Am I not a man and a brother?

Exhibition review by Peter Kent Baguley

Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the world-famous Stoke-on-Trent pottery firm, was a leading anti-slave trade campaigner. The minutes book of the inaugural meeting in Burslem was displayed in the Seeing Slavery exhibition in October. It opens with the list of those present and then records: “Josiah Wedgwood having been called to the chair it was unanimously resolved that this meeting beholds with sorrow the condition of 80,000 of our fellow creatures in the colonies of Great Britain suffering the privations and hardships inseparable from a state of slavery having no prospect of their condition being improved or their or their posterity’s being liberated from bondage but through the interference of the British Nation.”

The captain of a slave ship invited the two dozen of us there for the opening to follow him into the exhibition where he explained the “benefits” of the slave trade, providing much wealth for England and allaying any fears we might have about injustices, for after all, he explained, if English traders didn’t transport the Africans into slavery, others would! To back him up, he introduced us to a slave whose words suggested he was content with the situation but whose tone and demeanour suggested otherwise. The two actors from the agency, Andrew Ashmore & Associates of London, provided a novel and stimulating introduction to the exhibition.

“Am I not a man and a brother?” The Wedgwood ceramic slave medallion is perhaps the first mass-produced single-issue campaign badge, produced 220 years ago.
Thistley Hough High School’s slave galley quilt is a significant exhibit, vividly illustrating the appalling treatment and unimgainable suffering of an estimated 12 million African slaves shipped across the Atlantic, though many thousands died en route.

Pogus Caesar’s face of an African man is a striking and haunting exhibit, evocative of a thousand thoughts of the degradation, humiliation and inhumanity of capture, transportation and enslavement. The very title of the work, 80lbs of chains, along with adjacent headphones chained to the wall to remind you just what weight held down those enslaved, in unspeakably unsanitary conditions, indescribable stench, unbearable heat and almost total darkness, not knowing when or how the nightmare journey would end.

A large blue and white ware bowl, inscribed with the chilling words “Success to the Africa Trade” was made for a trader who never returned to collect his order. The label indicates it was made circa 1767 but fails to say where it was made.
Hopefully, not in the Potteries.