Survivors: the Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade

"This is an extraordinary story. It’s based on the last slave ship to go to America, Clotilda , and it had 110 enslaved Africans on it. This was in 1860 and they arrived in America, in Alabama, on the eve of the Civil War. The horrors of being transported across the Atlantic are something we know a lot about. But this is different, because when they arrived in Alabama, they were quickly dispersed. The boat had been funded by people in Alabama who wanted more slave labour, and this is the point exactly when the Civil War is about to break out, and the people disappear across Alabama. And because it’s 1860, they lived into the modern era. The last survivor only died in 1940 and that was Matilda, who was only two years old when she was transported from Africa. It’s very poignant. It’s not just about the 110 who were transported, or those who survived the journey; it also looks at their descendants. It goes right up to the civil rights movement; it’s a long story. The survivors, the children, their grandchildren, and the individual stories of these people can be captured from interviews in their lifetime, from memories. There are biographies, there are also lots of newspaper accounts and she brings all that together. You see not only the horror of the slave trade, but the strength with which these people retained their culture and the way in which they made new lives. One of my favourite sections, because I’m into fabric, is on the Gee’s Bend community, which did traditional quilting based on what they had done in Africa. This became an art form in its own right at Gee’s Bend. The quilts were traditionally made from old clothing, so they had the memory of the people who’d worn those clothes bound up in the quilt itself. That is an image for the book, that the memories of all these individual people who were brought over on the Clotilda come together to give you a picture of American history and the changing attitudes to slaves and to enslavement, and indeed the way that slavery went on, even though it was supposedly brought to an end. It’s a very strong, very vivid story."