The West Africa Squadron Memorial and the Daily Mail: An Exercise in Denial

Alan Lester dissects the true history behind a campaign that falsifies the past to promote "a story of white Britons doing good to black Africans".

An African Slave trading village destroyed by the boats of British cruisers, after the United Kingdom outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1808. Photo: Historical Images Archive/Alamy

In recent months the Daily Mail has joined the clamour for a new memorial to be built in Portsmouth, commemorating the Royal Navy sailors who participated in a 19th century antislavery initiative. In principle, the proposal seems entirely reasonable. Who wouldn’t want to acknowledge the sacrifice of those who combatted the trafficking of 12.5 million people across the Atlantic?  However, the proposal has attracted considerable opposition, and it is not coming from radical, ‘anti-British’ activists.

Along with fellow historians of slavery and colonialism, I see the campaign’s motivations as pernicious and promoting a deliberate distortion of history.