Two free things on Tuesday: brain food in Bloomsbury

Today's outings took me to Bloomsbury.

First stop was the British Library where I popped in to see the Michael Katakis Photographs in the Folio Gallery.  One wall of black and white images of Sierra Leone and the US. The photos were simple, people were smiling and posing in the photos from Sierra Leone unaware of the cataclysm about to fall. In the photos of the US no one smiles. The cataclysm has already occured: the Vietnam war and the 9/11.  It  was hard to say which pictures were sadder, of those who already knew the worst or of those happy smiling kids whose country would be plunged into a 9 year civil war. 

Then it was time for some Brain Food at UCL at their free public access lunchtime lectures held every Tuesday on a variety of subjects. Today's lecture was on Slavery and the writing of two contemporary women, Mary Prince and Elizabeth Barratt Browning by Professor Catherine Hall who argued well that the legacies of slavery are still with us and that slavery cannot be pigeonholed as black history or that abolition tells the whole story of British involvement. British history is the history of slavery. I sensed from some of the comments from the audience as they left that they found this an uncomfortable message although there was a heartfelt comment from a Trinidadian member of the audience thanking the Professor for insisting that the history of slavery is a central part of any telling of British history. As we walked out into a Bloomsbury built from the wealth of slave owners, the lecture gave me much to ponder on especially as I had recently read Harman's chapters on slavery in A People's History of the World and was reminded that the racist narratives of today were written in those dark days of slavery: "The prevalence of racism today leads people to think that it has always existed...slavery is then seen as a by-product of racism, rather than the other way round...Racism developed from an apology for African slavery into a full blown system of belief into which all people's of the Earth could be fitted as 'white', 'black', 'brown', 'red' or 'yellow'."