Plenary, 07 Feb 2007

Meeting date: Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Official Report 389KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. As is usual on Wednesdays, the first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is the Right Rev Alan McDonald, the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

I am glad to be standing in this place near the beginning of 2007, for, as members know, this is a significant year—it marks the 200th anniversary of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which abolished the slave trade.

Scotland has two moments in the history of slavery. The first is dark and troubling. In 1695, an African trading company was set up here in Edinburgh and sent out a slave ship to Africa. Glasgow prospered and became a wealthy city partly as a result of commerce based on slave-produced tobacco and sugar from the plantations. Many slave masters and owners in the Caribbean were Scottish. In fact, by 1817 one third of all slaves in Jamaica were owned by Scots.

However, Scotland has another moment in the history of slavery, and our second moment is a light in the darkness. Scots were crucially involved in the struggle to abolish the slave trade at home and abroad. The Rev Robert Walker of Cramond kirk—the skating minister in the famous portrait by Sir Henry Raeburn, which is a familiar, recurring image here—persuaded the presbytery of Edinburgh in February 1788 to petition for the ending of the slave trade. By 1792, 185 of the petitions calling on the British Government to end the slave trade—one third of the British total—came from Scotland, from communities as far apart as Kirkwall and Kirkcudbright.

I applaud the new, creative links that the Scottish Parliament is forging with Malawi, and the way in which in 2007 we in Scotland are learning to see the world anew, through African eyes. As a trade union leader from Malawi reminded me recently, it was David Livingstone—physician, explorer and missionary—who informed people in Britain about the impact of the slave trade on people in Africa, and who sought to fight slavery by taking the gospel, and commerce, to Africa.

I have just returned from two weeks in Ghana, in west Africa. I was invited to Ghana by the two Presbyterian churches with which the Church of Scotland has connections that stretch back more than 90 years. I also visited Christian Aid development projects in the country. As part of the visit, I was taken to the dungeons at Cape Coast where slaves were incarcerated before being shipped across the Atlantic. I will never forget standing at the little door in the dungeon wall known as the point of no return, which the slaves knew was the last sight they would ever have of Africa, as they were loaded on to the specially built slave ships.

As we prepare to mark this important anniversary, let us learn from the dark times of the past and resolve never to repeat the evils of slavery, whether through human trafficking, the international debt crisis or grinding poverty in the developing world. [Applause.]