Currently the Docklands Museum section on transatlantic slavery consists of four panels of text and a very large portrait of Wilberforce. A new permanent gallery is opening in November titled; London, Sugar and Slavery. I was shocked at the Eurocentric language used to describe slavery in the current exhibit, it does not refer to the brutality, violence and in its abolition panel it doesn’t mention anything about black abolitionists or slave resistance and generally glosses over the whole thing. 

The next day we managed to get a meeting with the museums community access officer who told us that the actual building that the museum was situated in a building that housed sugar from slave plantations and was apparently ‘a trading post’ for the sale of Africans themselves, this made me even more baffled at the panels they are currently displayed, especially as it is London. From comparisons it appears that the capital is trailing behind the rest of the country in its commemorations. I appreciate that the new exhibit will soon be opening and no doubt will be a vast improvement, but it is so late in the year commemorating the bicentenary of the slave trade, a time when the publics attention is really turned to the way the country remembers this history. Surely it wouldn’t have been too hard to reprint some more appropriate panels. I was surprised that they are also only 3 years old and in 2004 good examples of presentations of history of slavery could be seen in exhibits in Liverpool and Bristol. I am keen to learn more about how and when Africans were brought back to London from Africa and if other public spaces in London have responded in the same way as the Docklands.

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