Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

On a day when events in Israel and Gaza dominate the headlines, I’ll be boarding a flight from London to Barbados, heading for Codrington College, the site where the Anglican Mission Agency I now chair inherited and ran a sugar plantation with enslaved labour for over a hundred years. The burial places of those whose, often short and brutal, lives ended at Codrington, were noted neither on plans nor on the ground. We think however, in these last few weeks, we may have found some of them, ironically, like King Richard III, beneath a car park. Finding and marking the graves is one small part of a much wider programme. Our aim is to recognise and respond to the legacy of enslavement in ways that will build a better future for the descendants of those who produced the sugar that returned so much wealth to Britain three centuries ago. At the heart of it lies the task of learning to tell history not simply from the perspective of the rich and powerful, but from the actual experiences of ordinary people. Black History Month, which reaches its midpoint this week, adds a particular energy to that task. At the height of the American Civil War, Confederate envoys based in Liverpool sought to bring Britain into the conflict, on the side of the South, arguing that the UK’s primary interest lay in protecting the cotton trade. Famously, Manchester’s weavers refused to handle the slavery produced cotton they supplied, even at the cost to their own employment. The US President himself wrote a letter of thanks. Today his statue stands in the city centre, in a spot appropriately named Lincoln Square. Telling the story of slavery is for me not just an exercise in history but also a theological imperative. The Christian gospel compels me to recognise the intrinsic worth of every Individual. Christ died not just for the sake of a fortunate few but for the whole of humanity. When the story of what has happened in Gaza and Israel these last two years finds its way into the history books, I believe it must not just be the story of clashing ideologies and geopolitical forces, but centre on the experiences of those massacred by terrorists or held as hostage, or starved, or killed in bombed out buildings, and of all who survived but bear the scars Alongside this, recovering the memory of enslaved people buried beneath a Barbadian car park long ago, may seem less compelling, but it is by remembering and retelling all the stories of human beings at the heart of them that I hope a journey to a better future, in Barbados, the Middle East and for all of us, can be made.