The Last Slave, A journey of discovery - Trailer

The Last Slave
Sunday March 11th
Channel 4, 8pm.
Trailer Stream

The Last Slave

To commemorate the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the abolition of the British Slave Trade in March 2007, David Monteith, a youth drugs worker from Hackney, is embarking on a voyage of self discovery to reveal the untold truth and story about his ancestry. David's parents are Jamaican and came to Britain in the early sixties. Like most Afro-Caribbeans, David and his family are descended from slaves.Most of them are unable to trace their ancestry back more than a few generations because of this. Under slavery, families were split up and fathers' names were not recorded. David is atypical - however - his family know exactly where they came from. Thanks to a memoir kept by his great, great, great grandfather, Archibald Monteith - which he dictated to missionaries in 1854. Archibald was one of three million Africans enslaved by British traders, but one of only a tiny handful who kept such an account of their lives as slaves. But the memoir is frustratingly short and David is embarking on this inspiring journey with the intention of meeting people from both sides of the Atlantic who can help him to fill in the gaps.

He wants to know and to understand what his ancestor really experienced as a slave. "The trouble with Archie's account is it glosses over a lot of things", explains David. "All the most traumatic and difficult things about slavery he leaves out. And those are the bits I want to find out about." But this journey will also force him to confront some uncomfortable truths about his ancestor's life - and about the slave trade. "I think the biggest way that Archie's story affects me is just to think that but for an accident of birth that could have been me. I'm black he was black, at that time you were probably a slave. That could have been me. And that thought goes through my head a lot".

David's parents moved back to Jamaica some years ago. David is going to visit for his father's 80th birthday party - this trip to Jamaica will be the first stage in his journey to find out more about his slave ancestor's life. Britain was the world's biggest slave trading nation, and Jamaica was its largest slave colony. Slaves were brought here for one reason - to produce sugar and to satisfy the famously sweet tooth of the British. David knows from Archibald's memoir that he was owned by a family called Monteith and his first slave name was Toby. Records show that his owners later had him baptized and renamed him Archibald Monteith.

What David is not sure of, is how Archibald began his life and how he ended up in slavery as a child. The memoir reveals that Archibald was transported as a child on one of the last slave ships from Nigeria before the abolition of the British slave trade Act. But it does not explain why his ancestor was sold. To discover what went on, David travels to Calabar in South East Nigeria - one of the biggest slave ports in West Africa - where over one and a half million men, women and children were transported across the Atlantic. In his memoir, Archibald describes how he walked for a day before reaching this port where he was sold. David is hoping that by retracing his ancestor's steps, he will be able to find his birthplace and perhaps some answers to his many unanswered questions.

Despite the fact that Nigeria is three times the size of the UK, David is able to reduce his search to an area just fifty miles across, thanks entirely to the information gleaned from the Memoir. As his ancestor reveals he was a member of the Ibo tribe, with a traditional name of Aneaso, this helps the local experts in Nigeria to pin point exactly where Archibald's tribe would have lived. Remarkably, David is taken to meet the elders - and with the help of a translator David finally gets to understand that his ancestor was sold to slavery by his own family. He learns that when a child showed a tendency towards unruly behaviour, or of "being out of control" he would have been sold "so as not to allow him to corrupt the other children." And so, at the age of about 7, it seems that this is exactly what happened to his ancestor.

David has learned an unpalatable truth - that Africans willingly sold each other. He is stunned. "As a black person in England, what you're thinking about slavery is fairly monotone - it was a bad thing, it was an evil thing. white people are responsible. But apparently it is not. I was listening to people and I know what I wanted them to say that and they wouldn't. They weren't saying slavery was a bad thing. That is not what I traveled this far to hear.Domestic slavery it seems was just a way of life."

For David however, this is only the beginning of the unpalatable truths. Next, he must discover more about his ancestor's actual trip from Nigeria to his life in captivity in Jamaica. His Ancestor wrote that he was treated better than the other slaves, but did not go on to explain why this was. Can David find out such information? He is also on a mission to glean more about how Archibald would have felt at the time. He is frustrated that his ancestor failed to write an explicit account of his feelings and experiences. As David explains, "I think what really takes me aback is he doesn't talk about his emotions at arriving on land after all that time its just bang we arrived bang I was sold bang I was taken to this estate you know but what happened in between? It's frustrating because you want to know what goes through a man's mind at a time like that." But, when faced head on with the conditions that his Ancestor would have been subjected to and the equipment and clothing he would have been made to wear, it becomes clearer to David that maybe some things were just too horrific to express on paper.

Dir: Julia Harrington; Prod: Paul Kerr; Exec. Denman Rooke; Prod. Co: October Films

Please note: The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed on March 25th 1807. (This was NOT the abolition of slavery itself which was not ended until 1838)