they are offering, legacy status to anyone who can demonstrate that they were a descendant of one of those slaves. It's all about these people arbitrarily deciding what they want to do. If they are judge, jury and executioner for themselves, do you know what I mean? Like, imagine if you've committed a crime, sorry you're the victim of a crime, and it was up the person who committed the crime against you to say whether or not a crime had been committed. It was up to the person who committed the crime against you to decide whether or not you had a cause of action, whether you were a valid plaintiff for compensation. If it was agreed that you were a true victim and you did deserve compensation, it was up to the perpetrator of the crime against you to decide what compensation you should get, if you should get any compensation at all. And it would be at the absolute discretion of the perpetrator of the crime, as to whether or not they felt like they wanted to do it. That's what slavery reparations is looking like at this moment in time. So the more people and the more institutions that go back and trace these narratives, the more pressure comes on these institutions to actually 'fess up and say, OK, we did this, what can we do to put this right? I think that's a good starting point, so look into your own.
Q - Just to say, before moving on I just wanted to say this, so I was sat here, and I was like, Denbighshire? So, my grandad comes from Sir Ddinbych, that's how we'd say it in Cymraeg, like, OK, noted. And then I looked on Google, our Annie, Antoinette. So she was part of the Welsh Assembly, it said on Wikipedia. And then she was based near Llanfyllin, I actually spend all of my summer months in Llanfyllin so I feel like this is some kind of cosmic joke. I'm an Okelo, which is Kenya, Western Kenya. I'm also a Davis and I know they was grafting on them boats too. It's a funny situation because my white family are very king and country, queen and country, we're going to have a king again, blah blah, conservative, I love our Jacob Rees Mogg... you know what I mean, all that kind of stuff. They are Jacob Rees Mogg fans, even on Facebook, out and proud! I come from a very interesting family too.
Audience member - Jacob Rees Mogg needs fans... he needs a hug or something!
Bryan - I think we have to leave it there otherwise we'll be here all night.
Audience member - I think there's better places to leave it than Jacob Rees Mogg!
Bryan - I want to thank Malik enormously, it's been a fantastic evening, I think you'll all agree. Before I hand over to Maura to say a last few words from Writing on the Wall, can we give a big round of applause for Malik.
Maura Kennedy, Writing on the Wall - Thanks Malik, on behalf of Writing on the Wall. I think if I may, on behalf of the audience, it was a privilege to be here present, hearing such a searing, forensic narrative, with poetry, trance, academic trance throughout that everyone knows they've been spoken to - and you've provided a corrective that blows the poisonous nostalgia of the past, history, out of the water. I want to thank Tavia and Oleta as well for bringing your work, the work of Bryan, everybody else who is involved in providing actual history to the present day, and all the young people who are taking part in this project. To keep on a roll with Writing on the Wall, we've got three more action-packed days of good stuff. Tomorrow we have the Pulp Idol final with previous winner Philippa Holloway. This is young voices, different fiction breaking through. Joelle Taylor, a poet, and wonderful speaker, Friday in District, which will roll into a drag night and a club night. To culminate when something else is happening I think Saturday night [she is referring to the European Championship football final] with our chair, Stuart Borthwick, whose wonderful encyclopaedic book about the history of reggae, there'll be more craic after that. Thanks again to Malik, thanks to Bryan and thanks to everybody, and most of all to you for coming.
(Audience applause)
Malik - If anyone's interested in going a bit more in depth about my life and my history with Gil Scott Heron and my time in the care system, my book, Letters To Gil is published by Harper Collins, it came out in September and there's some hard copies there by this wonderful News From Nowhere, who are a women's co-operative, not for profit. Buying the book you don't only support me you support them as well. And I'm happy to sign it if anyone wants me to. Thank you.
Malik Al Nasir