RISE UP REVOLUTION AT THE FITZWILLIAM
David Martin, Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray at Kenwood House, c.1776. Earl of Mansfield, Scone Palace, Perth.
Rise Up Resistance, Revolution, Abolition is a remarkable exhibition. It dares to delve under the traditional account of Britain’s move to abolition of the trade in slaves in 1806. – often perceived as a smooth road to sense and a civilised attitude to black people.
It follows the exhibition Black Atlantic: Power, People,Resistance staged with stunning success at the Museum in 2023. Some features of the mechanics of abolition surprise us today. The Government of the day borrowed a staggering 20 million pounds, not to compensate the enslaved but to hand out to their owners. The queue for this massive hand-out stretched twice around what is now the Welsh Office, the only stand-alone building in Whitehall. There white owners who had ‘invested’ in slaves argued their case for more money, one woman reasoned that as ‘her’ slave was now pregnant, she should receive much more to allow for the loss of her ‘investment’. Staggeringly the bill for this project of breathtaking anti-philanthropy has only recently been paid – whilst the victims of such a brutal practice had to fend for themselves.
The exhibition explains how fortunes, still enjoyed by families descended from slave owners, still dominate our economy today
Over 100 carefully selected historic and contemporary artworks, objects, printed books and manuscripts on loan from Canada, Puerto Rico, France, and the USA, as well as the University of Cambridge collections and public and private collections in the UK, will shed new light on the impact on Africans and their children.
Rise Up focuses on Olaudah Equiano, one of the most famous and influential Black abolitionists of the eighteenth century. After publishing his autobiography in 1789,he toured the country as advocate for the cessation of the monstrous practices of slavery. Astonishingly Equiano married a Cambridgeshire girl and lived out his life in Soham, a modest village a few miles from Cambridge. He is buried in St. Andrew’s Church in Chesterton. Amazing that a land locked East Anglian market town could home to one of the most vocal in the fight for freedom.
Equiano’s re-enacted account of his time in slavery was a highlight of the the Black Atlantic exhibition, skilfully done to camera by a brilliant actor, it was an account of his treatment at an auction a video you will never forget. But, endured by one with the resilience to survive to help end the trade. In Rise Up we learn that this heroic man spent the rest of his life travelling across Britain to promote abolition and Black rights. Equiano’s powerful testimony was vital in the British anti-slavery campaign which led to the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. The exhibition will open with Joy Labinjo’s monumental An Eighteenth-Century Family, 2022, an imagined group portrait of Equiano and his family, .
The Age of Abolition and the ongoing legacies of enslavement are revealed in this moving radical and informative exhibition , a credit to its Curator and the Curator of the Ftizwilliam. .Bold brave and vital for our understanding of our past
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Francis Cauvin Toussaaint L’Overture
James Northcote , Ira Aldridge as Othello, the Moor of Venice
Thomas Gainsboroogh Ignatius Sancho 1768
