Sambo's Grave - A walk through history with my son

My friend Larry who I had an emotional re-union with a few days earlier after a gap of 30 years, had warned us of the tide times and the fact that Sunderland point, a small village at the end of a peninsula in Lancaster, regularly gets cut off by high tides as the narrow road leading there regularly gets flooded. So, at the end of our short holiday in Cumbria we parked our car in the village and took a brisk walk on a warm, bright cloudless day through a winding country lane to emerge into bleak, marshy Lancashire coast where slavers transferred their cargo. We had reached our destination: Sambo’s grave. On our way there Kabir picked up some daffodils and a white flower to make a small bouquet which he laid at the very well kept and tidy grave where Sambo was hurriedly buried in 1736. We noticed that children had made and contributed so many wonderful and beautiful offerings with heartfelt messages for the long departed Sambo.

It was an emotional experience I had already told Kabir the story of Sambo. Of how, he, a child plucked from Africa and sold into slavery ended up in a bleak corner of a marsh in Lancaster. Of how abandoned by the ship’s master, being unable to speak the language not understanding nor being understood the poor boy in cold, dank, dark miserable conditions uncared for and unappreciated just lay down in a corner and died. Kabir felt the full force of emotions and feelings that went went through us as we laid the flowers and paid our respect. “How did he end up being buried in this place outside the village dad? Why isn't he in the cemetery?” I tell Kabir that because he was not baptised Sambo was not seen fit to be buried in the consecrated ground of the local church. Not knowing what to do with him, the people around him, when they found him dead, simply just dug a hole in the ground at the edge of the village here on the marsh and still wearing the clothes that he died in just buried him. And there he lay un-appreciated and un-cared for more than 250 years. That Sambo is much better known now and that his grave is much better cared for now and that children come and visit and poets write amazingly powerful verses as acts of Remembrance for this poor boy while no one has a clue about where his master lies is indicative of the change that we as a society are going through particularly now in the light of BLM.

Even though Sambo has long figured in my imagination the truth is that when I was a student at Lancaster university in the 80s, slavery or its role in British economy, culture and society was never really discussed in any great depth. It is only comparatively recently over the last few years that he has been commemorated by poets and writers as we try and mature as a multicultural society in which previously silenced voices are being given a platform.

It is a much needed reappraisal of our history and the role of colonialism and the slave trade in shaping us that is at the heart of the culture wars of the Right that has been unleashed upon us all. There are many with vested interests who feel that this is a challenge to the cherished ideal of Britishness which is mostly conflated with whiteness. They feel difficulty in accepting not only that black and brown people have long been part of the very body fabric of British history far longer than has been normally accepted and understood and about how slavery and colonialism have shaped us economically and culturally.

Sambo’s grave seen in a wider, global context shows idiocy of “our” history or “their” history which drives culture wars deliberately seeking to divide us. In a multicultural society it epitomises colonialism and slavery as histories of us all to share and debate in the spirit of enriching and energising us.