Young Fathers star: Scotland's slavery past should be taught in every school

One of Scotland’s leading musicians has called for the “horrors” of the country’s past history in slavery to be taught in all of its schools to help overcome the “deep systemic and institutional racism” he says is still blighting the country.

Kayus Bankole launched a new film earlier this year exploring Edinburgh's little-known slave trade links

Kayus Bankole, singer with award-winning trio Young Fathers, said every child in Scotland should be taught about why there are memorials and statues around the country which have links to slavery and colonialism.

Edinburgh-born Bankole suggested Scotland had “eradicated and overlooked” its own black history, adding that for Scotland to have a “diverse future” the country needed to “reconcile with its historic injustices that perpetuate in our present.”

In a statement to The Scotsman, Bankole said the country’s slave trade past should be given as much prominence in the education curriculum as pivotal episodes in history like the battles of Bannockburn and Culloden.

Kayus Bankole's film Sugar For Your Tea was projected onto the facade of the City Chambers in January. Picture: Ian Georgeson

Earlier this year Bankole, whose band has won both the Mercury Prize and the Scottish Album of the Year Award, launched a short film about those who profited from the 18th century slave trade in Edinburgh.

Footage of Bankole performing the piece, Sugar For Your Tea, was projected onto the facade of the City Chambers, as part of Message from the Skies. It was commissioned by Edinburgh’s Hogmanay festival organiser Underbelly for the historic headquarters of the city council.

He has responded to growing calls, prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement, for streets names and memorials linked with slavery to either be removed to replaced.

He said: “If we are to take take down statues, monuments and rewrite plaques, we ought to realize that it is not enough, we ought to recognise how deep systemic and institutional racism runs in this country.

“We have to be willing to do this alongside changing laws and legislation that undermine and undo systemic and institutional racism across the board in Scotland.

“As a majority white country, Scotland has very little diversity and thus ought to be active in understanding that in order to safeguard a diverse future it must reconcile with its historic injustices that perpetuate in our present.

“We must, from the home, through schools, all the way to government, acknowledge Scotland’s history of colonialism and slave trade, and make the link between attitudes then and now. It has to be as important as any major part of our history, from Bannockburn to Culloden.

“We must learn of black history that has for the most part been eradicated and overlooked. It does not begin and end with colonialism and the slave trade. We must learn of the BAME experience in modern Scotland, to not let it be discounted as ‘not worthy’.

“Allow every child in Scotland to learn in school about the realities of how these memorials came to be and the horrors of our country’s deep involvement in crimes on humanity. It’s about time that truths are no longer distorted. We should be aware of the venom within the bite of those white men, and how it is perpetuated today.

“All the work I’ve done in Young Fathers and as an artist always deals with this situation to a greater or smaller degree. I live the problems, and it’s constant and it’s tiring.

“So now it’s time for white people to do the work and realise this is not a mess black people created. It’s up to white people to clean this s*** up as they have been comfortably living in this mess for long enough.”

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