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