Henry Dundas was one of the most powerful politicians of 18th century in
Britain. He's sometimes known as the uncrowned King of Scotland. But in June 2020,
and the context and climate for black life to matter, you might have heard of his
name in the context of his odious deeds to extend and maintain slavery in
Georgian and Victorian Britain. Should his statue in Saint Andrew's Squared be
pulled down? if you want to know what this Scottish Ghanaian thinks about our
history then this video is for you. More than any others that I've done so far
I'd really love for as many people as possible to see this video, so please
like and share it, and if you enjoy it subscribe to my YouTube channel. And also
I want to say a huge thanks to Liam McNamara and Alan Stewart. This wouldn't have happened
without them. You can find the links below. Big up to these guys. Let's do the
video. I sometimes feel like I live on the edge of two different worlds. I live
in West Perthshire. I think that gives me a unique perspective. You see it's not just
in Edinburgh that there's a monument to Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville Melville,
he has one here too. It dominates Comrie, as it overlooks his Perthshire estate. Here, a
half Scottish half African, I live in the borderlands between Highland and Lowland
Scotland. They're a bike ride apart. It's an easy bike ride to Ardoch, the roman fort on
the edge of the village of Braco, but I'm going to take the car anyway. ARdoch isn't
the only marching fort the Romans built, but it's the best preserved. They
say that the Romans built the first camp here when Agricola invaded in 83 AD.
Over 30 years they gradually worked their way north through Britannia, and at
Mons Graupius they confronted their biggest obstacle yet. A mass of Celtic
people who lived in tribal kinship groups, clans you might say, they gathered
together to stand against Rome. Tacitus tells us that they'd come together under
their leader and swordsman Calgacus, and before battle Calgacus
addressed the clanspeople, saying: 'We are the last of the free.' We are the last
of the free. The Roman Empire won that battle. These people and their kin groups
weren't quite as free as before. Roman imperial expansion was built on slavery,
and slaves would certainly have been taken, shipped across the Empire far from
the land where they belonged. Now it's one thing to win a battle, but it's another
thing to quench the people's thirst for freedom. Ardoch became one of a series
of forts built here. They called it The Gask Ridge. On the edge of the Highlands, it was
a string of forts to keep watch on every impenetrable hail Highland glen.
If Rome was the human Empire that controlled the civilised world
then this Highland line was the geological fault where civilisation ended.
The people north of here were less than human. They were little more than chattel.
17 hundred years later the Empire had changed, but attitudes hadn't. Whenever
you drive through the small Glen the terrain abruptly shifts. The frontier is
sudden, from lowland to Highland. This fault line was still the edge of the
civilised world, but in the post Culloden reality the Roman Empire had become the
British. They decided to subdue these Highland impenetrable Glen's. Highland and
Lowland literally didn't understand each other. One spoke that language that, one
way or another, had largely come down from Roman Latin but now called English.
The other still speak in a Celtic language, like Calgacus before them.
They still lived in the tribal kin groups. They still had a sense of dùthchas. There's
no literal English translation for the Gallic war dùthchas. It means many things,
but it's a sense of duty and belonging to the kin group, the
people and the land. A land from which they were about to be cruelly ripped. Here in
Highland Perthshire was the first place they brought the Sheep. These townships
had been full of the people who belonged to the land; but a new world was coming
where the Laird was no longer their leader, but was the landlord. They brought
the Sheep. Nobody wants to leave a land like this, where mountain Loch and Glen
pervade your very soul, in a feeling deeper than belonging. But they brought
the sheep, enclosed the land and they cleared the people. Less than human,
merely chattel. That people who had found their belonging and tribal kin groups
had made the last stand at Culloden. No one speaks Gallic here now; but if you
listen with your soul, you can hear an echo from the past dùthchas, dùthchas, dùthchas.
They tell me the last Perthshire Gael died in the 1970s. The clearing started here, but it
spread north, and the worst excesses were in Sutherland;
where the English politician and nobleman, the Marquess of Stafford,
through judicious marriage had become the Duke of Sutherland. His statue too towers
over Golspie, sneering contemptuously down on the people to this day.
His arrival preceded the most brutal burning of that sense of dùthchas. When the post
Culloden slaughter had ended the lairds of Empire said: 'We'll take your sons, and
you can stay on the land. When the heroes who fought Napoleon for British
regiments, raised from the sons of the Highlands, returned to find that the
homes that had left were razed to the ground.
At times the croft was lit with elderly still inside. On one occasion the factor
in charge had been heard to say of one old lady: 'Damn the old witch, she has
lived too long! Let her burn.' After her death he was acquitted, in a courtroom that was
never in reasonable doubt. How long does it take for a croft to burn? I reckon around
8 minutes and 46 seconds. There was no justice, there was no peace. They were
less than human. they were chattel. It wasn't because the Duke of
Sutherland it was English. Henry Dundas was a Scotsman. They were
improving the productivity of agricultural land in Highlands, but many
had also been investing in the West Indies and the Americas; buying cotton,
sugar and tobacco. Buying black souls to produce them all. Some of the Scots who
left this land made their fortunes with a whip on the backs of others. The Highland Gael
had become British. The only way to justify these acts of cruelty was to
convince yourself that blacks were less than human, they were merely chattel.
Of course some Christian men objected and called for a check to be brought in.
Others said nothing and banked theirs. The whip was in some Caribbean hand, but
on theirs the blood remained. And when the compensation was paid for the end of
slavery, we Scots had our bloody hands out more than most.
While the system of slavery officially ended in the 1830s, the attitudes
remained much longer. I know, because I remember growing up. Jim Crow died the
year that I was born, but shade crosses time and ocean. Less vivid no but it haunts
us still. As an African Scot living in the borderlands I think I've got a
unique perspective. Should we topple the monuments to Dundas,
to slave traders? I don't think so. These people shouldn't be hidden, they
should be exposed for what they were. History shouldn't be obscured, but
revealed; like cleared villages for all to see. Ardoch Fort, townships of the
clearance, the Duke of Sutherland, Henry Dundas;
each inextricably linked with a thread of inhumanity that runs through every
race and time. Man's inhumanity to man is an old song, but it's sung with many tunes.
Romans, Celts, Britons, Africans, Scots: the only thing that changes is the dates.
ALL LIVES MATTER... can be a universal axiom, or a glib cliche. Iit can even be a racist excuse. I would like to
think in 83 AD we would all believe Celtic lives matter, and the like 18th
century a Lowlander or Englishman with humanity would have screamed Highland
lives matter! Black lives matter today. We can't change the past. We can only do
what's right in our own time, so please like and share this video.
Tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda