Slavery Museum opens in Liverpool, England

UNESCO’s designated International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade has been marked by the opening of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool - the first museum of its type to open in the UK.

The museum features dynamic, powerful and moving displays about the story of the transatlantic slave trade, uncovering the largely hidden account of the exploitation of Africa and Africans.

Displays address the legacy of transatlantic slavery, both contemporary as well as historic, reflecting issues that are relevant to Britain today, as well as Western Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean and Africa.

One can, however, safely assume, though this writer has not seen the museum as yet, safely from press releases and such, that not a single word will be mentioned in the entire museum about the first slaves that were sent to the Caribbeans and the Colonies, well, before any African Blacks, namely the Romani, the Gypsy, the the British Isles.

Well before any African Blacks were ever sent as slaves to the sugar estates of Barbados or elsewhere in the English-occupied Caribbean Islands, Romani, Gypsy, were sent there as slaves; men, women and children, snatched from the streets and byways of the British Isles. Many a British trading house became rich from this Gypsy slave trade because the government of the day paid them for hunting down and rounding up the Gypsies, they also paid them to ship them out to the colonies and then the traders were paid yet again by the planters for the slaves that were bought by them. Nice little earner, for sure. But this is not a story ever mentioned.

Slavery can obviously only be a Black thing, with all the political correct pressure groups, in the same way as the Holocaust can only be a Jewish thing. No place for the Gypsy in either despite the fact that in both cases Gypsies were the first to suffer.
But in each case the fate of the Gypsy is suppressed and those that wish to mention it are ridiculed or silenced in that there material will not be published; definitely not when it comes to the slavery of Romanichals from England, Manush from France and Gitanos and Ciganos from Spain and Portugal respectively. There is a lobby out there, mush as with regards to the Romani Holocaust, that want to keep slavery a uniquely Black African thing in the same way as another lobby pushes all the time in keeping the Holocaust and Pogroms a uniquely Jewish thing.

Well, I am sorry to upset the applecart here but neither even is uniquely to those groups; the Gypsy has a part in it.

What was the reason for Romanichals from the British Isles being sold into slavery? The same reason why the Rom went to the Nazi concentration camps; it was ethnic cleansing and ultimately it was intended to destroy the Romani People.

Maybe some people would like to think about that but, alas, I doubt it; we are only dirty Gyppos in their eyes.

© M V Smith, August 2007

Abolition of Slavery Commemorated

London, England, March 26, 2007

For well over a week or so by now we are being bombarded, and I am sure this will be going on for the rest of the year, with commemorative programs on radio and television about Wilberforce and his fight to abolish slavery in the British Empire and the talk returns to the need for the British to apologize in their part in this dastardly trade and such. While we can all sympathize with that, I am sure, it is been basically negated that, in fact, had it not been for the Ashanti and such tribes, and for the Arabs in East Africa, the trade of Black African slaves may not even have happened to the Islands of the Caribbeans. There seems to be so much “White Man Guilt” that anyone bringing up the fact that the Blacks preyed upon each other and sold each other, especially the warrior tribes upon the pasturealists and such like, is being silenced. Obviously, amongst all this clamour of the Blacks demanding apologies and reparations from Britain the first slaves that were sent to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the Caribbeans and the New England Colonies are being forgotten, namely those that were referred to as “white slaves” but who were, in fact, Romanichals from the British Isles and Ireland. Byt the thousands they were rounded up, men, women and especially children, and in chains transported to the Caribbean islands and the colonies in the New World. Not a word is being mentioned about the Gypsy slaves. Why not? Because we are just, still to this very day, to government and church, dirty Gyppos and no more.

Other nations aside from Britain also shipped their unwanted Gypsy population to the colonies as slaves, namely Spain, Portugal and France. But also German Sinti arrived in the New World to be sold as slaves. Again, however, not a mention anywhere.

Then again, why should I be surprised. Is it not the same with the Holocaust where the powers that be want to have it as a uniquely Jewish even, colonial slavery cannot have been perpetrated upon any other than the African Blacks now, can it. The Gypsies defile the memory of this all by wishing to be associated with it; that is, I am sure, the reasoning of those that leave our memory out of it.

Am I being sarcastic? Probably, but then again, it is the truth after all. Again and again Gypsy Holocaust survivors and their decedents are being told that the Jews were sent to the camps because of their race while, and they say this even openly to the Gypsy, the Jews that is, it is said that the Gypsy only was sent to the camps because they were asocial. That despite all the proof in the records of the German Reich that show this bluntly and openly that the Gypsy People were treated even worse than the Jews in racial regards.

But I digressed.

The first slaves in the cane fields of the Caribbean Islands, folks, were not Blacks from Africa or elsewhere, but they were Gypsy, Romanichals, from the British Isles and Ireland and sent their in chains, not for any crime but simply for being Romani. But then, that was crime enough in those days.

Let us, while others commemorate the Blacks openly and publicly commemorate our Gypsy slaves.

© M V Smith, March 2007