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The US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haiti
From sexual orgies to Satan incarnated as a snake, lurid depictions of ‘voodoo’ in North America long titillated and shocked readers. As David G Cox explains, they were also wielded as justifications for racist oppression during the social and political upheavals of the 19th-century US
On 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean republic was riddled with “voodooism, fetishism, serpent worship and cannibalism”, and that “little children are fatted for slaughter and offered as sacrifices to their voodoo deities”. Such claims, Douglass declared, were false. He told his listeners that, while serving as US minister (effectively, ambassador) to Haiti between 1889 and 1891, he found no evidence of ritual sacrifice, despite diligent investigation. By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-556636225webready-f31fffd-e1765183494712.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a black man dressed in a suit with a small bow tie. He has short hair and a thick moustache" title="Ebenezer Bassett denounced claims that the black-led Caribbean nation was a hotbed of ‘voodoo’ cannibalism and human sacrifice (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist and traveller Robert Hill, the author of the piece claimed not only that “large numbers of young children are offered up annually in Haiti as sacrifices to the Great Yellow Snake” but also that “mothers frequently dedicate their infants at birth to this purpose”. The article provoked an incredulous response from Ebenezer Bassett who, as US minister to Haiti between 1869 and 1877, was the first black American diplomat. Having lived there for more than a decade, and speaking fluent French, Bassett – like Douglass – could claim authority on the question of Haitian religion. As Bassett knew, “the whole story about cannibalism in Haiti is no more than a myth which, like other myths, has gained credence by persistent repetition”. Casting doubt on the veracity of the report, he noted that Robert Hill had refuted the existence of Haitian cannibalism in his recent Caribbean travel narrative, and that the claims of the article were “in full accord with – it is better not to say that they are probably based upon – Sir Spenser St John’s book”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-152197629webready-4da9320-e1765183520674.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two stone figures, tied together by a metal chain around their necks" title="Chained bocio (protective figures) of the Vodun religion of the Fon people of southern Benin. The chains are symbolic both of slavery and of Gu, the vodu (spirit) of iron and war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Lurid inventions Spenser St John was a British diplomat and former chargé d’affaires in Haiti, and the book in question was Hayti, or, The Black Republic. First published in 1884, it made a deep impression on US journalism, providing the blueprint for a plethora of articles that, though claiming originality, did little more than summarise, in increasingly lurid terms, its lengthy chapter on “Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism”. Up to this point, I have placed ‘voodoo’ in quotation marks, not only to suggest that it was a figment of white imaginations but also to differentiate it from Vodou, the African-derived religion genuinely practised by Haitians. Much of this religion can be traced to west and west-central Africa. It contains elements of the religions practised during the era of slavery by the Aja and Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin (vodu is the Fon word for spirit), as well as of others from the kingdom of Kongo. Read more | Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom However, Vodou was not, as 19th-century white commentators claimed, a direct African import. It was a product of the New World melting pot – a dynamic blend of the religions of enslaved Africans and the Christianity of their European enslavers. In this respect, Vodou has much in common with other black diasporic religions including Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Jamaican Obeah. Like those, Vodou helped people of African origin survive the brutality of Atlantic slavery. In the Victorian age, white people on both sides of the Atlantic ignored the vibrant realities of Vodou, dwelling instead on its demonic imagined double: ‘voodoo’. Why were they so keen to defame Haitian religion? Frederick Douglass had the answer. “Haiti is black,” he declared in Chicago, “and we [Americans] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved and free people of colour rose against the French colonial government of Saint-Domingue. The revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence for the colony. Renamed Haiti, it became the world’s only black republic. Desperate to demonstrate that people of African descent were incapable of self-government, white supremacists spent the next century defaming Haiti, presenting it – in the words of Douglass – as a “very hell of horrors”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/webready-9c7ef73-e1765183675345.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" title="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the 20th century approached, the idea that the world could be divided into races whose members shared the same essential traits was widely accepted. Thus, to opponents of black freedom in the US, Haitian ‘voodoo’ became proof that, without white control, black Americans would degenerate to savagery. As Douglass reflected, the black American could “never part with his identity and race”, meaning that the denial of Haitian civilisation was a denial of the “possibilities of the negro race generally”. This backlash against black freedom explains why ‘voodoo’ first entered the American popular consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s, just as a series of constitutional amendments secured the abolition of slavery, along with the establishment of black citizenship and the enfranchisement of black men. As the author of an 1866 article in the Memphis Appeal proclaimed, ‘voodoo’ was “beginning to take hold among the negroes. Free them from the check which was once held over them, they have unlimited control over their baser passions, and now and then it bursts out, and proves that the worship of their barbaric fathers still runs in the blood of the Americanised negro.” Deluge of discourse Initially, Americans writing about ‘voodoo’ focused on Louisiana and, particularly, New Orleans. A former French colony, Louisiana had a sizeable French-speaking population well into the 19th century. In the 1790s and early 19th century, this population had been bolstered by the arrival of up to 25,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, well over half of whom were enslaved. It is thus unsurprising that a reference to “an African deity called Vaudoo” appeared in a New Orleans newspaper as early as 1820. However, from the 1880s onwards, thanks to Spenser St John, attention turned to ‘voodoo’ in Haiti. The press was swiftly saturated with reports depicting the Caribbean republic as a “land of blood” – with articles bearing headlines such as: “Haiti, a Brooding Nightmare of Savagery, Bloodshed, Cannibalism”. It is tempting to see this deluge of discourse as a reflection of US imperial designs on Haiti, which it occupied between 1915 and 1934. However, at the turn of the 20th century, Haitian ‘voodoo’ was most often invoked by white-supremacist Democrats who argued that Jim Crow laws and regulations – which, enacted from the late 19th century, disenfranchised black Americans and enforced their segregation from white people – were necessary to prevent similar savagery at home. The peak of interest in Haitian ‘voodoo’ coincided with legal efforts to destroy the black vote in the South. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, and ending with Georgia in 1906, southern legislatures drew up new state constitutions containing a plethora of voting restrictions. These were intended to disenfranchise black Americans without contravening the 15th Amendment of 1870, which made it unconstitutional to deprive the vote on the basis of race. In the halls of Congress, Democrats, including the Mississippi senator Hernando Money, cited the work of St John as supposed proof that the black American was no more than a “veneered savage”. To the architects of Jim Crow, ‘voodoo’ was an ideological weapon. Depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ worship, a potent brew of sex and violence, helped to sell newspapers in an age of sensationalist journalism. At the same time, they reinforced racist notions that everybody of African descent was inherently bestial, criminal and hypersexual. Depictions of orgiastic worship chimed with the myth that white women were in constant danger of the black ‘beast rapist’, which was used to justify Jim Crow and fuel violence against black Americans. Read more | The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France In a 1914 speech to Congress, the notoriously racist Mississippi senator James Vardaman made the connection explicit. St John, he claimed, had presented a “disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic”. Frequently portraying black worshippers as beasts and demons, the language used in depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ was dehumanising in the extreme. Written portrayals were sometimes accompanied by lurid illustrations, such as A Voodoo Sacrifice, published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1905. A depiction of child sacrifice, the illustration included a worshipper with grotesquely ape-like features as well as a reptilian figure fixing the newspaper reader with an accusatory gaze, suggesting that she or he was an unwelcome witness to secret black rites. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1426141403webready-352c952-e1765183778614.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a white man, wearing a white shirt and black cowboy hat, looking towards the right" title="Mississippi senator James Vardaman, who in 1914 told Congress that in Haiti “cannibalism… is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fears of black resistance While ostensibly justifying Jim Crow, American depictions of Haitian Vodou betrayed acute white fears of black resistance. African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices played a part in almost every slave uprising in North America and the Caribbean. In 1822, protective charms were allegedly distributed among those involved in South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after a free black man convicted of planning a major uprising of enslaved people. In Jamaica a little over 60 years earlier, the use of similar charms during the massive slave insurrection known as Tacky’s Revolt prompted a British crackdown on Obeah. For late 19th-century white Europeans and Americans, however, the dangerous character of black religion was most associated with the Haitian Revolution. By the end of the century, the idea had been enshrined in Haitian mythology that the revolution began with a Vodou ceremony in a forest named Bois-Caïman, during which a pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn. Though Vodou certainly galvanised the Haitian Revolution, the reality of the Bois-Caïman ceremony has been debated by scholars, some of whom question the sources upon which the story is based. White supremacists, however, had no interest in questions of historical accuracy, instead portraying Vodou as a death cult bent upon the annihilation of the white race. This accusation chimed with the widespread view that political equality in the US would lead to race war. In 1908, the San Antonio Light published what it claimed was a genuine Vodou chant invoking racial extermination, but which was almost certainly the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination. O-he! Papa Damba! Down with whites and with mulattoes! Burn them, shoot them, drown their women! Help your blacks, your poor black children Circulated by those seeking to justify Jim Crow, tales of ‘voodoo’ sacrifice and cannibalism were shot through with white anxiety. These sanguinary stories may have facilitated a kind of psychological displacement. In other words, real white violence against African Americans was projected as imaginary black murder in the service of Satan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/AKG9430442webready-9ba2b82-e1765183804180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a group of people seated on the ground of a cemetery, with large black and red trees arching over the top of them" title="A Vodou scene in Haiti, by renowned artist Hector Hyppolite. Lurid reports in US newspapers of ‘voodoo’ ceremonies were cited as proof that white control was necessary to prevent black Americans from degenerating into savagery (Image by AKG)" /> In the turn-of-the-20th-century South, racial violence assumed unimaginable dimensions in the form of spectacle lynching: black Americans were tortured and murdered before white crowds that could number in the thousands. According to statistics compiled by the NAACP (the civil rights organisation founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least 1,902 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1910. The affinities between these all-too-real rituals and fictional ‘voodoo’ ceremonies seem more than superficial, especially if we note – as many historians have – the religious symbolism and sacrificial dimensions of spectacle lynching. Read more | Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation This reign of racial terror troubled many white people, undermining their sense that they stood at the summit of human civilisation. Condemning the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert of Mississippi, one newspaper editor wrote that “[t]he negroes, in their most bestial state of voodooism, could be guilty of nothing more savage and brutal.” The editor’s conclusion deliberately inverted the racist language of Democratic politicians such as Hernando Money. “The white man is given to much boasting,” that journalist reflected, “but in many instances he is but a thinly veneered savage.” ‘Voodoo’ gripped the public imagination because, while fuelling the violence upon which Jim Crow was built, it allowed many white Americans to imagine that it was not themselves but others who lived in a “land of blood”. David G Cox is a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Southampton. His research for this article was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Samba schools used the carnival to foreground overlooked histories"
Kavita Puri on the important role of carnivals in remembering neglected histories
I was recently in Rio de Janeiro, in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, admiring some of the brightly coloured floats that had featured in this year’s world-famous carnival. Each spring, just before the start of Lent, hundreds of thousands of people attend the parades in the city’s Sambadrome stadium and enjoy watching the floats. Like pieces of art many metres high, they are designed and intricately handmade in Rio’s numerous escolas de samba (samba schools), each strongly identified with a local neighbourhood. The schools are organised into leagues for the carnival, during which they compete for the prestigious design award. Pre-Lenten festivities in Brazil began in the early 18th century, during the Portuguese colonial era. The Catholic influence is evident in the name of the event, which is believed to derive from the Latin carnem vale (farewell to meat) or carnem levare (remove meat), referring to the 40-day period of abstinence leading up to Easter. It’s said that the earliest form of the festivities in Brazil evolved from the pre-Lenten Entrudo, celebrated by immigrants from other Portuguese colonies on the Azores, Madeira and Cabo Verde. During that festival, people soaked each other with buckets of water and hurled mud and food, wreaking cheery mayhem that often degenerated into street brawls. Read more | Brazil: a society shaped by slavery In the 19th century, more organised parades attracted elite participants: even the Portuguese emperor joined in the celebrations, together with aristocrats wearing masks and extravagant costumes. Carnival balls were arranged, with music from Europe such as polkas and waltzes becoming popular. By the middle of that century, street parades with horse-drawn floats and military bands had become the focal points. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that samba – the music and dance style most strongly associated with carnival today – was developed by Afro-Brazilians whose ancestors had been transported to South America, many of them enslaved, over the preceding centuries. Brazil declared independence from Portugal in 1822, but slavery was not abolished there until 1888 – more than 65 years later. One of the first escolas de samba was established in 1928 in the barrio (district) of Mangueira, a little west of the city’s historic centre. More soon sprang up, enjoying strong community links – particularly in the poorer favelas (shanty towns), where they offered people a way to come together and organise themselves while avoiding police oppression. The schools’ theme songs and floats became outlets for political expression, voicing concerns about dictatorship, hunger, the environment, education – and, perhaps most tellingly, the Afro-Brazilian experience, social inequalities and indigenous rights. The schools have also used appearances in the competition – now held in the Sambadrome stadium built for the purpose in 1984 – to foreground overlooked histories. Last year, the Portela school highlighted the extraordinary story of Luíz Gama. Born in 1830 to a trafficked African woman, he escaped enslavement and went on to become a lawyer (in fact, he is considered by many to be Brazil’s first black lawyer) and a leading abolitionist. His story was retold through four incarnations of his figure on a float. Watched live by tens of thousands of spectators in the Sambadrome and broadcast around the country, it introduced him to a vast new audience. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories" The music, dance, costumes and extraordinary floats of carnival represent a huge source of local pride. The schools spend much of each year raising money, working in the communities, and planning and preparing for the next competition. Though a joyous and hugely fun event for all, Rio’s carnival plays an important role in highlighting long-neglected stories, histories and issues. This column was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
What is Juneteenth, and why is it celebrated? A historian explains the significance of the holiday today
Each year on 19 June, millions across the US gather to commemorate the day in 1865 when the last enslaved African Americans finally learned of their freedom. Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith explores how the celebrations have evolved over the past 160 years – and the long campaign to have Juneteenth formally recognised as a federal holiday
Every summer, the Juneteenth holiday offers Americans an opportunity to celebrate visions of black freedom in the United States. ‘Juneteenth’ refers to 19 June 1865 – the day that victorious federal troops read out a General Order to the inhabitants of Texas’s Galveston Island declaring that “all slaves are free” – but enslaved people knew the date was a bit arbitrary. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery in the Confederate states more than two years prior, and the ratification of the 13th amendment six months later would end it throughout the US. Emancipation came to the South not as a dramatic, singular event but, instead, agonisingly slowly over space and time. Yet, for all the news that black Texans had passed to each other about slavery and the Confederacy being on the ropes in the years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory, slaveholders in the Confederacy’s western frontier held fast to their regime until the Union Army’s arrival made emancipation enforceable. Within weeks, the more than 250,000 black people enslaved across Texas began seizing their freedom. Within a year, they had begun commemorating it. And by 1900, historian Quintard Taylor notes, Juneteenth had become more widely celebrated among black Texans than the Fourth of July. Read more | Abraham Lincoln: the greatest US president? Resistance through celebration The holiday served as part of freedpeople’s self-fashioning. Juneteenth is now a national American holiday, but it began as a Texas Emancipation Day, conceived and institutionalised by the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Black women’s clubs, churches and civic organisations marshalled resources to secure spaces for public celebration. In Houston in 1872, for example, they purchased 10 acres that they named ‘Emancipation Park’ and began holding annual celebrations. Black residents in Austin did the same in the early 1900s. In these cities and elsewhere, African Americans celebrated with picnics, parades, balls, rodeos and reunions. They honoured their elders who had lived through slavery and recorded their memories so that the experience would not be forgotten – or, more likely, erased. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/PA0MJN-b2f1b9e-e1750347645459.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph depicting a band of African American musicians standing in a wooded area. They are holding various musical instruments, including guitars, a violin and a double bass. There is a Stars and Stripes flag behind them." title="617 Emancipation Day Celebration band, June 19, 1900" /> In celebrating, they were also resisting. The establishment of Juneteenth as a holiday coincided with white southern elites’ violent resistance to the democratic experiment of postwar Reconstruction and their revanchist rollback of Reconstruction-era democracy. Colloquially known as Jim Crow, the system of economic and political exploitation was secured in part by sadistic violence and in part by narrative claim. To make Jim Crow palatable, even desirable, to white Americans across the regional divides, its defenders argued that US slavery was largely benign, enslaved people mostly content, and the antebellum South a white man’s romantic tragedy. Thus, every time black communities gathered in triumph and jubilation, they gave the lie to the claims of Jim Crow defenders. And in preserving freedpeople’s memories and knitting together family histories out of lives oft-defined by family separation, they built archives that preserved harder, but fuller, histories. A national phenomenon Through the 20th century, Juneteenth travelled with black mobility. Neighbouring states had already taken up the holiday, but the world wars and accompanying Great Migration of African Americans out of the US South and into the north and west meant that Juneteenth celebrations spread to cities like Milwaukee, Seattle and Los Angeles. Civil rights work in the 1960s kept the holiday expanding at the grassroots; the organisers of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign made 19 June a day of national solidarity for their march, spurring participants to carry the holiday from Washington DC back to their hometowns. It took hold because of what it offered. Joy – invaluable in social movements as well as in daily life – but also a way to remember, to honour, and to gird themselves for future struggles. WATCH | Inside a Jim Crow asylum View Green Video on the source website Juneteenth’s journey from a local holiday to a national phenomenon tracks the black freedom struggle in the post-civil rights era and underscores its connection to earlier times. By 1980, Juneteenth had become a legislative issue as well as a local celebration. In Texas, a veteran of the civil rights movement, Al Edwards, had successfully shepherded a bill to make Juneteenth a state holiday. No small feat, as prizewinning historian and Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed has noted, for a state seemingly more interested in its cowboy mythos than its actual history of fighting two wars (the Texas Revolution and the Civil War) to stay a slave regime. The pressure intensifies Amid a growing call over the course of the 1990s and 2000s to have it declared a federal holiday, other states began recognising Juneteenth. The emergence of the Movement for Black Lives as a response to police violence in the 2010s intensified pressure on both state and the federal governments, but the pressure did not come from younger activists alone. In 2016, educator-activist and local historian Opal Lee launched a walking campaign in cities from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, DC to lobby Congress for the federal holiday she and other civic leaders had been pursuing for decades. As the 89-year-old Lee told a reporter for National Public Radio, the holiday was an offering to her “ancestors” as well as to her “great -great-grandchildren”, her “grandchildren” and her “children”. When President Joe Biden signed the bill finally making Juneteenth a federal holiday in June 2021, Opal Lee was at his side. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? George Floyd’s death made the Juneteenth federal holiday possible. Floyd, a Texas-raised athlete who moved to Minnesota and was suffocated by a Minneapolis policeman, died so public and needless a death that it made the American epidemic of anti-black police violence hard to deny. In the short-lived racial reckoning that followed, activists laid out what they believed the nation needed: a return to robust voting rights; reform of militarised policing; a retreat from mass incarceration; and a vision for economic justice. Instead, Congress offered up Juneteenth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-2150767015-7035ced-e1750347673444.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="President Joe Biden embraces Opal Lee after presenting the civil rights activist with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024. Biden is wearing a black suit and white tie; Lee is wearing a a white suit and black suit. In the background, we can see attendees of the ceremony and two US flags." title="President Biden Hosts Presidential Medal Of Freedom Ceremony At The White House" /> “A heap of Juneteenths” There was to be no structural change, but perhaps we can look to Juneteenth’s founders as a reminder that countering white supremacist narratives is part of challenging state violence. Many everyday Americans have a hard time contending with slavery, and they shy away even more from thinking through the systems of racialised power and exploitation that developed in slavery’s wake. Juneteenth celebrations offer an opportunity to engage slavery’s histories and legacies, to sit with other people’s memories, to learn, and to find pleasure even in knowing hard things. This will be true and necessary whether the federal government continues to acknowledge the holiday or whether it returns to its vibrant home in the grassroots. Like most celebrations of liberation, Juneteenth marks something powerful and partial. “There’s been a heap of Juneteenths,” one of Ralph Ellison’s characters notes in his follow-up to Invisible Man, an unfinished novel named Juneteenth. “[And] I’ll tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free.” When freedpeople rejoiced at slavery’s end, they did not celebrate America’s triumph so much as they did their own survival. America was a promise yet fulfilled whereas black life was fact. The way they took the fact and beauty of their living and used it to seed a better future, therein lies the story and its inspiration.
Robert Wedderburn: the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery
While most British radicals fought for the rights of the exploited white working class, one man saw such rights as entwined with those of enslaved black workers. Ryan Hanley tells the story of the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery
One October evening in 1809, Robert Wedderburn was walking through London, one child asleep in his arms and his daughter beside him, when he saw a gang of about 20 drunks encircling a young man near his home on Peter Street, St Giles. Things were getting hairy; it was clear the man was in danger. Wedderburn tried to pull him away from the gang peacefully, but it was no good. If he wanted to help, he’d have to get his hands dirty. He handed the sleeping child to his daughter, took off his coat and “said he would fight one or two of them at a time”. Alas, they all set upon him at once and beat him with thick walking sticks. He might have died then and there outside his house, in front of his children, if a soldier had not happened by. But that was Wedderburn: he never could walk away from a fight – all the more so when the odds were stacked against him. When the gang members were rounded up and brought before the magistrates, Wedderburn was the chief witness for the prosecution. A journalist for The Star, hanging around the courts looking for a story, noted that “the witness having betrayed much violence of temper, during his cross-examination, was reprimanded by the court”. That, too, was typical of the man who became a leader in London’s working-class radical underworld. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? It is easy to see why Wedderburn had a problem with authority. Born in Jamaica in the early 1760s, he gained his most important life lessons from the rebellious black women in his life, notably his mother, Rosanna, and grandmother, Amy. His mother had been a ladies’ maid until his father, the Scottish planter James Wedderburn, had purchased her, as Robert later put it, “for purposes of lust”. James abused his legal status as the ‘owner’ of this beautiful and accomplished woman to try to compel her into a consensual relationship. She did bear at least two of his children but loathed her captor, and was not shy about showing it. Rosanna made James’s life such a misery that he eventually sold her on; he also signed manumission papers granting freedom to their sons, Robert and James Jr. That was lesson one: by being obstinate and difficult, and not shying away from confrontation, even apparently powerless people could negotiate a change in their circumstances and secure a better life for their children. Robert was sent to Kingston to be raised by his maternal grandmother, Amy. She was reputed to be an Obeah woman – a healer and spiritual guide with the power to communicate with spirits, hence her nickname, ‘Talkee Amy’. Wedderburn himself had no time for mysticism, leaving superstition to “silly Europeans”. But he always remembered that Amy’s ‘owner’, a man she had cared for when he was a child, whipped her mercilessly under suspicion of bewitching his father’s smuggling ship and causing him to be captured by the Spanish. That scene – a young man brutally beating a defenceless old woman accused of witchcraft and facing no repercussions – was seared into the young Wedderburn’s memory. Here was lesson two: he would never accede to the ‘legitimate authority’ of either religion or law – two means used by the powerful to justify trampling on the powerless. Listen | Gretchen Gerzina discovers the story of a forgotten revolutionary, Robert Wedderburn, in BBC Radio 4's Britain's Black Past Working-class insurrectionary Wedderburn worked as a millwright, a sailor and a soldier before crossing the Atlantic and forging a career as a tailor in England. In 1813, he was implicated in a scam involving pilfering excess fabric from the production of military uniforms. He escaped conviction partly because tailors were a notoriously tight-knit group, and prosecutors could find no one willing to inform on their brother tradesmen. It was probably through his trade club that Wedderburn first got into radical politics. Mentored by the renowned radical polymath Thomas Spence, he surged to the forefront of London’s militant political scene, rabble-rousing in smoky pub back rooms and setting the world to rights. By the end of the 1810s, Wedderburn was publishing pamphlets and running his own debate club, the infamous ‘Temple of Sedition’ at a chapel in Hopkins Street, Soho. Listen | Black British history: everything you wanted to know One of the most distinctive things about Wedderburn’s politics was his ability to see the working-class struggle in global perspective. Most radicals of his generation were fixated on Britain: how to improve conditions for British workers, how to reform the British parliament, how to save the children of the British poor from the factories. Wedderburn addressed all of these issues, but also saw the cause of exploited white workers in Britain as inextricably entwined with that of enslaved black workers in the Caribbean and Africa. As he asked his predominately white readership in 1816, “should the receivers and stealers of Africans become rich, and buy one of those seats in the House of Commons, which is sold at noon-day, ought they to be called the representative of a free people? Ought they to be obeyed, when there is an opportunity to oppose with success?” Read more | Abolition in Britain: the link between slavery and the British national identity He even went so far as to encourage enslaved people to rise up and kill their ‘masters’, calling to mind the successful insurrection that led to the establishment of the free black nation of Haiti in the former French colony of Saint Domingue: “Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St Domingo awaits you,” he wrote. “O ye planters, you know this has been done; the cause which produced former bloodshed still remains – of necessity similar effects must take place.” No other British abolitionist had previously been so bold as to suggest that the enslaved should take their freedom for themselves. Such hot rhetoric about rebellion in the empire was alarming for the Home Office, increasingly paranoid about the rise of all forms of radicalism during the bitter recession that followed the Napoleonic Wars. But Wedderburn’s domestic politics were what really landed him in hot water. At a debate in 1819, he proclaimed that the Prince Regent deserved to die for failing to protect his subjects, shouting: “My motto is assassinate stab in the dark.” He had already made a name for himself and, his actions reported by several government spies, came under the unforgiving scrutiny of the very highest ranks of the British establishment. In August 1819, the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, personally wrote to the Prince Regent about “a man of the name of Wedderburne, a notorious firebrand”, reassuring the future George IV that the troublemaker would soon be arrested. In February 1820, Wedderburn was convicted of seditious blasphemy for one of his Hopkins Street speeches, and served two years in Dorchester Jail. Listen | The children who fought for the abolition of slavery Radical abolitionist Prison proved extremely hard for Wedderburn. His hypervisibility as a black man, as well as his notoriety as an enemy of the state, meant that he was singled out for especially harsh treatment by the guards at Dorchester. After his release, Wedderburn’s life was marked by a steady decline into destitution and vice, including multiple convictions related to running brothels. Yet Wedderburn remained committed to the abolition of slavery. In 1824, he wrote his most famous text, The Horrors of Slavery, in which he described the injustices faced by his mother and grandmother. He wrote another anti-slavery tract, An Address to Lord Brougham and Vaux, from a jail cell in 1831. When he died in the winter of 1834–35, Wedderburn left behind some of the most uncompromising anti-slavery and anti-racist writing of the 19th century. Despite every conceivable disadvantage in life, he led the vanguard of the struggle for workers’ rights across the empire, regardless of colour or creed. At its most utopian, his work dared readers to imagine a world in which solidarity, not profit or self-interest, could determine the course of history. Read more | David Olusoga: "Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves" Wedderburn’s final descent into criminality and vice forms a bitter coda to a grittily inspiring story, but in his final year he did at least get to see one of his cherished dreams become a reality. On 1 August 1834, after years of uprisings in the Caribbean and activism in Britain, the enslaved celebrated the first day of their legal freedom. Among them were several members of Wedderburn’s immediate family. He might have derived some satisfaction from knowing that – though he also would have understood that legal emancipation was only the first step. The fight for equality was just beginning. Read more | Black Victorians: the hidden Britons who helped shape the 19th century Ryan Hanley is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter, and author of Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist (Yale University Press, 2025). This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
A “desperate leap for liberty”: how Ellen and William Craft made a daring escape from slavery
Born into slavery in the 19th century, Ellen and William Craft made a daring bid for freedom when they disguised themselves as a white man and his manservant and travelled 1,000 miles across America. Historian Ilyon Woo shares the extraordinary story of the husband and wife team with HistoryExtra podcast editor Ellie Cawthorne
On 21 December 1848, a young white-passing man going by the name ‘Mr Johnson’ boarded a train in Macon, Georgia, assisted by his enslaved manservant. With his slight frame, eyes shaded by green-tinged spectacles, and arm in a sling, this young man cut an unusual figure. But what no one else in the carriage knew was that Mr Johnson and his servant had a secret. They were not, in fact, master and slave, but wife and husband – Ellen and William Craft. In a bid to flee enslavement, the Crafts had donned disguises and were embarking on an epic 1,000-mile journey across America. It was, William later recalled, a “desperate leap for liberty”. Listen on the podcast: A audacious escape from slavery The Crafts’ story began in Macon, Georgia, where both had been enslaved since birth. Ellen’s first enslaver had been her own biological father, and by 1848, she was ‘owned’ by the husband of her half-sister, forced to work as a maid and seamstress. Meanwhile, William had struck an agreement with his enslaver to hire himself out as a skilled cabinetmaker. “Disappointingly, there’s no record of how the couple first met, but we do know that they thought about the idea of escape before they were even married,” says historian Ilyon Woo, who in 2024 appeared on the HistoryExtra podcast to discuss the Crafts’ extraordinary journey, which she reconstructed in her book Master Slave Husband Wife. Having seen loved ones torn apart by slavery, Ellen was initially hesitant to start a family of their own. “She wanted to wait to get married and have children until they were free,” says Woo. “Ultimately their love prevailed, and they decided to marry first, run later. But over the two years of their marriage, they were constantly thinking about how to get out.” Read more | The children who fought for the abolition of slavery The decision to run was a serious one; William and Ellen would have been all too aware of what might await them should their escape attempt fail – public punishment, torture, and death. According to the Crafts’ 1860 account of the escape, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, they hatched their final escape plan only four days before launching it. Those were tense and busy days. William had saved up some money from his cabinetry work and the couple obtained passes for a few days’ absence to “visit a sick relative” of Ellen’s. Meanwhile, they gathered items of clothing for Ellen’s disguise. The plan was for Ellen to play on her light-skinned complexion in order to pass as a wealthy white man called Mr Johnson, accompanied by his enslaved manservant (William). As a small and slight black woman, it was long shot. “When Ellen first tried the clothes on, William looked at her despairingly – he thought there was no way the plan was going to work,” says Woo. “The vest was huge, the clothes drowned her, she looked ridiculous. But, as an expert seamstress who knew about men’s fashion, Ellen calmed William down and took control of the situation.” As part of her disguise, Ellen had stitched her own trousers. She topped the outfit off with a top hat, green-tinged glasses, bandages around her face, and a sling. As she couldn’t read or write, the sling provided the perfect cover to avoid signing any documents. The overall impression was of a stylish but sickly young man of leisure. “What’s extraordinary is that person after person who observed Ellen in this disguise remarked on what a stylish man she was,” says Woo. “That’s testament to her powers of performance.” Despite their meticulous preparations, the journey itself got off to a bumpy start. After buying tickets for Savannah, the Crafts boarded different carriages on the segregated train. But before it had even pulled out of the station, the first challenges emerged. To his horror, William spotted his employer from the cabinet workshop on the platform, talking to the ticket master and peering through the carriage windows. He had had a strange feeling his apprentice had run away, but luckily, both William and Ellen went undetected. Meanwhile, the porter who helped Ellen with her bags was an acquaintance of hers, but again, she avoided suspicion. Unbelievably, a third man who knew Ellen then sat down beside her – this was Scott Cray, a close associate of her enslaver who had come to the house for years. Cray even spoke to Ellen, but she avoided interacting by pretending to be deaf, and miraculously, he left her alone. “People ask how Ellen was able to pull off this performance,” says Woo. “But when you look back at what she had endured since childhood, it begins to make more sense.” As the mixed-race daughter of her enslaver, “Ellen was forced to observe the markers between black and white, enslaved and free, because any failure to do so would invoke the wrath of her mistress. She was constantly observing and performing from a very young age. So, in some ways, she had prepared for this performance for a lifetime.” After three close shaves before they had even made it out of Georgia, the pair must have been relieved when they finally pulled into Savannah around dusk. The first leg of the journey was over – but a mammoth journey still lay ahead. From Savannah, they boarded the General Clinch steamer, bound for Charleston, South Carolina. Ellen spent much of the journey in her cabin, claiming to be ill, while William slept on deck. But when they reached Charleston, more trouble lay in store. The steamer they had intended to take to Philadelphia had stopped running – meaning they would need to take a more convoluted route, with many more changes than planned. To make the onward journey even more difficult, they would have to navigate this complex new route without the aid of maps or timetables. After passing some time at the Planter’s Hotel – one of the finest in Charleston – the Crafts headed for the first available steamer to Wilmington, North Carolina. But before boarding, Ellen was asked to write their names in the register. When she claimed she was unable to do so due to her injured arm, the ticketmaster objected. But in yet another stroke of luck, another traveller stepped in on ‘Mr Johnson’s’ behalf and the Crafts were let on board. From Wilmington, the couple then boarded another train to Virginia, then yet another steamer to Washington DC, before travelling overland via Baltimore, and on to Philadelphia in the free state of Pennsylvania. During every leg of the journey, Ellen had to make it through various interactions with other passengers, and even a steamboat captain; being interrogated about her ailments, challenged over her ownership of William and keeping her cool while witnessing several debates about the hot-topic of the day – abolition. The journey was fraught with danger for William too, with slavecatchers and kidnappers in operation on the route. But at every stage, they managed to bypass all the usual checks. The disguise may have been audacious – but that is likely part of the reason why the pair got away with it. “No-one imagined that a woman would even put on a pair of pants, let alone that an enslaved woman would disguise herself as a white man,” explains Woo. “Ellen took the markers of class, ability, gender, and race, and manipulated them to transform herself, and catapult from the very bottom of the social hierarchy all the way to the top. She used these signs of power to take power.” By the time the Crafts reached Pennsylvania on Christmas Sunday, they had been travelling for four days. William later recalled that when they arrived in the free state he “felt that the straps that bound the heavy burden to my back began to pop, and the load to roll off.” Yet, according to Woo, while this was “definitely a celebratory moment,” things weren’t so simple. “In many ways, even once they had arrived in the northern so-called ‘free states’, they were not free,” says Woo. “The United States Constitution mandated that when someone owed labour (the word slavery wasn’t used) in one state, they continued to owe that labour even if they moved to another state.” This meant that, by law, the Crafts’ enslavers were entitled to try and recapture them. Their absence passes had expired, and telegraph technology meant that the news of their disappearance may have even reached Philadelphia before they did. This compelled the Crafts to keep moving. With help from abolitionist networks, they lived for two years in Boston. But when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed (which required all enslaved people to be returned to their ‘owners’, even from free states), the pair decided it would be safer to leave America altogether. William and Ellen had originally planned to head to Canada, but instead turned to England, where their remarkable backstory made them celebrity speakers on the abolitionist circuit. And Ellen’s dream of having children who were born free came true – the pair would go on to have five. After abolition, they returned to America in the 1870s to establish a school for people recently released from slavery, and continued their activism. “Many of the issues the Crafts battled against are still issues now,” says Woo. “I look at them as American heroes, but also heroic citizens of the world, who repeatedly challenged their communities and nations to fight for better. When there's so much turmoil in the world right now, we can look back to them and draw inspiration. That's what I do.” Ilyon Woo is the author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom (Bonnier books, 2024)
The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside
We know that enslaved Africans and their descendants suffered in the distant colonies of empire. But, as Corinne Fowler explains, the colonial system also led to significant changes for the countryside and its people of the ‘motherland’
For an encounter with one of the most eye-opening legacies of Britain’s colonial projects, take a drive along the A31 in southern Dorset. On the stretch between the delightfully named villages of Winterborne Zelston and Sturminster Marshall, the road kinks nearly 90 degrees; lining the verge here you’ll notice a wall – not hugely tall, but impressively long. Reputedly stretching for 3 miles and comprising nearly 2 million bricks, it was almost certainly built with profits from slavery. This is the so-called ‘great wall of Dorset’ – one of England’s longest, built around 1841 to encircle the vast Dorset estate of Charborough Park. It belongs to the Drax family, an old propertied clan who owned tobacco and sugar plantations in Barbados – and who massively increased their wealth by boosting profits through the use of slave labour. Read more | Slavery's painful legacy: the British empire's role in the trade of enslaved people It is easy to forget that colonial governors, slave-owners and East India Company employees and their heirs commonly became rural magistrates, customs officials, industrialists and politicians in Britain. The newly acquired land and social networks of these men allowed them to hold sway over other Britons in countryside regions. So it’s important to understand that, when it comes to exploring rural history, it’s not enough to ask where the money came from to buy country houses or fund village schools. What also matters is how these figures and their descendants exercised their power, wealth and influence in such areas. Back in 2020, I undertook an audit of published academic research about National Trust properties and their colonial links. So I already knew that country estates such as Basildon Park in Berkshire and Harewood House in Yorkshire were built and landscaped with colonial profits, and that Speke Hall near Liverpool was bought and restored with money from Jamaican slavery. I’d found, too, other architectural stories of places not managed by the National Trust that are also linked to Britain’s colonial projects – including that statement wall around Charborough Park. These all highlighted the point that many of the ubiquitous colonial links in our countryside have been overlooked or forgotten. Read more | The colonial secrets of Britain’s stately homes British rural history is invariably depicted as a domestic affair that has very little to do with the empire. You don’t find many references to colonial history in local history pamphlets, for example, nor in the nature writing of many popular authors. To address this oversight, I set out to research a book of walks through regions with less-familiar histories of empire. As I ventured deeper into the countryside, empire’s impact on rural Britons was revealed in all its nuance and variety. My aim was to identify connections that were genuinely consequential to Britons who lived and worked in these places during four centuries of colonial activity. From servants to slavery That search led me, among other things, to revisit the Drax story – and I began to wonder about the family’s relationship with the ordinary inhabitants of Dorset. In the early 17th century, people from that county were shipped to Barbados plantations to work as indentured labourers, selling their employers a set number of labour years and receiving at the end of their contract a lump sum or its equivalent in sugar or land. By the middle of that century, such indentured servants were being replaced by enslaved African labourers – a system ‘pioneered’ by the Draxes. Notably, one member of the Drax family pops up in the historian EP Thompson’s account of the 1830s Swing Riots – protests by agricultural workers against poor pay, working conditions and mechanisation that threatened their jobs. In 1830, the average farm worker’s weekly wage of somewhere between seven and nine shillings was nowhere near enough to cover rent and the purchase of basics – tea and sugar, bread, potatoes, butter and cheese, candles, soap and wood – which typically came to around 13 shillings. During this period of recession and depressed wages, the Swing Riots spread west from Hampshire, and agricultural labourers in Dorset then rose up in protest. John Samuel Wanley Sawbridge Erle-Drax (1800–87) boosted his wealth by marrying into the family, and received compensation for the loss of slave labour after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. He met protesting labourers with beer, and offered to raise their wages – then reneged on that promise. He led an armed group of landed proprietors to quell the resultant protests and to ensure that his labourers felt the full force of the law. That episode recalls the actions of people elsewhere in Dorset who also campaigned for fairer conditions – notably the villagers from Tolpuddle, whose story became one of the most celebrated in British labour history. These six men, known today as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, started the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers – in effect, a union fighting wage cuts – led by Methodist lay preacher George Loveless. Under an obscure law prohibiting the swearing of secret oaths, they were unjustly found guilty of sedition in 1834 and sent to some of the furthest reaches of the British empire: the penal colonies in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). Read more | David Olusoga: "Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves" Loveless and his fellow ‘martyrs’ were among 4,000 British political prisoners and social protesters who, between 1787 and 1868, were transported to penal colonies as punishment for fighting for their rights. Loveless wrote about his experience in Van Diemen’s Land, and his words represent a powerful indictment of the colonial system. Working on menial tasks throughout daylight hours, convicts were inadequately clothed and often stripped to the waist. Punishments were severe – 50 lashes for attempting to escape, for example. Unsurprisingly, most prisoners’ health deteriorated, and suicide attempts were common. One of Loveless’s observations was that penal colonies exposed the dangers of unfettered power wielded by the British authorities. Enslavement and enclosure The system of forced labour that caused the suffering of so many enslaved people in Britain’s colonies was also linked with hardship at home. With this in mind, I planned a walk along the Norfolk–Suffolk border. I call this route my ‘enclosure walk’, because it reveals the intertwined history of land ownership and slavery wealth. For centuries, people grazed livestock amid the water meadows and lowland lakes of the East Anglian fens, and fished the wetlands that teem with fish and eels. The names on old maps reflect the management of these landscapes: First Fen, Second Fen, the Thirteen Acres. Others, such as Bullock Shed Close and Duck Lands Lane, suggest how land was used. Names convey observations of the natural world, too: Toads Lane, Birds Hill, Thistly Close. All of these reveal people’s intimate relationship with land that was known and loved long before it was enclosed with hedges. Read more | Abolition in Britain: the link between slavery and the British national identity Enclosure – private landowners erecting barriers to deny local people access to formerly common land – is massively significant to British rural history. Over the centuries, it effected a slow transformation from peasant husbandry to capitalist farming. Enclosure was responsible for removing landless people’s right to graze livestock, catch rabbits and collect firewood on the commons. Instead, the land was allocated to a proprietor who controlled its use. This process accelerated rapidly in the 18th century: between 1750 and 1820, over 21 per cent of England was enclosed by parliamentary decree. East Anglican injustice It is no coincidence that this period coincided with the era of transatlantic slavery. A vast amount of land was purchased or enclosed using wealth from the West Indies or investments in the slavery businesses. Enclosure is not just of local and national significance – it is a global story. My enclosure walk began in the north-east Suffolk town of Bungay, from where I ambled along waterways and quiet lanes to Earsham Hall, a red-brick residence once home to Sir William Windham Dalling, an absentee slave-owner. Between 1799 and 1840, Donnington Castle, the Jamaican plantation inherited by Sir William, produced a staggering £150,000 (equivalent to well over £10m today). Together with two neighbours – George Sandby and George Day, also absentee slave-owners – he dominated the lives of 811 enslaved people. But these men’s dominance did not begin and end on their Caribbean plantations. Read more | Success, sugar and slaves: the uncomfortable story of slaveholder Simon Taylor Local Norfolk enclosure maps show that Sir William used his slavery-derived profits to consolidate and expand his East Anglian estate. He was a petitioner on the 1812 ‘Act for Inclosing Lands in the Parishes of Earsham, Ditchingham, and Hedenham, in the County of Norfolk’. The lands to be enclosed under this act included Outney Common and Dole Meadow, where the word ‘dole’ suggested lands that had been habitually given over to people without a stable income as an act of charity. With distinctly colonial overtones, and in keeping with enclosure rhetoric throughout England, Sir William and the other petitioners argued that this was “uncultivated… wasteland” that would be “improved” through enclosure. That claim is undermined by their promise to award appropriate costs to displaced land users. Compensation would, the petition stated, be awarded to the owners of cottages or buildings who could provide evidence of ongoing land use. Any objectors were instructed to employ an attorney – which was, of course, beyond the means of most ordinary country folk. Commissioners’ judgements were always final in the enclosure process, and any who disputed an unsuccessful appeal outcome would be evicted. The 1812 enclosures were, indeed, contested by locals after notices were placed on church doors and printed in the Norfolk Chronicle. A public meeting was held to hear any objections put by an attorney – but only a handful of complainants could afford such legal representation. Among those who could was a local man called Alexander Adair, who claimed 2 acres (less than a hectare) in the Dole Meadows as his by right; his claim was overruled. The enclosures went ahead, and the commissioners allocated just 5 acres (2 hectares) as “poor allotments”. These small plots were to be leased to tenants who would now be required to pay rent twice a year, having previously paid nothing. Hand-drawn enclosure maps showing Sir William’s new land resemble dense webs. Spindly demarcation lines show the proposed new plots – numbered in red – and existing buildings shaded in dark pink. Within these plots, the names of the new and former landowners are written in tiny, immaculate letters. The 1812 map shows that Sir William bought – using wealth derived from slavery – 280 acres (113 hectares) around the perimeter of his estate, gobbling up tracts around Earsham Hall that were deemed by the commissioners to have “unfixed and uncertain” boundaries. The map shows two private roads for the use of Sir William, his heirs, and two other landowners. Walking along the old Norwich Road today, thin hedges mark the edges of the Earsham estate, with its flowerless meadows and gigantic oaks. In the 18th century you could have used more direct footpaths across fields, but these were blocked during Sir William’s enclosures. Read more | Did the British royal family support slavery? Five public lanes and footpaths that previously passed through the estate were rendered off-limits to locals, who were then forced into time-consuming detours as they walked the long way round. To this day, you still have to take longer, indirect routes. Clearly, such inconveniences can’t be compared to the horrors of chattel slavery, but Sir William’s Jamaican profits were used to set in motion a series of smaller injustices in Norfolk. Thanks to that wealth, formerly common land became strictly off limits, and people could be prosecuted or fined for using it. Anybody caught fishing with nets in the broads, cutting turf or carrying off rocks or flagstones would be in trouble. Non-payment of fines would result in bailiffs recovering the full amount. Sir William also claimed exclusive rights to all timber, standing or fallen, on the enclosed commons. This was a blow for anyone who had previously collected firewood there, or used logs for building or furniture-making. Sugar and slate Another story linking slavery-derived profits with labour history can be found at Penrhyn Castle near Bangor, north-west Wales. Now owned by the National Trust, its interconnected histories of sugar and slate are persistently told as separate stories. As soon as Richard Pennant inherited his Jamaican sugar wealth in 1781, he turned local slate producers off his land and, the following year, opened Penrhyn slate quarry. Within a decade, 500 men were employed there, and it became one of the world’s largest slate quarries. In a sinister echo of conditions in Jamaica, the quarry-workers’ barracks were modelled on huts built for enslaved people on the family plantations; we know this from the work of historian Marian Gwyn, who studied regular letters that Richard Pennant received from the manager of his West Indian estates. Read more | 7 key questions about the transatlantic slave trade – answered In 2022, the BBC Radio 4 series The Museums That Make Us stated that Penrhyn Castle was “built on money from slavery, the abolition of slavery and then the slate quarry nearby”. That wording is misleading, because it implies two distinct, unconnected phases of money-making – yet the slate quarry was created with slavery-derived profits in the first place. The resultant combined sugar and slate wealth funded roads, railways, schools, hotels, workers’ houses and the local port. Bitter dispute The Pennants’ slate mines were at the centre of the great strike of 1900–03 – one of the bitterest disputes in British industrial history – sparked by the family’s opposition to the North Wales Quarrymen’s Union. The strikers lost, and 2,000 hungry, impoverished quarry workers left for south Wales. This mass movement of labour was the long-term outcome of both histories. I learned of one further local connection not too far from Penrhyn, on the sheep-grazed hillsides of north Wales. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/PXJ4F6-e98e157-e1742213030277.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Welsh wool weavers in a 19th-century illustration. Slave-owners bought Welsh ‘woollen plains’ to clothe their labourers in order to maintain productivity" title="Welsh wool weavers in a 19th-century illustration. Slave-owners bought Welsh ‘woollen plains’ to clothe their labourers in order to maintain productivity" /> In the old county of Meirionnydd, part of Eryri (Snowdonia), local people produced a rough fabric called woollen plains, which was used to clothe enslaved people in North American and West Indian plantations. In the callous minds of the enslavers, this coarse Welsh textile was desirable because it bolstered productivity: proper clothing prevented enslaved people from becoming ill, and kept them alive for longer. Listen | Browse our archive of HistoryExtra podcasts on the history of slavery Far-away transatlantic slavery was thus directly linked to the livelihoods of Welsh sheep-shearers, wool-carders, spinners and weavers. Not that wool-workers were made rich by slavery: on the contrary, their lives were often harsh. The money was being made by people far higher up the economic ladder: wool merchants and landowners with sheep-grazing pasture. Once again, two unrelated groups of people, separated by heritage and thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean, were linked by their circumstances – bound within the colonial system of the British empire. Corinne Fowler is professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester, and founder of the Colonial Countryside research project. Her latest book is Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain (Allen Lane, 2024) This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation
Slavery, exploitation and racism. These tragedies have long dominated histories of Africa. But there’s another way to tell this story, argues Luke Pepera. And it’s one that puts Africans right at the centre of their continent’s extraordinarily rich and vibrant past
In 1414, in the Chinese city of Nanjing, a giraffe caused a stir. Amid a crowd of shocked, noble spectators, an official, leading the creature via a rope tied round its face, presented it to China’s Yongle emperor. His officials said it was a qilin – an auspicious unicorn – which his sage governance had made appear. This giraffe was a gift from the sultan of Bengal. But it had originally come from Africa – specifically, the city-state of Malindi in today’s Kenya. In 1415, ambassadors from Malindi and Mogadishu sailed to China. In a special ceremony, the Malindi ambassadors gifted the Yongle emperor another giraffe. Delighted at having received his second qilin, the Yongle emperor gave an order. His senior eunuch, Zheng He, whom he’d charged with overseeing the construction of a 200-strong fleet of treasure ships, was to sail to Malindi to obtain more giraffes and other goods. With the holds of his ships full of treasures, including gold, silver, silk and ceramics, Zheng He set sail for Malindi in 1417. He exchanged what he had for goods including live animals such as leopards and zebras, frankincense and ivory. Sometime between then and 1423, Malindi’s king himself sailed to China to meet the Yongle emperor in Nanjing. He made it as far as Fujian, a province in south-eastern China, where he died, seemingly succumbing to illness. He was buried in Fujian, and the Yongle emperor decreed that his grave be given a small sacrifice every year. This is an intriguing story. But for Africa, it’s not extraordinary. For at least 2,000 years, African civilisations have been plugged into international trade networks. Third-century AD Nubia (now northern Sudan and southern Egypt) exported goods including gold, ivory and ostrich feathers to Rome and Yemen. Along Africa’s eastern coast, from northern Somalia to southern Tanzania, east African merchants exchanged similar goods for date syrup from Persian traders, swords from Yemenis and carnelian beads from Indians. Chinese pottery and Indian beads have been found as far inland as Great Zimbabwe – a stone city located in southern Zimbabwe that thrived between about 1100 and 1500 AD. Great Zimbabwe’s residents obtained these treasures from east African merchants in exchange for gold, which was plentiful around Great Zimbabwe. Chinese silk also made it as far west as Mali, whose emperors had it woven into robes. One-dimensional view Given historical African societies’ economic, political and cultural importance, why is so little of their history generally known? Quite simply, this is because of a tendency to focus on narratives of slavery, colonisation, victimisation and dominance. In the UK, when we tell stories about African peoples or their history, either in the classroom or in documentaries, books, films and TV series, we cover largely the events of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. Read more | The big question: Is Africa a prisoner of its past? We talk and tell stories about European ‘discovery’ of the Americas, the Atlantic triangle, abolition, anti-African racism, European presence in Africa, colonial wars and the British empire. In all of these narratives, the African is inevitably presented as a victim of superior European technology, economic might and military prowess. This, then, becomes our view of the African throughout history, and, arguably, even our view of Africans today. We assume that this relationship between Europe and Africa has always been the natural order of things, and we do little either to scrutinise, interrogate or contradict this view. The truth is, our conversations about African history and culture lack nuance. As far as the eras of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism are concerned, we don’t question enough how and why they happened. To our minds, it is a simple story of dominance – European over African. We think that when the Europeans arrived in Africa, they almost immediately subdued its societies, imposed their rules and regulations and captured the poor, unwitting Africans whom they stuffed in slave ships and shipped off to the Americas. We think that in this scenario Africans had only two options: capitulate and trade slaves willingly or be destroyed. We don’t consider for a moment African agency in these turning points in world history. If we dug a little bit deeper into the history of these events to look at things from the African perspective, we would see that in many places the scenario I’ve sketched out here wasn’t what necessarily happened. Read more | 7 key questions about the transatlantic slave trade – answered A war on slavery Take 18th-century Dahomey (now Benin) and arguably its best king, Agaja, as an example. Born in c1673, Agaja was crowned in 1708. From the records we have of him, including those of an English Royal African Company agent called Bulfinch Lambe (who was forced to live with Agaja for three years), we know that Agaja was handsome, majestic, intelligent and an incomparable strategist and military commander. In 1724 and 1727, Agaja invaded the nearby kingdoms of Allada and Whydah respectively. At the time, both of these kingdoms were the region’s premier slave traders. Since the late 17th century, the Europeans in the region, including the Dutch, Portuguese, English and French, had had their slaving headquarters in one or both of these kingdoms. Annually, both Whydah and Allada ‘exported’ close to 20,000 enslaved Africans, mostly prisoners of war, those who’d committed crimes or broken serious taboos. Some historians, such as Archibald Dalzel, a late 18th-century historian and also a slave trader who had spent significant time in both Whydah and Dahomey, argued that Agaja invaded Whydah and Allada because he wanted to take over their slave-trading infrastructures. However, Agaja immediately went about dismantling these structures, destroying ports, forts and castles almost with glee. He also showed little interest in preserving good relationships with the Europeans in Allada and Whydah. In fact, he took about 40 of them prisoner. Read more | Africa’s medieval golden age When he consolidated his control over Allada and Whydah, Agaja also did nothing to repair the slave-trading infrastructures he’d destroyed. Instead, he ordered his soldiers to stop slave-traders from bringing enslaved people to the coast. He also jailed Dahomeans who tried to sell enslaved people. When Europeans made to leave Allada and Whydah for kingdoms whose rulers were more hospitable to the idea of selling enslaved people, Agaja blocked them. The Europeans complained that trade dropped off a cliff and that they couldn’t see it returning to its previous levels as long as Agaja remained in power. Read more | The warrior ‘Amazons’ of Dahomey What’s more, any difficulty Agaja faced in holding on to power came not from Europeans, but largely from other great African kingdoms who, for one reason or another, disagreed with his policies. The rulers of Oyo – a city-state of the Yoruba people in what’s now Nigeria – felt that, in conquering neighbouring kingdoms, Agaja had contravened age-old customs that had for centuries governed relations between the coastal west African kingdoms. But stories like Agaja’s, where the African isn’t presented solely as an agency-less victim at the mercy of the Europeans with whom they dealt, are sorely missing from our conception and tellings of African history. Another way in which our understanding of African history lacks nuance is in a poor appreciation for the true breadth and depth of African history and culture. The earliest ancestor in the evolutionary line that produced our species, Homo sapiens, is said to be Sahelanthropus tchadensis (‘Sahel man of Chad’), who lived in around that part of Africa 7 million years ago. Until the emergence of Homo erectus some 5 million years later, early humans lived only in Africa. What’s crucial to remember is that Sahelanthropus wasn’t the only early human being who inhabited the continent. There were lots of different groups of these hominids that probably migrated back and forth across it, lived in different areas, developed differently and then mixed with others, resulting in the emergence of plenty of new groups. It is largely this deep history, diversity and mixing that means Africans today are some of the most ethnically, culturally and racially diverse peoples on Earth. Africans speak around a third of the world’s 7,000 languages. Africa boasts the largest language group in the world – Niger-Congo – which contains around 1,500 languages spoken by more than 300 million people. Africa also boasts one of the oldest language groups in the world – Khoisan – whose 35 languages emerged from one that’s said to have been spoken as far back as 20,000 years ago. A misunderstanding of the depth and complexity of African cultures is often what led 19th-century European anthropologists to dismiss certain aspects of these cultures as nonsensical or unnecessary. One such aspect that comes to mind is witchcraft. Early European anthropologists saw it largely as a universal, superstitious belief system. They mostly didn’t account for the differences in African peoples’ witchcraft beliefs, nor could they conceive of the practical purposes these beliefs served. For example, in the case of the Azande people of what’s now the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan, witchcraft was about diffusing tensions and restoring social harmony. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn’t know about medieval West Africa The Azande believed that you bewitched someone by feeling negatively towards them. In other words, if a Zande (the singular of Azande) was angry, hateful or resentful towards another person, they bewitched that person, causing them to suffer some kind of misfortune (falling ill, say). Therefore, when a Zande suffered a misfortune, they thought of someone with whom they had a problem. They then confronted that person, garnered sympathy by explaining what they’d been going through and asked for reconciliation. Customarily, the latter complied, and social harmony was restored. Complex cultures Another aspect that comes to mind is African female leadership. To many European observers, this represented the inverse of their societies – one in which men dominated institutions and the public sphere, whereas women were often relegated to second-class citizens. In short, these African societies represented to them Amazonia. But this wasn’t really the case. In many female-led African societies, there was actually a balance of power between men and women. From about 25 to 21 BC, the Nubians and the Romans (the latter under their first emperor, Augustus Caesar) were at war. Rome had conquered Egypt and northern Nubia. When the northern Nubians rebelled, their king, Teriteqas, and queen, Amanirenas, lent them the support of their royal army. In Nubia, the king didn’t have absolute authority. In various ways, he shared this authority with his mother (the queen mother) and his wife. The Nubians believed that duality and balance was the foundation of success in any sphere. This included in rulership, which required both male and female energies to function successfully. It was not unusual then that when Teriteqas died in one of this war’s early conflicts, Amanirenas succeeded him (their young son, Akinidad, was not yet elected king). She sacked Roman Egyptian cities, took prisoners and looted statues of Augustus, securing a victory for the Nubians and a favourable peace treaty from Augustus himself. She is the best known of the ‘Kandakes’, Nubian royal women who ruled Meröe (the last Nubian kingdom) nearly absolutely. Gaps in the story These stories represent just a fraction of the breadth, depth and nuance of African peoples’ history and cultures. If we not only want to understand truly the African past but also fill in a significant gap in the story of our species, we need to consider the African perspective even when it comes to well-trodden areas of history like the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. We need to understand and present Africans and their history more accurately. Africans haven’t historically been only the enslaved or the conquered. We’ve been emperors, sculptors, merchants, architects and scholars. We’ve navigated our continent and the globe. We’ve created world-class architecture and art. We’ve innovated, leading academic, governmental and industrial institutions. This is some of the African history we need to see in books, documentaries, films and TV series. If we fail to explore this history, we do a disservice not just to Africans, but to peoples of other societies who otherwise come away with a woefully erroneous understanding of the peoples that have inhabited our world the longest. Luke Pepera is a Ghanaian-born writer, broadcaster, historian and anthropologist. He is the author of Motherland: A Journey Through 500,000 Years of African History, Cultures and Identity (W&N, 2025) This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism”
Many people of African and Caribbean heritage in Britain have suffered racist attacks over the centuries. But, as Hakim Adi explains, they have also been active and effective in organising their own defence
Racist attacks targeting people of African and Caribbean heritage in the UK have a long history, and have taken many varying forms. They are among the main reasons why, for many centuries, it has been necessary for these people to establish organisations for self-defence, often in concert with supporters and allies among the wider population. African self-organisation became well established in the 18th century. In 1768, Sir John Fielding, a London magistrate, complained that enslaved Africans in Britain not only liberated themselves but then would “enter into Societies and make their business to corrupt and dissatisfy the mind of every black servant that comes to England”. In other words, they encouraged others to liberate themselves. Indeed, Africans were among the initiators of abolitionism – one of the biggest political movements in British history. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? The 1780s saw even more overt efforts at political organising by well-known African abolitionists Ottobah Cugoana and Olaudah Equiano. They acted jointly with several other Africans based in London, writing to prominent parliamentarians, abolitionists and the press from 1785 on. In December 1787, Cugoana and Equiano styled themselves Sons of Africa, thereby creating one of the first named African political organisations in Britain’s history – and one of the first Pan-African organisations anywhere in the world. Their letters were signed by as many as 12 different Africans, sometimes specifically “for ourselves and brethren”, suggesting that the signatories represented a much wider community. Through Equiano, the Sons of Africa were connected to other radical political organisations in Britain, including the United Irishmen and the London Corresponding Society. The rise of community activism This tradition continued into the first half of the 19th century, when leading figures included the radical British-Jamaicans Robert Wedderburn and William Davidson, and the Chartist William Cuffay, son of a formerly enslaved Kittitian. Towards the end of that century, the Dominican Celestine Edwards emerged as a prominent anti-racist and anti-imperialist propagandist, writer and speaker, working closely with the African-American journalist and civil rights activist Ida B Wells during her influential tour of Britain. It seems likely that informal organisations existed in places with large black communities in the 19th century. We know that ‘coloured’ seamen in Liverpool united in 1879 to complain against racist employment practices. But it was not until the 1890s that an organisation emerged to coordinate the activities of African and Caribbean activists. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/2WWE9GP-CMYK-f782f11-e1730722296265.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The leading anti-racist and anti-imperialist writer and speaker Celestine Edwards (Photo by piemags/AN24/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="The leading anti-racist and anti-imperialist writer and speaker Celestine Edwards (Photo by piemags/AN24/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> The African Association was founded in London in 1897 by a black South African, Alice Kinloch, and a Trinidadian lawyer, Henry Sylvester Williams. The Association aimed to enable those of African descent to speak with one voice on all issues that concerned them – principally the impact of colonial rule and various forms of racism. It is now best remembered for convening the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 which, Williams stated, “would be the first occasion upon which black men would assemble in England to speak for themselves and endeavour to influence public opinion in their favour”. Heralding the start of modern Pan-Africanism, this moment highlights the fact that the Association was in contact with people in Africa, the Caribbean, the US and Europe. Key figures at the conference included John Archer – who later became the first black mayor of a London borough – composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Haitian journalist and lawyer Benito Sylvain, and American sociologist and activist WEB Du Bois. Many members of the African Association were students and, in the period from the turn of the century to the First World War, several other black student organisations were formed. In 1902, African students at the University of Edinburgh united to urge university authorities to protest against the racist employment policies of the colonial West African Medical Service. Less localised examples include the Ethiopian Progressive Association, formed in 1904; the African Students’ Union, set up in 1916; and the Union of Students of African Descent, established during the First World War. These were generally concerned with Britain’s ‘colour bar’ – informal racial segregation in public facilities and services – as well as the most oppressive aspects of colonial rule overseas. Read more | Black British history: key questions answered Racism soon grew more overt, including large-scale attacks in nine towns and cities in 1919, in some cases resulting in deaths. One victim was Charles Wotten, a young seaman from Bermuda who was drowned in Liverpool docks in 1919. In response, many African, Caribbean and Yemeni seafarers united to defend themselves. In Glasgow, for example, black seafarers fired shots, and armed self-defence was a feature of resistance in South Shields and Cardiff. Indeed, in all the towns and cities affected, black residents united and fought back using any means at their disposal. Confronting institutional racism These attacks exposed wider racism in various institutions. Government and trade unions had allowed discriminatory practices to persist in the shipping industry, and sections of the press had published articles on the “black peril” even during the First World War when men such as Wotten had served. And in 1919, police arrested many of those defending themselves from racist attacks. Such actions were met with community protests from organisations such as the Liverpool Ethiopian Association and Cardiff Coloured Association, while seamen in South Shields threatened to strike. The African Progress Union, founded in 1918, demanded reparation for the “Negro race”. It also protested against the 1919 attacks, sending a delegation to the deputy lord mayor of Liverpool and arranging legal defence so those arrested could defend themselves. Pan-African organisations and their publications flourished between the world wars. Black workers’ organisations also formed to combat racism in various industries, such as the Coloured Film Artists Association. Wider collective action included mass protests in London against Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Many major British organisations also united in the Pan-African Federation to participate in two Subject Peoples Conferences in 1945, and to convene the more famous Pan-African Congress in Manchester that October. Activism within the Windrush generation In the postwar years, the need for collective action continued as the struggle to end colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean intensified and racist attacks in Britain persisted. People who arrived from the Caribbean turned to existing organisations, including the London branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress and the West Indian Students’ Union, but more direct self-defence was often required. In July and August 1948, Liverpool’s black community was forced to defend itself from large-scale racist attacks fuelled in part by continued opposition from the government and the National Union of Seamen to the employment of African and Caribbean seamen. The need for this resistance prompted the formation of such organisations as the Colonial Defence Committee and the Colonial People’s Defence Association. As in earlier episodes, the police arrested many of those trying to defend themselves. Read more | “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation Residents of Causeway Green, Birmingham faced racist attacks in 1949; in the wake of this violence, the influential Afro-Caribbean Organisation was formed in 1952. And in 1958, major racist onslaughts in Nottingham and Notting Hill faced united black resistance on the streets, including from well-organised coalitions. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1212210475-91bbdf9-e1730722492442.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Police question men outside a restaurant during the Notting Hill riots of 1958, which were sparked by violent racist attacks on black residents (Photo by Daily Express/Pictorial Parade/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Police question men outside a restaurant during the Notting Hill riots of 1958, which were sparked by violent racist attacks on black residents (Photo by Daily Express/Pictorial Parade/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> By that time, a hostile environment had been created by the press and by some politicians who expressed the view that “coloured” immigration was a problem that needed to be controlled. The ‘colour bar’ was still widespread, and successive governments failed to introduce legislation to make racism illegal until the Race Relations Act 1965. Conditions were ripe for racist attacks that black people and anti-racists were left to deal with. Edward Scobie, a BBC reporter of Caribbean origin, later wrote: “It would be no exaggeration to say that the attitude of the British police in the Notting Hill area during those days of riots and violence [in 1958] was unsympathetic and anti-black.” And Frances Ezzreco, an activist of the Coloured People’s Progressive Association, recalled thinking: “If someone comes to hit me, I’m going to hit back. If I can’t hit back with my fists because they are bigger than me, I’ll hit them with anything I can lay my hands on – and that’s exactly what happened. We weren’t prepared for that kind of fighting, but when it came to it, we did it.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-613490752-45a70a0-e1730722440284.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A crowd gathers in London to watch the funeral procession of Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan expatriate murdered in 1959 (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="A crowd gathers in London to watch the funeral procession of Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan expatriate murdered in 1959 (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> Many of the key protests in this period were coordinated by the Committee of African Organisations (CAO). This coalition was the main signatory to a letter condemning racism sent to the prime minister, and it established the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain. When the government introduced the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962, including stringent restrictions on immigration from Commonwealth nations – in other words, mostly non-white people – the CAO played a leading role in protests organised by another coalition, the Afro-Asian-Caribbean Conference. Anti-racism in the 20th century and beyond Through the mid-1960s, black protesters continued to act, launching the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 and the Campaign Against Racist Discrimination, inspired by the 1964 visit to London of Martin Luther King Jr. Radical politics, particularly the Black Power movement, prompted the birth of a range of activist coalitions. These were among the bodies campaigning against oppression overseas: in 1969, for example, a protest against apartheid in South Africa was held in Manchester Cathedral. It was also in this period that the word ‘black’ was first used in a political context to describe those of African and Caribbean heritage, although for a time it was sometimes also used to describe those of south Asian origin. Racism in Britain has a long history, closely connected with colonial conquest and enslavement – but so, too, does anti-racism, which has generally been the attitude of the majority. And the collective organising of those of African and Caribbean heritage has played a key role in that tradition – as it still does today. This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Roman slavery: a brutal life in the ancient empire
Guy de la Bédoyère reveals why the Roman empire simply couldn't have functioned without the labour (and the suffering) of its captive population
How many slaves were there in the Roman empire? Were they cruelly treated, or could they sometimes go on to win fame, fortune and freedom? And how often did they – like Spartacus –rebel? Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Guy de la Bédoyère explores the remarkable, and often brutal, history of slavery in the ancient world's most powerful empire. View Green Video on the source website
How many slaves were there in the Roman empire? Were they cruelly treated, or could they sometimes go on to win fame, fortune and freedom? And how often did they – like Spartacus –rebel? Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Guy de la Bédoyère explores the remarkable, and often brutal, history of slavery in the ancient world's most powerful empire. (Ad) Guy de la Bédoyère is the author of Populus: Living and Dying in the Wealth, Smoke and Din of Ancient Rome (Abacus, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon Hannah Platts takes listeners on a multi-sensory tour of the ancient Roman home, here