Africa, the arrival of Europeans and the transatlantic slave trade

Oldham Debate: African people, Britain and racism

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The accounting of African people as 'goods' is discussed. The number who died in the process of capture and transportation means that the exact number will never been known, but is estimated as a third.

The parallel with the holocaust is raised - and the development of racist ideologies.

The estimate of 10,000 black people in Britain at the end of the 1700s was largely a result of recruitment to the armed services to fight on behalf of the British at the end of the American War of Independence. Black servants were also a feature in Britain, but numbers of (visible) black people dropped in Britain across the 1800s until the Windrush generation.

Henry Box Brown, a now famous African American abolitionist, was only discovered as a black resident in Greater Manchester in relatively recent times as the records Henry B Brown do not indicate colour. He was also married to an English woman.

Filmed at Gallery Oldham on 29 March 2008.