Join us for the launch of Malik Al Nasir’s new book Searching For My Slave Roots, exploring an untold chapter in both Black and British history.
Attendees joining in-person will have the unique opportunity to view a small display of Senate House Library’s collections related to the interconnected histories of Guyana and Britain alongside Malik Al Nasir’s own collection of items amassed during his research journey.
All welcome - the event is free to attend, but booking is essential.
This is a hybrid event. Those attending online will be sent a link to join the event in advance of the start time.
About the book
Searching For My Slave Roots charts the twists and turns of Malik’s journey into the past and explores an untold chapter in both Black and British history. As Malik investigates his roots, he reveals a new history of the transatlantic slave trade and the role of Scottish, Dutch and English merchants. Largely set between Liverpool, Glasgow and Demerara, in what was British Guiana, this is a story of sugar and of the barbaric transportation and abuse of human beings that facilitated our insatiable desire for the sweet stuff. In Guyana, he discovers ancestors that had been both enslaved Africans and prominent white slaveholders.
He finds himself part of a complex lineage linking slaveholdings to high sheriffs, mayors, a British Prime Minister and bankers, whose companies formed major modern-day financial 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 slavery but also plantation economics and the wealth of a slaveholding dynasty and that he himself was a descendant of theirs and those they had enslaved. A major theme of this history is the nuanced ways that trauma plays down through generations of the enslaved, and how wealth and privilege plays out across generations of slaveholders and their descendants.
About the author
Malik Al Nasir is an author, film maker, performance poet, and an award-winning academic from Liverpool. Malik started tracing his roots back through Caribbean slavery over 20 years ago and his pioneering research has been recognised by Sir Hilary Beckles (Chair: CARICOM Commission for slavery reparations), historian David Olusoga, and The University of Cambridge, where Malik has just completed a PhD in history with a full scholarship. In recognition of the significance of his research, Malik received several awards whilst at Cambridge, as well as an honorary Doctorate from Liverpool Hope University. Malik is co-founder of the policy making initiative, 'Black Academia – Lifting the Barriers.' He has produced and appeared in several documentaries with Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Benjamin Zephaniah, Public Enemy, Ice T and many other luminaries.
