Who resisted and campaigned for abolition?

A message from SuAndi

'If you know your history, Then you will know where you’re coming from.'

So wrote the late great reggae maestro Robert Nesta Marley. However, Bob (as we all know him) wasn’t simply referring to the slavery that placed Africans in the Caribbean, but the history of Africans across her continent. It was the same thinking that inspired Malcolm X (El-Hajj, Malik & El-Shabazz) to say:

'the truth will set you free'.

The truth that Malcolm was referring to embraced the history of slavery as well as the resulting segregation policies in the USA. Moreover, as the USA is a former British colony, Malcolm was speaking directly to the English nation, exhorting her people to embrace the bad as well as the good of the history of colonialism, because if they did not (if you do not), a life of denial would be a life only half lived.

Europe and Great Britain value culture most highly. Culture has always been considered as a sophistication that can only be achieved and maintained by a civilised society, which is able to utilise hard labour and relax from its toil in the pleasure of the arts; and that ability to appreciate culture was considered to be the result of good grooming and education. Qualities that, during the period between 1700-1930, the upper classes of England refused to acknowledge existed within African societies. In truth, for many a long year the English working class poor were brainwashed to believe that Africans were not even part of the human race, but an abnormality of nature, placing them (us) just slightly above monkeys, apes and gorillas, and therefore worthy of no compassion – worthy only to be considered as chattels to be traded, abused, tortured and raped; then bred much like cattle.

Meanwhile, in the drawing rooms of high society, on the walls of galleries and in the glass cases of museums, African culture had been stolen from its creators and displayed as a backdrop to the bloodiest of holocausts in the history of civilisation.