March 22, 2007
Ken apologises for slavery
Published in the Evening Standard
Well, at least we now know he can apologise. For a while, Ken Livingstone seemed to have inherited a speech impediment from the Fonz, the hero of the 1970s sitcom Happy Days, who was physically unable to utter the word ‘sorry.’ But yesterday we saw that our mayor has no such disability. On the pages of the Guardian, he issued a formal apology for London’s role in the “monstrous crime” of the transatlantic slave trade, whose bicentenary will be marked on Sunday.
Writing that article can’t have been easy. We know from recent experience that it can take the mayor quite some time, Fonzie-style, to spit out the s-word. When many Jewish Londoners were offended by Livingstone’s branding of a Jewish reporter – the Evening Standard’s Oliver Finegold — as a concentration camp guard, Livingstone refused to say sorry. It took the best part of two years and a bitter legal process before he finally, and to his credit, apologised last December.
Perhaps, though, it’s easier to say sorry for those things you didn’t actually do — and whatever gripes we may have with our mayor, not many of us hold him personally responsible for the murderous trade in Africa’s people. Tony Blair is no different, readily apologising for Britain’s role in the Irish famine of the 19th century – though uttering not a word of regret for those decisions in which his involvement was rather more direct. As one comic has quipped, at the present rate we can expect the British government to apologise for the lethal invasion of Iraq around the year 2153.
The temptations to cynicism are obvious. Yet not all retrospective apologies are without value. If for example, the victims of a crime are still alive, it can be a great comfort to hear an apology, even if it comes from the descendants of the original perpetrators. The textbook example, cited by the mayor yesterday, is Germany’s apology for the Holocaust, something the remaining survivors of that catastrophe badly needed to hear. But there are others.
The same is true of an apology which entails a promise to change future behaviour or which implies a deep and soulful reckoning by the institution doing the apologising. Think of Pope John-Paul II’s semi-apology to the Jews for Christian anti-semitism on a visit to Jerusalem in 2000. He stopped short of saying sorry, declaring instead that the church was “deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-semitism directed against the Jews by Christians.” It wasn’t enough; it didn’t mention the church’s complicity in the Holocaust. But still it had meaning, because the Pope was giving an implicit commitment that Catholicism would not return to the anti-Jewish teachings of its past.
But the mayor’s statement on slavery is not in the same category. He was not, like Germany, addressing the direct victims of the crime: those people are long dead. Nor was he, like the Pope, promising a new course of behaviour by the body he heads. Nor was there the sense that the mayor’s statement emerged from a long, serious process of grappling with an uncomfortable history. As it happens, many British institutions are looking hard at the calamity of slavery, with exhibits and lecture series going on across the land: the current Peoples, Portraits and Abolition season at the National Portrait Gallery is an admirable example. Ken Livingstone’s intervention yesterday might be part of that process, but it would be a stretch to see it as the culmination of a period of collective soul-searching.
Without those elements, the mayor’s apology is well-intentioned, even welcome — and he is surely right that it is squalid for the prime minister to avoid saying sorry simply to deflect legal claims from slaves’ descendants — but it lacks emotional gravity. It feels too much like a political move to have real heft. What are the politics behind it? A clue is provided in the passage where Ken suggests the man currently lauded as the great liberator of the slaves — witness the new film Amazing Grace — is over-rated. “No one denigrates William Wilberforce,” the mayor writes generously, “but it was black resistance and economic development that destroyed slavery, not white philanthropy.”
Livingstone is right to recall the heroism of those slaves who staged revolts, from the first in 1570 right through to the 1831 rebellion in Jamaica. But most historians agree that these uprisings could not, alone, have eradicated slavery: the British Empire was simply too strong to fold in the face of a few pockets of resistance here and there.
Instead the key factor was the stirring of British civil society, as Christian evangelicals galvanized public opinion to reject this hateful trade on religious and moral grounds. London can claim a particular role, since Wilberforce and the other prime movers operated from here, earning the name the Clapham Sect. You’d think that Livingstone, a progressive, would celebrate this movement of enlightened social reform. Yet he dismisses it. Historian Tristram Hunt suspects he knows why: “Because Christian evangelicals don’t quite fit the Ken world view.” The heroes of black resistance are a more comfortable object of praise.
Still, none of that would have mattered if Ken had made the John-Paul II move – using his apology to promise action in the future. For slavery is not entirely eradicated; nor is it confined to our history. It lives on, in this very city.
In the London of 2007, there are perhaps thousands of women, mainly from eastern Europe, tricked and trafficked into this city and now locked in windowless rooms, where they are forced to have sex with up to 40 men a day in 20-hour shifts. The meager money they make they have to give to their captors, under threat that if they don’t their families back home will be killed.
Tomorrow Britain will sign the European Convention against people trafficking. That’s good, but action from the mayor to eradicate it in this city would be even better. An apology for the slavery of the past is all very well — but abolition of the slavery we live with right now would mean so much more.
Posted on March 22, 2007 11:50 AM