The thick walls of the fort have all but crumbled away; the remains held together by a mat of creepers and vines. Rusty cannon, stamped with the King of England’s seal, point out to sea.

Abandoned long ago, they once protected one of the most valuable commodities on the West African coast – slaves.

Bunce Island, set up in 1670, was for years the most important and busiest of about 40 British slave forts from where millions of African captives were loaded on to slave ships from Bristol, Liverpool and London and transported to the West Indies and the Americas.

From here, an estimated 150,000 captives made the short walk through an archway, now collapsed, and on to ships taking advantage of a natural deepwater harbour — the closest point to the mainland that ocean-going vessels could then reach.

The island is uninhabited.

Residents on neighbouring ones say that its waters are empty, the fish frightened off by muffled cries that drift across the sea on most nights.

Unlike on other slave islands off West Africa, there is none of the tourism largely sponsored by the vocal African-American lobby and contemptuously dismissed by critics as “Disneyland tourism”. The Bicentenary of the Abolition of Slavery Act yesterday went unmarked, in sharp contrast to ceremonies in neighbouring Ghana.

Sierra Leone, mired in conflict for much of the 1990s, until recently largely ignored its links to slavery. That is beginning to change. The Government is renaming streets after Africans who fought in the abolition movement instead of the British, and is involved in efforts to preserve what is left of the ruins on Bunce Island.

Yesterday, however, no ceremonies took place to mark William Wilberforce’s Bill finally passing through the House of Lords to become law.

“Slavery and its legacy have had a tremendous impact on Sierra Leone, but not all our people are very aware of it. Most of the slaves released on the African coast were encouraged to set up settlements here,” Professor Joe Alie, of the Department of History and African Studies at Fourah Bay College, told The Times.

The first recorded episode of slaves being taken from West Africa happened just outside Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, when John Hawkins, an English sailor, arrived to capture 300 local people in 1562.

The land that comprises the country today later became known as the Rice Coast. Its Mende and Vai tribes were prized in the Carolinas and Georgia because of their knowledge of growing rice, which had by the 1750s succeeded sugar and tobacco as the cash crop on which fortunes could be built. Today Sierra Leone is the most frequent result for DNA tests in the United States to trace African ancestry.

“The slave trade was a crime on a par with the Holocaust. Our postindependence leaders played it down because they were fearful of the forces it could unleash,” said Olu Awoonor-Gordon, the editor of the satirical paper Peep and a descendant of Ajai Crowther, the first black Anglican bishop.

Freetown was created in 1787 — many years before abolition — as a home for freed rescued slaves. A group of philanthropists landed with 411 settlers, including a number of freed slaves found destitute in Britain and several white prostitutes who had been offered a new chance in life. They were soon joined by a group of “Nova Scotians” — blacks encouraged to fight on the British side during the American War of Independence who London agreed to resettle after losing the war — and “Maroons” from Jamaica who had successfully revolted against their slave masters.

After abolition, the British Navy’s AntiSlavery Squadron, which patrolled the entire West African coast, was based in Freetown. Between 1807 and 1860, the British Navy seized 1,600 ships — often captained by British slavers using flags of convenience — and set free 150,000 Africans.

Nearly all of them were taken to Freetown. Still in chains, they would be taken up “freedom steps” to a special sitting of the Court of the Admiralty and declared free men.

In Ghana, yesterday’s anniversary was marked by a cultural festival organised by the British Council at St George’s Castle in Accra. Among the guests was President Kufuor, recently returned from a visit to Britain, where he was entertained by the Queen.

Outside the walls a crowd listened to performances by Hugh Masekela, the South African jazz trumpeter, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, the Jamaican poet. Baroness Amos, the Leader of the House of Lords and the descendant of slaves, represented the Government. She told The Times that the slave trade was as much a crime against humanity as the Holocaust or the Rwanda genocide, but ruled out reparations.

Figures of shame

10-12m West Africans who were forcibly displaced from their homes by the 300-year transatlantic slave trade

1730 By this year Britain had become the biggest slave-trading country

3m Estimated number of Africans transported across the Atlantic by British merchants

9 inches The width of the space a man had to lie down in a ship’s hold; he had to lie on his side

One third of slaves died within the first three years of their life on a plantation

400,000 Britons were refusing to eat plantation sugar in 1791 after campaigns by the abolition movement

1833 The Emancipation Act ended slavery in British colonies. It was abolished in North America at the end of the Civil War in 1865

£20m was paid to plantation owners when slavery was abolished in the Caribbean

Nothing What freed slaves received

Source: understandingslavery.com

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