We do a lot of history here.
Mostly it's the ancient stuff and we can get away with dismissing the crueler side by saying airily that it was thousands of years ago, and we all know better now.
So it is with an awful lot of fear and trepidation that I now peer into the next chapter of history looming on the horizon. The one that makes me hang my head in shame to even be a human being.
It is the Slave Trade.
I cannot find it in me to explain this horror to my children. I know that in their world such actions are alien, they cannot comprehend that only a few hundred centuries ago people were treated as commodities, their value measured alongside that of a barrel of tobacco or a sack of sugar.
When you start to read about the slave trade, your eyes are opened to how much of what exists now in Britain is owed to people who were ripped from their homeland and forced to submit to back breaking work without pay or comfort until the day that they dropped dead.
It makes me feel uncomfortable, and I think that I will forever look at buildings built in the 1700s in a very different way, not so much marvelling at the architecture, but pausing to wonder how much of it is owed directly or indirectly to the trading of people.
I worry at how such education will change my children's view of the world, of themselves and those around them. We have a friend who can trace their roots back to the slave trade, her family was brought into Glasgow on slave ships. How different would her life had been if her ancestors had not been kidnapped and taken to the UK? She is rightly proud of her roots, but tell me there are many that are not.
Over three hundred years later, and I wonder whether we have done enough to apologise for the atrocities committed in the name of progress.
This I see as the underbelly of history, the less shiny, unglorious side.
I want my children to know the wrongs of the world, so that they as the bright new generation can go about setting things back on the track it should be on, but I don't want them to know what I know now, which is the stuff of nightmares.
Nightmares that still go on.
3 comments:
ack...i don't even know it was so much the name of progress as it was greed. *sigh*
there's a wonderful book... -- called Underground to Canada about the underground railroad.... i read it when i was in school..it shows that there was still goodness in amongst the horror...
http://www.amazon.ca/Underground-Canada-Barbara-Smucker/dp/0143168592/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301955489&sr=1-1
xo
Yeah, I've wanted to do 'slavery' with my bunch, but I really don't know how to go there. We have a few books (untouched) and I've thought of a trip to Bristol, which apparently was a big centre for the slave trade (?), but haven't quite summed up the inner strength to tackle it all yet. It's difficult to admit such a shameful past, but our country was not alone in the crime.
i really struggle with this too. it doesn't help to keep it from them, but i've wanted to wait until the heart-crushingness of it can be tempered by some call-to-action. my 8 yr old recently thumbed through a national geographic magazine and found photos i wish she hadn't that called for explanation of how since there have been humans there has been greed and "poor judgement" and fear. it really sparked a passion in her to do something for people who don't have what she has. hard stuff to get into...
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