Searching For My Slave Roots

my name is abdul malikan nasa

i’m a phd student at the university of

cambridge

at the faculty of history of saint

catherine’s college i’m looking into

my identity and my history

through the transatlantic slave trade

as many of you all know black people in

the diaspora

have had their identities erased by

slavery

and colonialism and many of us

have faced the dilemma growing up in a

white western society

being told to go back to where you came

from

now that would be pretty straightforward

for someone who

knew where they came from but when

there’s been a systematic effort

over 400 years to erase

your history your identity your culture

your religion your traditions your

name and every single thing

that will connect you to your past how

are you supposed to know

where that place is

so in my case i grew up on a council

estate

in a white working-class neighborhood

where being told to go back to where you

came from was almost an everyday

occurrence for me

i’d hear it in the shops i’d heard it in

the street side here in schoolyard

i’d hear from the teachers so i grew up

with this sense of

not belonging of not knowing where i fit

i’ve always feeling like

and other even though i was born here

in liverpool in britain in the 1960s

so this question is something that’s

dogged me throughout my life

so i got to a point where having heard

so many

negative headlines about immigrants

foreigners muslims all of these kind of

negative connotations that surrounded

the identity of

other i decided to start to look into

who i actually am and what started me

off on this journey

was an interesting documentary about

football

in about 2003 a man called brendan

o’hara

produced the documentary for bbc

scotland on 100 years of black

footballers

from arthur wharton at the turn of the

20th century

playing for preston north end right up

to john bones and justin fashion you

and a whole host of other black players

of that

era however

during their research they uncovered

a very interesting set of scottish

football annuals

from the 19th century and lo and behold

among them was a character called andrew

watson they realized that he had

predated

arthur wharton by about 20 years and he

had not only played

football in scotland as a black man in

the 19th century

but he’d actually captained the scottish

national side leading them to a victory

over england at the oval

now you might think that that’s just a

fact of history nothing special about

that

they’ve discovered some guy historically

that was there

what’s the connection well the

connection was

my family name was watson i converted to

islam

and changed my name to al nasa but my

name prior to that was mark watson

my father was reginald wilcox watson my

grandfather was george edward watson

my father came to this country in the

1930s

he was born in 1918 in demerara a place

called grove in british guyana

and he traveled in the 1930s as a

merchant seaman

to britain and he came here as a

colonial seaman

and served as a merchant seaman during

world war ii

until 1942 when he joined the royal navy

and fought the nazis to protect britain

as a volunteer

and at the end of world war ii he

settled here and in the 1960s

he had his children of which are one

so having realized that i have this

connection to guyana my colonial

history begins there

but tracing that back further from there

to africa

requires a more in-depth look at the

slave trade

so when i discovered andrew watson with

the same name as my father

and there were photographs of him and he

looked identical to me

that set me off on a journey of thinking

i need to go back to guyana

and find my roots and when i went back

to guyana i discovered

entries in the voter registration

in guyana in the 1850s for a man called

peter miller watson

who was a white scottish sugar planter

son of james watson

who was the chamberlain for the earl of

orkney lord dundas

so peter miller watson ran plantations

owned slaves and produced

slave produced produce sugar molasses

rum cotton coffee which were then

shipped back to glasgow

and also to liverpool to be sold

similarly prior to 1833 in the official

abolition of the slave trade

he was importing slaves

into the guyanas now people say well how

do you do that because in 1807

it was forbidden to go to west africa

and import slaves the british

had a blockade there well it’s very

simple

what they did was they used american

ships after the war of independence

america did not recognize the

sovereignty of britain

at all so therefore the british blockade

from 1807 of the slaves being taken out

of west africa

didn’t apply to the americans so all the

slave traders just simply

put their slaves on american ships and

brought them in

that way and i have documents which show

that even as late as 1847

peter miller watson the father of the

black football andrew watson

is importing slaves into damarara

on ships that late and not only

several years after the official

abolition of slavery

in its entirety in 1833 but also after

having received substantial

slavery compensation for him

his company and also many of his

compatriots and partners who worked in

the company who were also family members

in 1834 and here 13 years later

after having received compensation for

freeing all their slaves they’re

actually still

importing them so there’s an illicit

slave trade which has continued

after that so i wanted to know who these

people were

if i’m descended from uh slaves on a

plantation

in denmark in guyana who were they

and i came up against the blank i

couldn’t find any record of them

so i decided the only thing i could do

was to go to guyana

so i traveled to guyana in 2008 and lo

and behold i found my maternal

ancestry and my paternal ancestry i

found my grandmother

olivia july who was actually indigenous

uh amerindian she was dead

but i found reference to her and the

place where she lived and people who

knew her

and i also found a gentleman whose um

grandmother was also my grandmother so

we share a common grandmother so we

would be potentially second cousins

i also traveled to the province of

berbice and to a village called weldad

where my father had been reported to

have

lived at one point and there i found a

man who

studied family histories and he took my

details and said he would listen out and

if he knew anyone

who was a watson in the area he would

get in touch with me

and lo and behold two days later i got a

phone call

that he’d found a watson i went to

babies

i walked in and i met an 82 year old

woman

called within who was in fact my first

cousin

her father and my father were half

brothers

and she was living in a land on the

edward village

close to the stelling which is the place

where you embark for the ship

to go across the blue beast river into

new amsterdam

and it was just north of the famous

blairmont sugar refinery

where all the cane that was cut by the

slaves would be taken and refined

and then put on to san vegetini ships

and

shipped back to liverpool and glasgow

and the plantation that that belonged to

historically was known as the woodlands

plantation

and about three years ago i uncovered a

set of documents

which came up for sale and i purchased

them because i had names

of members of my family people like

samuel sandbunch

people like philip frederick tinney

people like charles stuart parker

why are these guys important samuel

sandbach

was lord mayor of liverpool 1830 to

he was also a founding shareholder and

later

deputy director and also

chief executive stroke chairman

of a bank that was formed in 1831

called the bank of liverpool

now many members of

his family were also directors of the

bank of liverpool

and or chairman and deputy chairman

and many of them were slave holders

so this family made its entire fortune

on the slave trade and as well as being

lord mayor of liverpool

and as well as being uh chairman of the

bank of liverpool

he was also a high sheriff in dembyshire

where he built a fantastic home

called haferdunas estate in denmasher

and one of his descendants

antoinette sunbatch still lives on that

land to this very day

she farms and lives in one of the

cottages there

and up until recently she was a sitting

member of parliament

philip frederick teddy was the dutch of

huguenots

ancestry who was in the diplomatic corps

and when guyana was originally a dutch

territory

philip frederick tinney was one of the

principal administrators there

who when the british privateers decided

to take the territory

he drafted the document that formerly

ceded the territory to the british in

he also drafted the capitulation where

the dutch

actually just gave the territory up they

surrendered the territory

to the british 10 years earlier in 1803

but the formal seeding of the territory

never came until 1813

but he was a signatory on both of those

documents and he also

drafted both of those documents and in

1813 when the british formally took over

denmari and babies from the dutch then

at that point

philip frederick tinney became a partner

with samuel sandbach

and the company became known as sandbach

tinian company

and what’s interesting is that they

continued operating and making fortunes

from slaves slave produced products on

plantations

and supplying uh the actual

uh colony as well from glasgow and

england building the slave ships in

glasgow

and selling all the slave-produced

commodities in liverpool

and they continued their trade up until

after slavery ended they had a period

what they called apprenticeships which

was just another name for slaves

uh until 1838 and then after that they

had what they called indentured laborers

which came from shanghai

and from also

calcutta and they populated the area

with indian and chinese labourers

which then contributed to the

makeup demographically of the population

that we know

in guyana today so

what i came to understand was that my

family lived on land

in babies which was passed down from the

woodlands plantation

and when i met my 82 year old cousin

her daughter who was in her 60s had

grown up with her grandmother

who had told her that i had a

great great great grandparent known as

nanny ben

who was a slave who became free and

married a white man

called william watson and that man was

william

robertson watson brother of peter miller

watson

who was the father of the world’s first

black footballer who looked just like me

andrew watson so

the circle at this point was complete

but what i’d come to understand is a

segment of my identity

that when people said to me in liverpool

when i was growing up go back to where

you come from

i was born on warwick street in

liverpool

in tokstuff

my ancestor on the slave owner side was

the lord mayor of liverpool

the founder of the bank of liverpool and

one of the architects of the city

as we know it today so when people tell

me to go back to where i came from

this is also where i came from this is a

part of my identity

all be a very disturbed and

difficult part to contend with it is

a part of my identity

i came to find out that andrew watson’s

grandmother

christian robertson who was known as one

of the three fair maids of killtan

in scotland marry james watson

so what i had come to understand about

james watson was

that he had been the chamberlain for the

earl of orkney but he came from a long

line of chamberlain’s who managed royal

estates

and that whilst he was married to one of

the three fair maids of killtan

one of her sisters married

charles stuart parker who ran the entire

glasgow operation of san betunion co and

built the slave ships

another of her sisters married samuel

sandbach

mayor of liverpool founder of the bank

of liverpool

so my direct ancestor was their nephew

by marriage

so that brings me into their family

so for anyone who wants to know who i am

and where i come from yes there’s slaves

in my ancestry

but there are also slave owners

yes there are people of african origin

in my ancestry but there are also

europeans

i’m a combination of all of that

and i have as much right to assert my

right to be here

than anybody else so in respect of my

identity

i now know who i am and where i come

from

there’s still a missing link in terms of

the connection back to africa

and that’s something that i’ve yet to

traverse it’s next on my list

but for now content yourselves with this

i have as much right to be here

in this country than anybody else

and all efforts to obscure my identity

and remove my identity

have been thwarted because i now know

not only who i am but i know who you are

and i know what you did