27/09/2021
As residents and practitioners in the UKs most engaged Arts and Culture space Pavilion HIVE members are committed to embedding the decolonisation and reparatory justice agenda into RBKC’s Creative Conversation series. We urge you to join us, and catch up with colleagues around the world who are proactively supporting and actually doing decolonising and reparations work, rather than leaving it only to those from Afrikan Heritage Communities.
Aim: to engage in conversation, share ideas and experiences and begin the process of looking at the world through a different lens, one that communicates different cultural narratives and applies critical thinking to how art has accrued value, is valued and funded in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This exercise will provide an opportunity for creatives to enter a discussion about the decolonising process and begin to develop strategic plans to create the space in which Afrikans can claim space, change the narrative, the language and have agency to shift the discussion.
Decolonisation requires that institutions, arts and cultural organisations and practitioners are transparent, honest and take accountability for their unmerited benefits, monetary and otherwise. Confronting colonial structures and practises in arts and culture is not lip service, and it is more than tokenism. It is a long-term process that requires that we illuminate the inherent bias of white privilege and eurocentrism in the arts and cultural realm; it requires systemic change in how we speak, think and act, it requires shifting the power of decision makers.
If arts and culture is to be truly decolonised and if there is to be tangible racial justice for Afrikan heritage communities, including reparations, then senior managers, curators and others in decision making positions must reappraise our institutions and their histories as part of a larger process that acknowledges the role of empire and the harm caused in terms of violence, theft, exploitation and erasure.
There are a number of institutions beginning the process of decolonising. For example, in Scotland a number of museums have begun work to research their involvement in and profit from the enslavement and trading of Afrikans, colonialism and continuing racial injustice. V&A Dundee, Glasgow Life and museums of the University of Aberdeen and University of Dundee have all recently begun researching and expanding how they use their collections to properly communicate Scotland's part in enslavement and colonial history.
By learning more about the transformative projects and processes that are happening beyond the RBKC and Exhibition Road we hope cultural colleagues would be inspired to take action themselves.
The Local and the Global Context: In 1833 the United Kingdom spent 40% of its national budget, £20 million, to compensate enslavers (captors) for the freedom of enslaved Afrikans freedom, it was essentially reparations paid for the loss of ‘human property’. In addition the captors ‘won another concession, the euphemistically titled “apprenticeship” system. What this meant was that the slaves themselves were forced to work the fields for a further six years after the supposed abolition of slavery – 45 hours a week for no pay’ . On February 9 2015 following a tweet from the treasury department which read “Millions of you helped end the slave trade through your taxes” it was discovered in a perverse turn of events that Britain’s taxpayers who included those whose ancestors were subjected to the horrors of enslavement, had contributed to the very compensation debt paid to the captors nearly 200 years earlier.
It is an indisputable fact that Britain was built on the proceeds of enslavement and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has substantial links to these criminal endeavours. For example, research undertaken by the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at UCL identified that sizable amounts of compensation were paid to residents in the borough for emancipation of former enslaved people across the Caribbean. The so called éminence grise Hans Sloane benefitted from the proceeds of enslavement through his wife: Sloane Square, Sloane Avenue, Sloane Street and the Chelsea Physic Garden are all connected to their legacies. The Cadogan estate belonged to the family of Hans Sloane’s son-in-law. Brompton Oratory is built on a site bought from Robert Blemell Pollard, a school-proprietor who was a judgement creditor on ‘slave-property.’ Of course the museums in the South of the borough are full of stolen items related to the colonial era, their collections bequeathed from wealthy European donors who benefited from empire, including the foundation of the Natural History Museum, as part of the British Museum via a large donation from Hans Sloane.
Hosted by Isis Amlak, JC Kamau, Junior Tomlin, Lynda Rosenior Patten, Toby Laurent Belson and Harry Ross Eanraig Ros