Where is Wilberforce in all this?

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5 April 2012

By the end of this year, we shall perhaps be weary of William Wilberforce, the Yorkshireman to whom the end of the slave trade is generally attributed, this year being the bicentenary of the Act of Parliament that outlawed the deplorable business. He had adopted the cause two decades earlier when, a son of privilege and wealth, he was 28 or so and already for seven years the MP for Hull. Year after year he fought for abolition, supported by the younger Pitt, Fox and other men of generous spirit, until at last the House of Commons agreed that the trade should end, and so it did, prohibited in Britain from 1 January 1808. It is remarkable, not that it took so many years, but that it took so few to achieve so momentous a reversal.

It did not mean the end of slavery - that was abolished by an unsatisfactory Act in 1833, and not finally so until 1838 with an "Act to Amend the Abolition of Slavery Act", but Wilberforce, always of frail health, did not live to see it. Holland abolished the slave trade in 1814, France the following year and Portugal, grudgingly and in stages, for so important was it to the economy, by 1830. And yet, though the British Navy was patrolling the coasts of West Africa with limited rights to search the ships of these nations, but not those of America, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Germany or any other nation that had not agreed to abolition, it was reported to the Foreign Secretary in December 1844 that the Slave Trade was "increasing ... more systematically than ever hitherto ... a very large number of slaves transported both to Cuba and Brazil". And to America too, no doubt, where the southern states of the Union were dependent on slave labour for their tobacco, cotton and sugar plantations, and the new prairie states might follow suit.

Figures are unreliable. One authority has it that the number of slaves carried across the Atlantic by all nations was of the order of 12 million, another puts it at 95 million, but this conflicts with the belief that a quarter of all slaves transported to the Americas crossed the Atlantic after 1807, equalling the number carried by the British before that year. The usual give-or-take British number is 3,250,000.

It is convenient to celebrate 1807 as the year that marks the beginning of the end of the slave trade as an economic, social and moral phenomenon, and Wilberforce as the principal agent of a significant change of heart about the business. He was not alone, even among the politicians of his day, for more oratory than his was required to move the whole House of Commons into a mood of reforming zeal; he had, too, the support of the Quakers, other non-conformist Protestant sects and the evangelical wing of the Church of England. But Wilberforce will do as the greatest of many and it is he whom generations have venerated as the man who brought about the end of a trade that was as old as society - the prop on which Sparta and the democracy of Athens had depended, the foundation of the ancient empires of Babylon and Persia, the engine of the economic and military might of Ancient Rome, the sine qua non of all Islam.

It was thus with surprise and disappointment that I reacted to the first of no doubt many exhibitions marking the bicentenary of abolition. In the Victoria and Albert Museum there is no mention of Wilberforce in theirs, a drifting and incoherent aberration that is, in no sense that I understand the word, an exhibition. It is, in the words of the museum's directory, "intended to get people to think about ... objects in the V&A and their links to the slave trade, and to show how contemporary artists are responding to the horrors of slavery in the past and in today's world". It is difficult to believe that it is the business of a museum devoted, not to art and artists but to the manufactured object and the work of craftsmen, to ask anything of contemporary artists. I see no more point in asking them, because they are black or partly so, to demonstrate their retrospective responses to an ancient aspect of society brought to an end by that society itself two centuries ago, than in asking a contemporary Irish artist for his views on the potato famine. That they have responded with ideas of scant intellectual weight and objects of no aesthetic merit, the whole nonsense virtually invisible, renders the foolish project utterly without point.

The curator calls her exhibition Uncomfortable Truths. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that it is nothing but a traipse through the glooms, principally, of the British Galleries, in which the most evident contemporary interventions are lifesize silhouettes of black figures reminiscent of the cut-out "companions" that in the 18th century stood beside the fine fireplaces of so many English homes. We must contemplate brown paper, crumpled or greasy, as a metaphor for skin or as upholstery material for chairs stuffed with coffee beans. We must stand in awe of a headless figure by Yinka Shonibare and wonder at his wit and irony. And there is, inevitably, a tedious video, its raucous sound bleeding into neighbouring galleries - "thought-provoking", according to the curator. Yes, indeed. Nothing in this meagre treasure hunt is worth even a first glance; do not trouble to give anything a second.

The historical slave trade was a business at least as appalling as the Holocaust, with many, many, more victims, and like the Holocaust its memory has been hijacked by the descendants of those victims and turned into a scourge with which to whip guilt into society. The twaddle, jargon and political correctitude of what must be the feeblest exhibition I have ever seen must make the sane man rage. The V&A has poured £39,000 into the pockets of Yinka Shonibare and three other artists for their exhibits (of which they retain possession); I have been given no figures for the other seven artists, but for their contributions and the associated costs of the exhibition - they come from Zimbabwe, Zanzibar, Ghana, Benin, America and Germany, and one has travelled to Nigeria and Brazil for inspiration - the total cost must be in excess of £100,000. It is not worth one penny. And not one of the self-centred scribblers in what passes for a catalogue has the courtesy to mention Wilberforce or abolition, only "the cultural hypocrisies" of our ( presumably white) collective memories.

AT THE National Portrait Gallery, where one might reasonably have expected a proper exhibition devoted to Wilberforce, there is to be another trail, "a journey through the collections ... highlighting portraits of key individuals connected with the slave trade or its abolition", among them Wesley, Sterne, Johnson, Blake, and - I am assured, though he is omitted from the preliminary lists - Wilberforce, in the unfinished portrait-by Lawrence, painted in 1828, five years before our hero's death. The trail is a lazy substitute for an exhibition. The gallery need do nothing more than tell its visitors to report to the information desk and collect a map - no rooms need be set aside, no pictures moved, no pictures borrowed, no supplementary material brought in, no catalogue to write and print, no significant costs in advertising and promotion. This is not good enough.

I am, as it were, a Wilberforce man in the sense that I believe that great men influence and embody history and deserve their recognition. In focusing on Wilberforce an exhibition could have looked back through the Enlightenment at men who sowed the first seeds of, if not reform, its promise - as the NPG just manages with the forgotten Granville Sharp, half a generation before Wilberforce; and a proper exhibition there could so easily have been of contemporary artists in the sense that they were contemporary with the events of the slow reform, demonstrating that not all Englishmen of the 18th century were heartless. A proper exhibition would and should have demonstrated the extent to which the slave trade was so long the preserve of Arab dealers in this human commodity, that it was rooted in Islamic contempt for the black African. It could and should have made it clear that Africans were complicit in the trade, that Africans sold Africans, and that the trade grew to its enormous volume only because the African was willing to supply demand. It is always argued that we must shoulder the guilt because, had there been no buyers, there would have been no sellers - but, six of one and half a dozen of the other, we must turn that on its head with the response that, had there been no sellers, there could have been no buyers.

For the transatlantic slave trade, both black traders and white were to blame. No one now, two centuries since Wilberforce brought about its end, should follow the fashion to apologise for the past. The trade was a creature of its time. Here, in England, we had our own home-grown slaves, the pauper children, orphaned and abandoned, who from the age of five could be "apprenticed" by workhouse authorities to manufacturers unwilling to pay for adult labour. These pathetic waifs were sent in batches numbering in hundreds, as crammed into canal boats as were Africans in slave ships, to the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire, there to be kept in conditions that made cleanliness, decency and morality impossible, deprived of education and affection, starved and kept at work for hours that were limited only by exhaustion. In 1802, an Act of Parliament limited their labour to not more than 12 hours a day. In 1833 children under 13 were limited to not more than eight hours work a day, and nine was fixed as the minimum age for their employment; children aged 13 to 17 were restricted to 69 hours work a week. In 1842 the employment of children in mines was prohibited. To achieve these modest improvements took twice as many years as to prohibit the slave trade. If we owe apology to any slaves, it is to these forgotten children.

We should take pride in Wilberforce. The bicentenary of abolition will not be celebrated in Cuba until 2086, and 2088 in Brazil. In the USA there were some four million slaves in the southern states when emancipation was proclaimed in 1863, and more than another full century passed before it really came into effect. In the Muslim world the trade in African slaves did not begin to dwindle until the British closed the slave markets of Zanzibar in 1873, reducing the supply to the Ottoman Empire and Persia; in Muslim North Africa slaves were still openly employed at least until the outbreak of the Second World War. Wilberforce was the great prime mover of reform, the first in Europe, the first in the world. We should not allow his memory to be smothered by the artificial and sentimental guilt that politically correct curators, historians and biased commentators force on us.

Uncomfortable Truths is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, SW7 (020 7942 2000, www.vam.ac.uk), until 17 June. Open Sat-Thurs, 10am-6pm; Fri, 10am-10pm. Admission free.

Abolition of Slavery opens at the National Portrait Gallery, WC2 (020 7306 0055, www.npg.org.uk), on 17 March and runs until 22 July. Open Sat-Weds, 10am-6pm; Thurs-Fri, 10am-9pm). Admission free.

Uncomfortable Truths: The Shadow Of Slave Trading On Contemporary Art And Design
Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, SW7 2RL

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