Historian ZAREER MASANI slams Michael Palin over slave trade claim

I’ve admired Michael Palin for half a century, dating back to his Monty Python era as one of our most witty and intelligent comedians.

I’ve also followed his distinguished later career as an intrepid travel journalist, and a champion of charitable causes, ranging from better transport for north London to the rights of Indian hill tribes threatened by miners and even to aid for stammerers. I’ve welcomed Palin’s various royal gongs and especially his recent knighthood.

So it was with some sadness that I switched off halfway through Channel 5’s new series of Palin in Nigeria. The choice of Africa’s largest, most populous country for this latest venture is understandable.

Less so is Palin’s new tendency to see only the brighter side of the world’s largest slum, spread across the muddy swamps of Nigeria’s capital, once hailed by the Portuguese as the kingdom of beautiful lakes, or lagos.

I’ve admired Michael Palin for half a century, dating back to his Monty Python era as one of our most witty and intelligent comedians, writes historian ZAREER MASANI. So it was with some sadness that I switched off halfway through Channel 5 ‘s new series of Palin in Nigeria

Most striking was the loss of Palin’s characteristic wit and shrewd observation. Instead, he just smiled indulgently at the human catastrophe that is modern Lagos, with its mad traffic and enormous disparities of wealth, between towering high-rise blocks and teeming, filthy, disease-ridden slums. Palin’s very bland comments were mostly about the ‘colourful’, crowds that surrounded him, made up largely of the migrant workers who flock to Africa’s busiest city in search of work.

READ MORE: Businessman says Britain has ‘very little to apologise for’ over slave trade as he raises funds for new £70,000 statue in honour of Royal Navy sailors who died helping to free more than 150,000 slaves 

Having sampled Lagos, Palin then embarked on a muddy journey by alternating boat and tuktuk to the nearby Atlantic coast. He was accompanied by a garrulous Nigerian lady Aduke Gomez, who was billed as ‘a historian of slavery’. Though we never quite discovered her academic credentials, she described the horrors suffered by the unfortunate millions captured and sold, to be transported on those horrendous Atlantic crossings.

Michael joined her with a comment about Britain leading the evil trade, totally incorrect as it happens, because he ignored the far larger numbers transported by other European slavers or the millions more who fed the Arab trade. The point at which I switched off was when Palin, standing on the beaches of the Atlantic, declared that this was a history that made him ‘uncomfortable’ to be British.

‘The fact is that the British were the main proponents of the slave trade,’ he intoned.

He went on: ‘What I’ve learnt today, what I’ve seen today, makes me feel well, at the very least, uncomfortable, despite being on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. ‘Horrible things happened here. There’s no getting away from it.’ Had I stayed on, I’m told I might have enjoyed the retribution of him dodging alligators at a local Emir’s palace.

Having sampled Lagos, Palin then embarked on a muddy journey by alternating boat and tuktuk to the nearby Atlantic coast. He was accompanied by garrulous Nigerian lady Aduke Gomez, who was billed as ‘a historian of slavery’

Sir Michael Palin ignored the far larger numbers of slaves transported by other European slavers or the millions more who fed the Arab trade Above: Female African slaves in the 19th century

What all this ignored, apart from one very cursory reference to the outlawing of slavery in 1807, was Britain’s leading role in abolition and its huge expenditure in naval policing to end the transatlantic trade. Even more striking was Palin’s complete silence on the role of the native African kingdoms that eagerly supplied the trade by capturing and selling them the slaves. Equally ignored, presumably to spare the feelings of his local ‘historian’, was Nigeria’s current position as Africa’s largest centre of modern slavery.

That’s a status conferred by the Global Slavery Index, maintained by the International Labour Organisation. The ILO numbers almost two million Nigerian men and women in modern slavery today, defined as either forced labour or forced marriage. That’s a very harsh social reality, conveniently ignored not just by Palin and Channel 5 but by the woke multitudes of Black Lives Matter campaigners.

The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron freed more than 150,000 slaves over the course of six decades in the 19th century. Above: A painting by Reverend Robert Ross-Lewin – the chaplain on anti-slavery ship HMS London – showing Royal Navy sailors chasing a slaver ship near Zanzibar

Modern slavery also barely figures in the curricula of what has now become a burgeoning industry in Slavery Studies across Western universities. Some like Harvard have not only dedicated academic departments to this blazing new discipline, but even professorial chairs. Bristol led the UK with a professorship in the history of slavery. Manchester followed suit, with Britain’s foremost television expert on transatlantic slavery, David Olusoga, honoured with a chair in ‘Public History’.

Born in Britain of Anglo-Nigerian heritage, Olusoga fronted BBC programmes like ‘Black and British: A Forgotten History’, ‘Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners’ and even Desert Island Discs. His statements against Britain’s slave-owning past predictably ignored the role of African and Arab slavers. Nor did his politics prevent him accepting the Order of the British Empire from King Charles last year for his ‘services to history’. A knighthood will no doubt soon follow.

Zareer Masani is the author of books including Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist and And All Is Said: Memoir of a Home Divided.

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