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Why I should start saying sorry
Published 16 August 2007
No amount of anti-racism, inclusion or social justice will ever eradicate the inescapable reality of being descended from a human cattle auction
Sorry has become a most problematic word. As John Wayne kept saying in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon: "Never apologise - it's a sign of weakness."
Yet chauvinists are not alone in finding it the hardest word to say. I was part of the generation that learned the mantra "Love means never having to say you're sorry" from the Hollywood weepie Love Story. You didn't need to be a fan to be seduced by the idea. It was part of the zeitgeist. Perhaps that's how the love generation became convinced it never had anything to apologise for. I bought into this. "What's the point of saying sorry?" I have argued repeatedly. "It doesn't achieve anything. The important thing is to transcend the mistakes we've made." Or, as Tony Blair used to say, "Let's just move on."
On 23 August there will be an "International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition". The commemoration will begin with the opening of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. It will be an opportunity to learn about the inhumanity imposed on black people. The Atlantic slave trade was the first flush of modernity: a systematic, integrated, industrial-scale project that made people into units and chattels in a way never before known.
But this month we see the system of chattel slavery through a particular prism: the movement for the ending of the organised trade in human flesh and gore. And what we learn is that "we", despite the national wealth accumulated, despite being the world's leading exponent of this dark art, abolished the trade in an upsurge of moral conscience. We came good in the end.
The problem with this position is that it leaves the contours of the world-view which produced slavery untouched. Slavery was an inevitable part of the mindset of European expansion. To me, it was seamlessly necessary in a view of the world that was hierarchical, that saw civilisation and history as serial upward progress that reserved the top spot exclusively for Europeans or, more particularly, the British. So the important thing for me was not to say sorry about slavery, but to do something about abolishing this world-view.
Then, two things happened. I stumbled into the "Breaking the Chains" exhibition at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. This exceptionally well-researched effort does not focus on the horrors of slavery. Instead, it shows what Africans were like, how cultured and civilised they were, before their "discovery" by the white man. It is difficult to go through this exhibition and not think that there is something here to apologise for.
A couple of weeks later I met Joel, a black American university lecturer. We got into a heated discussion about the nature of colonialism, imperialism and their ongoing histories. The more I insisted the history of western attitudes to other people was one integrated process, the more irritated Joel became. Eventually, in anguish, he shrieked: "No, Zia, your ancestors never stood on a block to be sold like cattle."
And that's when I learned the meaning of saying sorry. It is not an intellectual exercise, not a sanitised commemoration, not just knowing that such history existed. It is reaching out to feel the pain; to see and in some visceral way appreciate the consciousness that lives and will live on in all whose identity was made by the fact of slavery.
Without that leap of understanding we can never really know our neighbours, our colleagues, our friends. It is the genuine multicultural experience - not the story of "us", but of what it is for "them". No amount of anti-racism, inclusion or social justice will ever eradicate the inescapable reality of being descended from a human cattle auction. And when you see that, sorry will be the only word you can say.
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