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‘Wilberfarce 2007’ to mark abolition
• THE African community has watched in dismay as this year has become popularly known to us as “Wilberfarce 2007”.
William Wilberforce, we have been told, freed millions of African people from enslavement.
We have witnessed the political circus around the question of whether Britain should apologise for its violation of African human rights.
The celebrations have even gone as far as to create a ‘slavery beer’ named after the Brookes ship, a place of torture, death and suffering for many African people.
The culmination of this gross cultural orgy, organised by the Set All Free organisation, was the service in Westminster Abbey on Tuesday, March 27.
Attended by the Queen, Prince Philip, Tony and Cherie Blair, Trevor Philips and a number of other African Christians, the ceremony involved “the singing of hymns, readings from the Bible and an air of inviolable solemnity” according to David Smith from the Guardian newspaper.
The popular tabloid myth that continues to be bandied around is that “slavery happened 200 ago, it’s over”. This is patently untrue.
Even by European standards, British Slavery was only finally abolished in Sierra Leone on January 1 1928, nearly a century after the Abolition of Slavery Act.
Reverend John Hall claims to have delivered an “inclusive and moving” service at the Wilberfest abolition celebration and asserted that mentioning “the courage of abolitionists, black and white” who were at liberty to live in relative opulence compares with the millions of African freedom fighters who often paid for the liberty of their families with their own lives.
There is no comparison to be made between Boukman Dutty and William Wilberforce, there is no equality in a comparison of Queen Nzinga and Queen Victoria and there is no equality of comparison between the Haitian
revolution and the passing of the 1807 act.
If church leaders will not provide honest moral leadership for their people then perhaps it is time for honest people to provide moral leadership for their church.
TOYIN AGBETU
Founder of Ligali, a non-profit organisation challenging negative representations
of the African British community in the media, Hackney
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