Likewise, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, renowned for his defeat of Napoleon’s French navy in 1805, was accompanied by Black sailors during his battle against the French at Cape Trafalgar. And in another journey to Panama, Drake formed an alliance with mixed-race Africans known as the Cimaroons in order to outwit the Spanish in Central America. The explorer Francis Drake’s famous mission to circumnavigate the globe in 1577 included four Africans as part of his crew. They were also important actors in British history.

This is compounded by the fact that, historically, British plantations were located in the West Indies, in places like Jamaica and Barbados, far away from the British populace residing in Britain.īut Black people were not just victims of the British slave trade. It wasn’t until the 1970s that archeologists rediscovered the site and identified it as a major British slave fortress in West Africa, a site that the historian Joseph Opala called the “Pompeii” of the Atlantic slave trade.Įven today, most British people have a far clearer picture of American slavery than they do of their own country’s involvement in it. This is evidenced by the fact that Bunce Island itself remained forgotten for generations. Nonetheless, Britain’s role in the slave trade is often glossed over or ignored. Half of all the millions of Africans carried into slavery in the eighteenth century were transported on British ships.

Between 1618, which marked the rise of the British slave trade, and 1807, when the country abolished it, Britain was the premier slave-trading nation in the Atlantic.

This island contains the ruins of a fortress that, for over a century, was at the heart of the British slave trade in Africa.įrom that fortress, tens of thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped to plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas. There’s an island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River in West Africa called Bunce Island.

Black british history david olusoga