Searching for My Slave Roots

From Guyana's Sugar Plantations to Cambridge

Malik Al Nasir was born in Liverpool, a mixed race kid formerly known as Mark Watson – he changed his name when he converted to Islam in early adulthood. Bemused by memories of racist chants baying for him to ‘go back to where you came from’ – he came from Liverpool after all – he began to look in detail into his ancestry. This book is the result and charts the twists and turns of his journey into the past, exploring an untold chapter in both Black and British history. As Malik investigates his roots, he uncovers a forgotten history of the trade in enslaved Africans and the role of Scottish, Dutch and English merchants known as Sandbach Tinne & Co.

Largely set in between Liverpool, Glasgow and Demerara and Berbice, Searching for my Slave Roots is a quest for identity, through the genealogy of Malik’s family and of the barbaric transportation and abuse of humans, all to feed our insatiable desire for the sweet stuff.

In Guyana, he discovers ancestors that had been both enslaved people and prominent slaveholders. He finds himself part of a complex lineage linking slaveholdings to high sheriffs, mayors, a British prime minister and bankers, whose companies and social enterprises formed major modern day institutions, some of whom have yet to acknowledge their connections to the slave trade.

Announced by the University of Cambridge as the winner of the Vice-Chancellor’s Global Impact Award for his research, Searching for my Slave Roots unravels not just the legacies of enslavement but also plantation economics and the wealth of a slaveholding dynasty that he himself is descended from through the exploitation of those they enslaved. A major theme of this vital history is the nuanced ways that trauma is passed down through generations of the enslaved, and how wealth and privilege play out across generations of slaveholders and their descendants.

'I suspect that in ten years’ time, we’ll look back at the study of slavery and try to remember what it was like before we’d heard of the Sandbach Tinne dynasty. That we’ll struggle to imagine how we tried to understand Britain’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade without this huge dynastic epic at the centre of it’ DAVID OLUSOGA