Great Britain likes to think of itself as the country which ended slavery, what with Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce and all that. Yet a few years ago a BBC documentary pulled back the drapes, revealing the names and circumstances of the 46,000 slave owners who received compensation when the Slavery Abolition Act was finally passed after decades of campaigning in 1833. The government raised £20 million to redress the losses accrued by the slave owners upon the emancipation of some 800,000 African people, which amounts to almost £17 billion in today’s money, around 40% of the annual budget at the time and the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. The largest single beneficiary was the plantation owner Sir John Gladstone, the father of a future British prime minister, while in the colonies slaves over the age of six years old were redesignated as apprentices and made to work for another five years.
The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was the second major piece of legislation which sought to tackle what had become a hot-button issue, aiming to end the practice of slavery throughout most of the British Empire while the Slave Trade Act of 1807 had specifically prohibited the trade in slaves. It was at least a timely remedy, as by the turn of the nineteenth century, the British had surpassed the Portuguese as the most profligate slave traders in the world. According to the historian Martin Meredith, in the decade between 1791 and 1800, ships bearing the British flag made about 1,340 voyages across the Atlantic to land almost 400,000 slaves, as the trade remained one of the country’s most profitable business ventures.
Britain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade, the terror and the cover-up and their tandem effects, serves as the theme of Moor Mother’s latest studio album The Great Bailout. Billed as a dissection of displacement, the spoken word artist contrasts the architects of death with the unheralded nation builders who even decades after their arrival on British shores might face deportation due to some change in public opinion or dubious administrative mix-up, hones in on the legacy of former slave ports like Liverpool, and conjures shipping routes with a sense of both the queasiness and sheer abandonment of a life all at sea.
On the caterwauling and ululating ‘Liverpool Wins’ she refers to an oil painting by Thomas Jones Barker from circa 1863, which is titled The Secret of England’s Greatness and has been variously described as an ‘apocryphal anecdote’ or a belated rendering of the visit of an Omani ruler, the Mombasa governor Ali bin Nasr, to London sometime between 1838 and 1842. In the painting, which was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in 1974 and has since been exhibited in Manchester, Birmingham and at Tate Britain, Queen Victoria is shown at Windsor Castle receiving an ambassador from East Africa, to whom she is presenting an ornate Bible, closed which the kneeling dignitary reaches towards but does not touch. A contemporary anecdote provides the thrust of the image, stating that when the Queen was asked by a diplomatic delegate as to Britain’s power in the world:
our beloved Queen sent him, not the number of her fleet, not the number of her armies, not the account of her boundless merchandise, not the details of her inexhaustible wealth [. . .] but handing him a beautifully bound copy of the Bible, she said ‘Tell the prince that this is the secret of England’s greatness’.
The vocalist Kyle Kidd features on the track, their second appearance on The Great Bailout following the strained and elongated gospel cries of ‘Compensated Emancipation’, a harrowing post-industrial treatise on anti-blackness which sputters and chokes beneath the whirring of helicopter blades. ‘Guilty’ the album opener slops and sways like a sea shanty with celestial shivers as the Afrofuturist poet is joined by Mary Lattimore on the harp plus the trenchant voices of Lonnie Holley and Raia Was, while on ‘All The Money’ the British-Iraqi dramatic soprano Alya Al-Sultani offers smouldering echoes and despairing trills atop operatic washes of noise. The Great Bailout proves a great heaving mass of crackles and hisses and loping, menacing drones, offset by the occasional splintering string and warped music hall melody which has become something of a Moor Mother trademark, capturing a frozen moment in time while suggesting the imminent possibility of a rut or loop. Vocals seethe in consonance and snarl with a serpentine tongue.
The penultimate track ‘South Sea’ featuring Angel Bat Dawid and her fellow Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty serves as a recapitulation of Moor Mother’s major themes, as she intones ‘We in the present are constantly injecting ourselves into the past. The gaze of history shapes it. Crystallizes it. Collapses it upon the linear timeline’. Amid the humming swarm, cutlery rattles and pots whistle and woodwinds briefly suggest other dalliances before bubbling under, forced into a repatriation of sorts as they cohere as a clandestine orchestra submerged beneath the sea. ‘When and where do the ancestors speak for themselves’ she asks, to which T. S. Eliot looking out over London Bridge retorts ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’, as The Great Bailout proves less a history lesson than a séance, a summoning of spectres and the visceral sensation of shared trauma, wondering aloud whether and how it can ever be paid off.
