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Colonial Complexity in the British Landscape

An African-centric autoethnography

Shawn Sobers

Background to research

This chapter will explore the notion of what sites of collective significance in the United Kingdom can mean to people of African descent,1 whose ancestral lands were formerly colonised by the British Empire. With such a premise, the methodological position of this study needs to be stated from the outset. Although I am of African descent, I am not attempting to make claims for a notional African diasporic community. An autoethnographic methodology (Chang 2008) has therefore been adopted to avoid any attempt at speaking for others, or to be mistaken as such. Autoethnography asks the researcher to draw on personal experience to make broader theoretical points, and to make him or herself as transparent and vulnerable in the process in order to highlight how research works and how knowledge is gathered (Behar 1997). This is a personal, physical, theoretical, and emotional journey exploring these ideas, drawing on primary experience, observations, and broader primary and secondary research. As stated by African American anthropologist Lanita Jacobs-Huey (2002: 791), ‘The Natives are gazing and talking back.’

The significance of this study from a personal perspective stems from two specific moments I witnessed, which provides the schematic framework of this chapter, offering two distinct ways the notion of colonial complexity can be considered.

Part one − sites of association

In 2007 I was co-leading a research project which saw us taking groups of African heritage people to various National Trust properties. On different visits I saw both young and older people become upset when the tour guides failed to mention the historical African associations with the properties. This current study will not be looking back at those specific examples (published elsewhere, see Sobers & Mitchell 2013), but will look at a more recent example from 2017 of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, and how sites of association can be reconciled within the body politic.

Part two − sites of pilgrimage

The second key moment was in 2015, speaking with a friend, writer Judah Tafari, who lamented not feeling there was anywhere in Britain that he can visit with his family that has African heritage significance that was not related to slavery (which he was tired of seeing as the only African narrative). Judah said there was nowhere to visit other than Fairfield House, the former residence of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I during his exile from Mussolini’s invasion from 1936–1940 (Tafari 2016). I have written elsewhere about how Fairfield House has become a site of pilgrimage for members of the Rastafari faith (Sobers 2017), and in this chapter I share the findings of an alternative Rastafari pilgrimage undertaken in 2017 of other sites the Emperor visited during exile. This saw me inventing my own three-day 899-mile solo pilgrimage across England and Scotland.

Embodied ownership of post-colonial landscapes

The two key moments described, for me, combine to present what Stuart Hall argued was the post-colonial ‘fissured’ notion of identity on the British Isles to which heritage industries need to respond (Hall 1999: 7):

Hall presents challenges to formal heritage and educational institutions to think about how they could re-imagine incorporating ‘Black British’ narratives into their work, and how, similar to Jacobs-Huey’s provocation, they can chart how African descent people themselves create their own collections and heritage sites. The research in this chapter draws upon heritage industry discourses, though the muse for this study is not a formal set of recommendations for how they could do their work in a more inclusive manner, but rather the African heritage individuals themselves. As a creative practitioner, namely in photography and filmmaking, I also draw upon those discourses in relation to landscape and identity.

From my experience, as an African heritage person growing up in the United Kingdom, it takes motivation to engage with national heritage sites steeped in British history. Whilst I have enjoyed looking around stately homes and royal palaces, I still cannot shake the question: ‘How much of this was funded from the labour of my ancestors?’ Like many of my generation growing up in Caribbean families during 1970s and 1980s, we did not take annual summer holidays on the British Riviera or in Europe. We went on holiday about once a decade when we had enough money to summer on whichever island with familial ties (for me, Barbados). So the British landscape always felt alien, heightened when I educated myself in the thorns of history. As described by Gilroy (1993: 1) ‘Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness.’ Thus to engage with the British landscape beyond the aesthetic requires a notional motivation for an emotional ownership of that landscape. In her personal exploration of her journey to reconnect with the United States, bell hooks describes her experience of returning to her hometown of Kentucky, which she had left 30 years previously, stifled by the impact of the state’s racist history (hooks 2009: 18).

hooks goes onto describe how she read the memoirs of ‘black Kentuckians,’ of a state steeped in slavery and racial exploitation, yet seeing the ‘inventive ways black folks deployed to survive and thrive in the midst of exploitation and oppression’ (ibid., 20). After spending 30 years away from Kentucky, and seeing racism as the ‘norm’ throughout the States, on returning, hooks surprises herself and ‘found there essential remnants of a culture of belonging, a sense of the meaning and vitality of geographical place’ (ibid). From growing up in a place she began to despise because of its racist history and the ‘dysfunctional’ impact on the emotional state of people, including her family, she eventually made it her home.

The notion of home is an overarching metaphor in this conversation. Whether a home from childhood or more recent, permanent or temporary, an idealised notion of home provides the premise of a place the dweller should feel comfortable, safe, and rested (Bachelard 1994: 4).

This is the leap asked of children of the former British Empire such as myself: to extend the notion of home beyond immediate dwelling places, to reach into the civic and rural fabric of the United Kingdom. Not to forget the atrocities of slavery and Empire, or even be comfortable with traumatic histories, but to feel comfortable calling this place home, with acceptance of the ownership of its past, present, and future. The call for this leap is as romanticised as this notion of home itself. The key word in is the criteria of a home is safe – will children of the Empire feel safe to call this place their home, and will they be given access to full ownership of the United Kingdom’s past, present, and future by the resident European heritage hosts? At the time of writing, the United Kingdom is negotiating to leave the European Union, thus complicating matters further.

The provocation behind my challenge is whether the descendants of my children’s generation and younger should be influenced by the cultural politics of my generation and older? My heart says no, they need to look to the future and be their own people. My head urges that they need protection from the politics of history in case it resurfaces. Unsurprisingly Stuart Hall (in the same text quotedearlier), pre-empting my concerns, would be cautious of full adoption. He argues that the ‘peculiarity’ of African descendent British subjects is that, no matter how long we have lived in this country, assimilate, and become ‘deeply familiar’ within the landscape, due to the fact we remain (physically) black we remain ‘culturally inexplicable’ to a white population who have never had to give their heritage much thought (Hall 1999: 12). The diasporic and transatlantic bonds of this peculiarity concern the first theme under study: sites of association.

Part one − sites of association

As previously mentioned, when I visit stately homes or other splendid buildings, the thought of connections with slavery and Empire is present. If I am at the property for leisure, or there for work reasons (unrelated to heritage) such as a meeting or conference, the thought remains silent, but I might look for clues, dates, and familiar names. Living in Bristol, which has well-documented connections with the slave trade (Coules 2007), these thoughts are never absent and the same can be said for most cities in Britain, not just port cities. Not only do fine buildings suggest connections to slavery, but any luxurious surroundings concentrate the mind on such connections. However to remain a functioning ‘sane’ individual, unless connected to a particular project, these ideas are silenced, as to follow up on every association would lead to unviable life obsession.

This persistent awareness is the enactment of the double-consciousness to which Gilroy referred. Of looking at oneself from the perspective of those implicated in oppression, Du Bois states,

With this is mind, it can be a relief to enter such a building with an overt agenda to discover a property’s connections with slavery, rather than through furtive glances. When I first visited Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire (on 20 December 2017), it was as part of a participatory film project about the building’s history, drawing upon original (forthcoming) research by Dr. Helen Bates and Dr. Susanne Seymour, Lisa Robinson and the Slave Trade Legacies2 group. The house’s most famous occupant, poet and political reformer Lord Byron, neglected the house to near dereliction, selling it to his former school-friend and slave-trader Thomas Wildman in 1818. Wildman renovated Newstead Abbey to its former glory, adding the extensions and modifications which made it the property it is today. As Simon Brown, the property’s curator, said whilst showing me around, ‘structurally, the Newstead we see today is Wildman’s, not Byron’s.’ Fans of Byron, visiting in their tens of thousands annually from around the world, have slave-trader Wildman to thank. An additional personal association arose, I noted that the Wildman family had bought their Jamaican plantation (Quebec) from slave-trader and politician William Beckford, whose son, the novelist and art collector also named William Beckford, is well known in my birth town of Bath; the entire city is overlooked by the prominent landmark Beckford’s Tower. Beckford junior inherited his father’s wealth in 1770 at the age of ten, making him one of the richest people in the country. Standing in Newstead Abbey, it was if I was transported back to the landscape of my birth town 163 miles away, following a financial trail through the Caribbean. As a child growing up in Bath, I was fascinated by Beckford’s Tower, regularly looking out for it high in the landscape. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s and lived in Bristol that I discovered the historical connection between the tower and transatlantic slavery I was disappointed that this indelible stain had polluted my previous appreciation.

This link between Newstead Abbey and the city of Bath is apt, as they both play a similar function in how the horrors of the Transatlantic slave trade can be viewed from the perspective of the British Isles, namely keeping up a polite facade in genteel society. Bath plays this role by geography, and Newstead Abbey by metaphor. As Bristol rose to prominence in the early eighteenth century, expanding its economy as a successful slaving port, much of the wealth flowed 30 miles east to Bath, with the merchants spending their plantation-gained money in the spas and health resorts of the city that grew wealthy from entertaining the genteel elite. According to Perry (2013: 108),

Bristol thus shielded Bath as a site of association, the former containing the overt signs of ships, cranes, and warehouses, caught red-handed with blood-money, while Bath washed those hands clean like Pontius Pilate. The facade of the genteel elite is also present in the narrative of Newstead Abbey, with Thomas Wildman using money raised thousands of miles away at his father’s slaving plantation to fund the purchase and renovation of the dilapidated Newstead Abbey. The equivalent of Bath’s luxurious health spas and entertainment for the elite at Newstead became the figure of Byron himself. By the time Wildman purchased the property, Byron was so famous that Wildman could rebuild the property to become a museum celebrating the life and work of the great poet. Byron has no known connections with slavery (other than selling his house to Wildman), and the conceit of polite society was maintained, with the violence behind the money hidden across the Atlantic.

Hall asks, ‘What would “England” mean without its cathedrals, churches, castles and country houses, its gardens, thatched cottages and hedgerowed landscapes?’ (1999: 4). He argues that such entities in the landscape become English identity itself, presenting a social fabric as it wants to be, even if at the core of such fabrications it is a veneer folly, facial screens hiding the engine room. Hall suggests ‘It is one of the ways in which the nation slowly constructs for itself a sort of collective social memory’ (ibid). Both Newstead Abbey and Bath play that role for England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they present a romantic visual representation of how life could be, all the while funded by a shameful reality.

At Newstead Abbey, Byron left a poem which prophetically speaks to this notion, albeit in an unusual circumstance. Byron’s dog Boatswain died of rabies in 1808, and the poem he wrote in tribute, ‘Epitaph to a Dog,’ is inscribed on the elaborate tomb in the grounds of Newstead Abbey. The poem sees Byron compare the virtuous and loyal nature of his animal companion with the corrupted conceit of human nature. The extract below is what Byron had to say about humanity:

What to do with history like this today?

A community group from Nottingham called Slave Trade Legacies have been working together since 2015 to explore connections between Nottinghamshire and the transatlantic slave-trade. The group worked with Newstead Abbey and produced a body of work to begin telling this untold story. I worked with the group to produce a film based on a poem by Michelle ‘Mother’ Hubbard titled Blood Sugar, which was written through a participatory process with the group. The film is now screened on a monitor in a new room at the entrance to Newstead Abbey, designed to give an overview of the whole property at the start of a visit.

The physical inclusion of this narrative installed into the house is part of an overall refresh of the current interpretive material and includes new approaches to how the Byron and Wildman stories are told. Wildman’s links to slavery plantations in Jamaica plays a small but significant part in this redesign.

The Slave Trade Legacies group is approximately 20 in number, a combination of Nottingham-born residents and those who have moved from elsewhere. The group consists of a range of ages (approximately 40–80), all self-defined as black. They have taken it upon themselves to take ownership of the Newstead landscape, not for their own benefit, but for the next visitors to that space. The embodied ownership of site-specific action sees the group become active members of civil society, custodians of the knowledge they have unearthed, presenting it back for public consumption, rather than their own private knowledge banks.

In this instance, the leap to ownership of the landscape comprises action beyond awareness. I would argue that it is possible to still feel ownership over a landscape without then having to take action to rectify previous injustices. As with hooks, working on our interior personalities and feeling comfortable and safe in a place is enough; it is already a big leap. There is a difference here between individual embodied knowledge, and activism of the collective body politic.

Autoethnographic postscript to section

As I was typing those last words about Beckford’s Tower, I received a private Facebook message from someone I didn’t know. She asked if I was related to any Sobers family in Barbados, Trinidad, or Grenada, as she was tracing her family tree. I replied saying all the Sobers family I knew were from Barbados, and we started trying to fit the pieces together. No direct link has been made yet, but it is still early days.

I mentioned it to my 16-year-old daughter, and she was immediately interested. Unbeknown to me she had been conducting her own research into the family name. She shared with me some of the things she discovered, and asked me about slavery, and where the plantation would have been in Barbados. We decided we would visit it one day. I told her about Beckford’s Tower, which she also knew well from the Bath landscape. She guessed that most of the buildings of Bath and Bristol were connected with the slave trade. I replied saying yes, it is good to be aware but not consumed by that awareness.

I told her we would resume the conversation, and I returned to my laptop and wrote this Postscript. I shared with the woman the web page my daughter had found about the family name, and she replied saying she had previously seen it and that that is what inspired her to start the family research.

It seems the ghosts are calling home.

Part two − sites of pilgrimage

For the second part of this research, I invented my own pilgrimage and went on a three-day 899-mile journey alone. This pilgrimage took place between 21 and 23 December 2017, the day after I visited Newstead Abbey.

For many years I have volunteered at Fairfield House (Bath), the former residence of exiled Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I and his wife, Empress Menen Asfaw. The royal household lived there from 1936–1943, with their children (Princes and Princesses), grandchildren, government advisors, Ethiopian Orthodox priests, nannies, cooks, and other members of the household (Bowers 2016: 91). Fairfield House has now become a pilgrimage site for the worldwide Rastafari community who view the Emperor as their deity (Tafari, 2016: 221–251). It is also a site of importance for many Ethiopians who live in, or visit, England, and members of the Orthodox Church. Visitors to the house have included members of the Ethiopian Royal Family themselves, some of whom lived there with the Emperor in exile. The Emperor is remembered fondly by the people of Bath, and in 1999 I directed a documentary for ITV-West (Footsteps of the Emperor) interviewing local people who either worked for the Emperor, met him, had family connections, or with other stories to tell. In 1958 the Emperor gifted the house to the City for use by the elderly. It is still used for that purpose today, also containing a museum, art gallery space, and community resources.

During his time in exile, the Emperor visited a number of sites around the United Kingdom. In the short space of time I had for my pilgrimage, I prioritised the furthest away, which happened to be Wemyss Bay, on the coast of the Firth of Clyde, Inverclyde, Scotland. The Bay was the site of the now demolished Wemyss Castle, where the Emperor visited in 1936, immortalised in a photograph. I then worked my way back south visiting Kelburn Castle, Abbey Hotel, and Holy Trinity Church in Malvern, where he was known to stay, visiting his granddaughters at a nearby boarding-school. Here, I discuss my experiences in Wemyss Bay.

For this pilgrimage I was interested in the impact this African presence had on the British landscape, and how the idea of this African presence could connect me with an unfamiliar British landscape. I was not looking for physical or anecdotal memories, though of course these would be welcomed. Neither was I looking for any spiritual reawakening or epiphany. The historical context provided me with a good excuse to travel, so I grasped it. I linked the pilgrimage to an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project titled, ‘Ethiopian Stories in a British Landscape.’

There were a number of rules I set myself in advance, as follows:

As with all journeys there is so much that could be said. Here I have discussed key moments from Wemyss Bay under themes which I feel are pertinent to the topic here. I have subdivided the themes into chronologically ordered parts, so they make sense told in context. The themes are; being present, serendipity, vulnerability, and talking with strangers.

Being present

The van arrived in Bristol at 8 am, but before I could collect it, I first drove to Bath at 7.30 am to drive my parents back to Bristol for a hospital appointment. I drove them home to Bath afterwards, and then returned to Bristol to pick up the van. I mention this as I realised, while driving to Bath first thing in the morning, that I was not doing my family duty before my pilgrimage started; I realised that this was the beginning of my pilgrimage. One of my favourite quotes is ‘The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there’ (Pirsig 1989: 248). I think of this quote often, and thought about it whilst embarking on this journey. It came into my mind again as I was driving to Bath to pick up my parents. They are my mountains.

I picked up the van, leaving Bristol at about 3 pm. Twenty minutes into my journey, I realised that I had forgotten my camera tripod. It was hidden under clutter in the boot of my car. Even though I had vowed to only use my camera-phone, I brought along my DSLR as a backup, and the tripod also had an attachment for my phone. So rather than being in the present and preoccupied with romantic thoughts about Rastafari philosophy and tracing the footsteps of Haile Selassie, I could only think about the missing tripod, and berating myself for being so stupid. After about an hour more of this distraction as I drove, I eventually decided to fix the situation, making a detour to the nearest city (Worcester) to buy a tripod. This added at least an hour and a half onto my journey, and I had already stopped at most service stations to write my journal along the way. By the time I bought the new tripod it was 6.08 pm, and in real terms I was only about two hours outside of Bristol. As I was leaving Worcester my friend Rob rang me to check my progress. I complained to him I was going a lot slower than I had planned. He reminded me that the diversions, the pauses to write, and whatever other experiences I had were the point of the journey, and that any expectations of time were entirely self-imposed. It was a good reminder. After that I progressed as slowly as I wanted to.

Serendipity

I am interested in how, when you give certain ideas your attention, links can be made. Listening to BBC Radio 4 in the van, a programme comes on with comedian Susan Calman. She was trying her hand at baking, something she cannot do, being taught by a man called Selassie. She says he was on the show the Great British Bake Off, but as I have never watched it, I had no idea who he was. I later find out the spelling of his name is Selasi (surname Gbormittah), but it is pronounced Selassie.

A few hours later, at around 1 am, still driving, I turn to BBC Radio 1. Reggae comes out of the speakers. The presenter/DJ, (whose name I later discover as Toddla T), takes listeners to Jamaica as he speaks with veteran reggae singers, local Rastafari, and other Jamaican locals about certain sites that were important to the history of reggae music. They talk about trying to get certain buildings protected by UNESCO, visit an old record shop and talk about how they get visitors coming there specifically from all over the world in a form of pilgrimage to reggae. They mention roots reggae and the importance of Haile Selassie. I could not believe my ears. No one would believe this if it was scripted.

Vulnerability

Not long after passing Lockerbie I pull over on the side of the road to take a photograph of the landscape. I put the camera on the new tripod and try a few long exposures. I (uncharacteristically) decide to take a few self-portraits, but only want the back of me in the shot. I set the camera to timer to give myself chance to get in position, and still keep the setting to long exposure, so I have to stand in position for quite a long time. I hear a beep from a passing motorist, and it immediately dawns on me it must look like I am urinating on the roadside. I am mortified. My double-consciousness kicks in. I think the people out here probably do not see many people of African descent, let alone Rastafari, and when they do they think he urinates in full public view. Even though this is no doubt a comedic moment and I do chuckle to myself, I also feel a certain shame, and it stays on my mind. Such is the burden of the double-conscious mind. This episode confirmed to trust my instincts and not use my DSLR but only my camera phone as I previously vowed.

Talking with strangers

I arrive at Wemyss Bay, at the site where the castle once stood. I find the remaining castle flagpole and photograph it among the surrounding houses. It is now, by the looks of it, quite an upper-class housing area. I walk around and take some photos and, becoming slightly self-conscious, get back in the van. As I drive away, I suddenly become a bit braver and flag down a woman driving slowly towards me in a BMW. I ask her for some clarification of my surroundings. We speak through vehicle windows, and she voluntarily tells me about Haile Selassie’s connection with the area, and of the tree he planted which is at the end of the road. I knew he planted a tree at the castle in 1936, but did not think I would find it, presuming it was impossible to try. I was now being shown it without asking. It is now just a stump, rather than a tree, but it is still there. The lady was very proud of it, as were other locals I spoke to. They all had fond things to say.

Figure 4.1

Figure 4.1Front pages of The Daily Record, 1936 and 2017.

Being present

The reason I have come to Wemyss Bay is because it is the location of the first ever colour photograph in a newspaper in the world: The Daily Record in 1936 (Hutchinson 2003: 225). The photograph was a portrait of Haile Selassie, his daughter Princess Tsehai, and local lady Mrs. Olive Muir.3 As a Rastafari photographer this has special resonance for me, and was first pointed out to me by former researcher at Fairfield House, Kayley Porter. Whilst there I buy that day’s edition of the paper. On the front page are Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, soon to be a Duchess: an African American. The front pages read (Figure 4.1)

The irony of the 1936 headline ‘Another Colour Revolution’, read in context of the 2017 headline story, was not lost on me.

Being present

I leave Wemyss Bay, visit Kelburn Castle, Malvern’s Abbey Hotel, and Holy Trinity Church, with stop-offs to sleep along the way, and many more stories to tell. I reach Bristol at 6.15 pm on 23 December. I rang my daughters on the way and said I would be 15 minutes late; my daughters are teenagers, up in their bedrooms doing their own thing. I fall asleep on the sofa.

Conclusion

This chapter attempted to present an African-centric engagement with the British landscape through autoethnographic research, firstly through focus on a particular site and an exploration of what a body politic ownership of that space can look like, and then through a more personal embodied immersion into the landscape. My thoughts are still emerging on this topic; I think of both experiences as forms of pilgrimage. I think of accidental pilgrimage and how a state of true pilgrimage can begin even after you have physically arrived. How pilgrimage can be a form of archaeology, unearthing the significance of a place, and the importance of being fully present in that place, not just physically there.

This journey saw pilgrimage enacted as a form of creative expression, as much drawn and responding to a site of narrative, rather than primacy of the physical place itself. I look through my photographs from both journeys and begin to see each image as a pilgrimage in its own right. Photographer and writer Robert Adams (1996) tells us that good landscape photographs contain three elements: geography, landscape, and metaphor. I think he is absolutely right. I pledge to take full ownership of all three in life, and try to not let the weight of history get in the way.

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