An island in the Atlantic Ocean
In November 2023 I wrote a post about my Great Uncle Sid. Sydney Wilcox was an Uncle who was definitely known to my Aunt Dorothy because of the photographs of him visiting her and my cousins in the 1950’s.
Sid was a soldier with the Middlesex Regiment, the Diehards. He signed up in 1899 and served consistently until the end of the First World War having seen active service in the Boer War, guarding Boer prisoners of war and returning to serve in the Great War of 1914. He was invalided to London suffering from shell shock and returned to duty in Middlesex as an army trainer. Then he became a tram driver which he worked as until he retired. Sid died in 1959.
He is a connection to the island of St Helena.
St Helena is a small island in the Atlantic Ocean about 1200 miles from South Africa and twice that distance from Rio de Janeiro in South America. It was discovered by the Portuguese in the 16th century and over the next two centuries became an important staging port for ships travelling to and from China and Asia before the Suez Canal was created in the 19th Century. In the 18th Century there was a peak of 1000 ships stopping off to take on water and to drop off sick crew and passengers who would wait for recovery and the next passage onwards.
Map of St Helena, approximately twenty miles by twelve miles wide. Rupert’s Valley is just outside of Jamestown to the East. (Oona Räisänen (Mysid) Wikimedia Commons)
The island has a devolved Parliament under the British Monarchy. The 2021 Census recorded a population of less than 4500. As with many islands in the Atlantic, St.Helena is now dependant upon tourism and digital nomadism for its economy.
It was not always like this. St Helena lies off the West coast of Africa and it became such an important staging post for shipping that it should not surprise us that it became an important part of the transportation of slaves to the Americas.
The British brought an estimated 27,000 slaves from west Africa to the island, in addition to the 3,000,000 they transported to the New World. The importation of slaves was made illegal in 1792, but the horrific conditions of slavery on St Helena were not abolished until 27 May 1839, when the ‘Ordinance For the Abolition of Slavery in the Island of St Helena’ was enacted. Rupert’s Valley was the embarkation area for slaves; in 2008, when the road to the airport was being built, over 9,000 skeletal remains of slaves were uncovered in a mass burial area. They were reburied en masse in 2022 without ceremony of any kind.
However, 325 human remains that were managed to be saved from the mass reburial have been respectfully reburied. The current reburial works are part of the “Trans-Atlantic Slave Memorial – St Helena Project,” led by the Liberated African Advisory Committee, a committee comprised of St Helenians wishing to respectfully lay to rest the excavated remains, to honour their story and their part in St Helena’s story.
There is an excellent short documentary film that appeared in the Guardian last week which offers more insight to this harrowing story. The story of the slave trade and the role that St. Helena played in it. The absence of any memorial or respect for the deaths of 9000 African slaves and their mass burial. Africans who had grown up through generations of respect for their dead and with the same ritualistic habits for burying their people as the rest of the world.
Why is this an important story? Because it was discovered very recently when the British Government agreed to finance the new airport on St Helena, choosing Rupert’s Valley to build it. This entailed infilling the valley with rock and rubble. The process of building the airport uncovered the remains of the African slaves and this led to a major rush to preserve as many of the remains as possible.
The new airport was developed to encourage a greater economic environment with tourism at its heart. When you consider the size of the island there is little to do other than sport fishing and a visit to the pavilion where Napoleon Bonaparte was living during his exile and his memorial grave. Napoleon died in 1821 on the island at the time when so many African slaves found themselves abandoned here after liberation, and where they died without any markers or stones to remember them by. Probably one of the biggest burial sites associated with the slave trade that has been discovered.
Yesterday the Guardian had a report about the trend in rewriting these stories for tourists across the world. New tour guides are introducing visitors to the evidence of the slave trade in many cities. The very infrastructure that was designed to bring more visitors to St Helena was unknowingly being built upon a mass grave.
What has my Great Uncle Sid got to do with this ? He was stationed here with his regiment to guard the Boer prisoners of war that were sent to live on St. Helena in two prison camps until the Second Anglo- Boer War was over. In 1900 and 1901, over 6,000 Boer prisoners were held on the island, during the Second Anglo- Boer War. A 2019 report stated, “no traces remain of the two POW camps”, but added, “the Boer Cemetery is a poignant spot”. This ‘poignant spot’ consists of immaculately laid out graves with memorial monuments to remember the Boer prisoners who died while being held in captivity there. I use the word captivity, the prisoners were well treated and organised themselves well. Each year they are included in the annual Remembrance Sunday ceremonies on the island. The only poignancy that I can see in this story is that there is nothing to remember the 9000 African slaves who died on the island at this point in time.
There is a well documented website with a lot of photographs and information about the Second Anglo Boer War and the prisoners of war on St. Helena.
A newspaper image of the Boer prisoner of war camp. (Wikimedia Commons)
Sid would not have known anything about the history of St Helena other than Napoleon’s exile, probably. There is almost an irony about the history of the island being used to enslave or hold two entirely different populations. The 325 African slaves have no memorial on the island but the Boer Cemetery is ‘poignant’.
Now there is a campaign to have the African remains returned to their continent and offered dignified reburial and memorialisation.