When you think about who was literate in 1860s Alabama, it was mostly white men – and that history is 100 per cent written by the victors.”Īs for Africatown’s black community, Brown’s film points out that, until the mid-1960s, those who talked about it were in danger of being lynched. “There was absolutely a conspiracy of silencing. “Even in my family, which is white, it wasn’t something which is talked about openly,” Margaret Brown, the film’s director, tells me over Zoom. Its present inhabitants are descendants of the last slaves to reach America’s shores. More powerfully still, it immerses us in the struggles of Africatown, the predominantly black community which grew up around the Africans stolen by Meaher. Filmed over the course of four and a half years, it embeds viewers in the search for, and eventual discovery of, the remains of the Clotilda. Now this extraordinary story is explored in a Netflix documentary, Descendant. The Clotilda was scuttled to cover up his crime. He risked execution and deracinated an entire community on a whim. And the local businessman who sponsored the expedition, Thomas Meaher, did so for a bet. But the Clotilda’s journey is significant – she arrived in Alabama 52 years after Congress had abolished slave trading, forbidding it with the death penalty. They were dumped on the shore, and the Clotilda was sunk.įor most of the previous two centuries, this would have been unremarkable: just another transaction in a trade which, for Britain alone, is estimated to have made £12m between 16. In 1860, she sailed from West Africa, in what is now Benin, to Mobile Bay, Alabama, with 110 African men, women and children aboard. Most sunk, or were scuttled, or rechristened after abolition as though the stain of their trade could be buried under a fresh lick of paint. The names of most slave ships, like their human cargo, are forgotten.
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