In 2018, Abdul Mohamud and Robin Whitburn (Justice2History) wrote a blogpost for OBHD entitled ‘Rethinking how we teach about transatlantic slavery’ as they were preparing for the HA Teacher Fellowship ‘Britain and Transatlantic Slavery’. In this blogpost Abdul, history teacher and now working on his PHd as part of the Empire, Migration and Belonging project, returns to the topic to reflect on what we have learned and what still needs to be done, and to share curricular and pedagogical principles from a forthcoming book for teachers.
The teaching of transatlantic slavery has improved in UK schools over the last decade. This owes much to the efforts of teachers themselves, recognising the ‘sacred duty’ they have in doing justice to these painful stories (Devine, T., 2018). In 2019, the Historical Association, in cooperation with the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project at UCL and Justice to History, facilitated a Teacher Fellowship programme, in which fifteen teachers from across Britain engaged in deep and challenging thinking on the history of transatlantic slavery and how they could translate that work into transformational classroom materials.
Five years later, what have we learned and what do we still need to do?
Along with Katie Donington and Nick Draper, the fellowship academics, Robin Whitburn and I realised that the programme’s ideas would be valuable to all teachers. The fellows produced outstanding enquiries, which still influence and inform good practice in this field (HA fellowship resources). Furthermore, we decided we needed to write a book that could develop teachers’ understanding of the course’s pillars: the 14, later 13, curricular and pedagogical principles. Here are some insights into what you can look forward to reading:
- Donington and Draper have distilled their considerable knowledge and insights of the key historiographical developments within this field of British colonial slavery into eight chapters covering race, mass commercialisation, violence, resistance, gender, abolition, legacies, and remembrance. They bridge the gap between high level scholarship and the demands of lesson-planning for the secondary classroom.
This story in the Gender chapter, which has sections on both Black and White women, describes the involvement of a Jamaican clergyman’s widow, Dorothy Little, in claiming from the Slavery Compensation Commissioners; Little wrote:
I am anxious to ascertain if there is a prospect of my getting full and fair compensation for my unattached field labourers, they will I fear be put down as inferior labourers, for out of the whole number (14) 10 of them are females, but from that very circumstance they have been more valuable to me than if they had been very strong men, for they have more than doubled their original number, and of course doubled my income… (T71/1608: letter, dated 27/09/1833, from Dorothy Little, with a petition to Lord Stanley).
Donington continues:
Essentially Dorothy Little’s position as an independent woman of means rested on her ability to control the freedom of enslaved women and men in the Caribbean. Her claims to feminine respectability as the widow of a clergyman rested on the sexual exploitation and gendered labour of enslaved women at a distance.
Another value of the work of Donington and Draper is that in writing as historians for teachers, they make explicit the processes of the historian, which in turn gives teachers insights that they can then translate into evidence-based activities for their students[i]. In his chapter on violence and slavery, Draper highlights the archival silences in relation to the terror inflicted on enslaved Africans prior to the Abolition Movement:
The realities of that trade tended to ensure that no-one with a financial or commercial interest in it was likely to report on it; there was no regulatory or government oversight; and the captive Africans themselves had no access to means of recording their experience beyond oral tradition which remained within the communities of the enslaved people. We depend largely therefore on participants in the slave-trade who turned against it in the second half of the 18th century. John Newton, who wrote Amazing Grace, was a former slave-ship sailor, who recorded that:
‘A Mate of a ship, in a long-boat, purchased a young woman, with a fine child, of about a year old, in her arms. In the night, the child cried much, and disturbed his sleep. He rose up in great anger, and swore, that if the child did not cease making such a noise, he would presently silence it. The child continued to cry. At length he rose up a second time, tore the child from the mother, and threw it into the sea. The child was soon silenced indeed, but it was not so easy to pacify the woman: she was too valuable to be thrown overboard, and he was obliged to bear the sound of her lamentations, till he could put her on board his ship.’ (Newton 1788, 18).
- Finding sources from people of African descent is the subject of one of our pedagogical chapters. Since 2019, we have researched the work of Saidiya Hartman (2008) who coined the phrase ‘critical fabulation’ for the use of storytelling and speculative narration in the reconstruction of voices that are missing from the archives. We discuss her use of this process in the case of Captain Kimber’s killing[ii] by flogging of an enslaved African girl on his Bristol ship ‘Recovery’ in 1792:
Hartman told the basic story of the girl’s transgression, violent treatment and subsequent death through four white men’s accounts (including William Wilberforce in a Parliamentary speech) and then presented a version of events from the girl’s perspective… Captain Kimber had her hung up by each limb in turn on the deck, and then he whipped her severely. After the ordeal, the girl lay wounded for three days, refusing any food or drink, and then died. She was immediately thrown overboard on the captain’s orders… Sources have conveyed the thinking of some Africans who committed suicide during the transatlantic slave voyages so that they could return to their ancestors; Hartman apportions that knowledge to this one particular African girl:
She curled into a ball in the corner of the deck. Her body hurt and she trembled… Had her tongue not made speech impracticable, had it been possible for a corpse to speak, she would have said, “You are wrong. I am going to meet my friends.” All they could see was a girl slumped in a dirty puddle and not the one soaring and on her way home. [Hartman, 2021, 152]
Students should understand the limitations of Hartman’s reconstruction, but also appreciate the importance of thinking about one African life caught up in the enormity of the ‘Maafa’[iii].
The pedagogical principles cover the planning and pedagogy of historical enquiries, and we discuss the opportunities for teachers to tackle the sensitivities of these histories in relation to contemporary issues of racial justice and global inequalities. As with any set of guidelines or recommendations the principles will, to some extent, remain open to revision but they are a valuable reference point for any teacher setting out to plan a new enquiry on slavery, abolition and its legacies or to revamp existing enquiries.
Principles for the teaching of Britain and transatlantic slavery
Curricular principles
1. Race
The emergence of racial language and thought, in terms of the construction of both whiteness and blackness, should be considered in relation to both transatlantic slavery and more broadly the development of empire and colonialism. You should consider the place of race in the functional operations of transatlantic slavery, as well as its role in debates over its dismantling.
2. Africa and Africans
African culture and civilization existed before and after transatlantic slavery and colonialism. You should consider the existence of complex cultural, social and economic systems within the continent prior to European contact.
3. Mass commercialisation
Forms of enslavement existed in Africa prior to European contact; transatlantic slavery industrialised the trade, transforming it into a trans-continental system. You should consider the wider slave economy including the slave trade, plantation ownership, finance, insurance, and the trade in slave-produced commodities in order to understand the centrality of slave-based wealth to the prosperity of Britain.
4. Gender
Schemes of learning and sources should reflect the gendered experience of enslavement, resistance and emancipation.
5. Terror and violence
Violence was central to the system of transatlantic slavery. It was a fundamental form of control and punishment that was built on existing notions of frightfulness, such as torture and capital punishments. You should consider the ways in which violence and terror was a gendered experience, paying careful attention to the double oppression experienced by women.
6. Resistance
Enslaved people resisted their enslavement in both revolutionary and everyday ways. Resistance began from the moment of capture and continued on the slave ships, as well as within the Caribbean. You should consider different forms of resistance from individual to collective action.
7. Abolition
The abolition of transatlantic slavery must be placed in the context of economic and social change in Britain. You should consider the role of mass mobilization of the public, women, and African abolitionists in Britain, as well as the parliamentary campaign. The impact of resistance of the enslaved in the Caribbean should form an equal part of the discussion of antislavery.
8. Legacies
The history of transatlantic slavery links Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Britain. Its impacts were felt at a local, national, and global level and they continue to shape the world today. You should consider the legacies of transatlantic slavery in terms of culture, society, politics and the economy in order to understand their role in the development of modern Britain.
9. Representation and memory
The commemoration and representation of transatlantic slavery should be examined and debated in relation to the ways in which it has shaped ideas about race both at the time and in the present.
Pedagogical principles
10. ‘Activist’ pedagogy
This topic connects the past directly with issues of justice and equity in the present, through consideration of legacies of racism, exploitation and underdevelopment. Teachers should neither avoid these connections nor pursue them with a contemporary stance that distorts historical perspectives. Classroom work must recognise the sensitivities of teaching traumatic histories and avoid activities and approaches that risk trivialising or demeaning the experiences of enslaved people and their descendants.
11. Black voices
The sources and interpretations selected for schemes of learning must include the voices of people of African descent, from the continent and the diaspora, including those directly impacted by the oppression of transatlantic slavery. This will involve confronting the challenges of filling the gaps left by silences in archives.
12. Specificity
The experience of slavery in the Americas was not uniform and when developing schemes of work it is critical that teachers are steadfast in their attention to the features of the British experience. Transatlantic slavery was a major part of Britain’s national story and so exploring British sites and stories are key to reinforcing this idea.
13. Enquiries
This topic should be framed and taught in sequences of lessons that seek to answer an overarching enquiry question, an approach termed ‘teaching through historical enquiries’. The core knowledge and the enquiry question should connect with these principles for teaching the topic. The students should be given co-agency in the enquiries to ask questions and to discuss the sensitive and challenging aspects of the topic, including contemporary race relations and the use of racial language.
References:
Donington, K., Draper, N., Mohamud, A., and Whitburn, R. (forthcoming, 2024) Teaching Slavery: Critical Approaches to Britain’s Colonial Past, UCL Press.
Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe, 12(2), 1–14. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115/summary
Fuentes, M. (2016) Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Philadelphia, PA: U. of Pennsylvania
[i] See ‘What’s the Wisdom on Evidence and sources’, in Teaching History 176, 2019.
[ii] Kimber was found ‘not guilty’ of the girl’s murder, hence the term ‘killling’.
[iii] ‘Maafa’ is a Swahili term, which means ‘great disaster’ or ‘unspeakable horror’, and has been used to refer to the period of transatlantic enslavement; credited to the anthropologist Marimba Ali in an article of 1989.
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