Wilberforce House

Hull may not have the same international profile as New York City, but I am just as exiting about visiting there as I was about Manhattan.

I went to New York and I danced along the streets of dreams, I was pleasured by the shining lights and humoured by the heavy snowfall. I enjoyed every second of it. I will never forget those five days in New York City.

The trip to Hull holds the same kind of excitement, but with a more somber feel to it. It is more of a pilgrimage than a city break. It is my intention to pay my personal respects to a man who dedicated his life to making the slave trade a thing of the past. He did so against all the odds -- against all the murmurs and scowls of Parliament, and against all the protests of businessmen. And 200 years after his greatest achievement became law, I want to express my gratitude for his actions.

I know very little of the life and work of Mr. William Wilberforce. I am also on a mission to educate myself. Something I'm sure the former slave Booker T. Washington would have admired greatly.

One should not forget the people he helped either. My trip as much about them as it is about William Wilberforce. Lives of unimaginable misery and pain were lived out in a blind gaze. Most people of the twenty-first century have become too detached, too immune, to the existence of such feelings. In the developed world, these feelings do not occur any more. Not really. We only get glimpses of something close to what the slaves had to deal with on our news bulletins. We have become too used to seeing this as a distant issue. But it happened in Britain. The souls of fellow human beings were bought and sold in Britain with the nod of another man's head or the lifting of another man's arm. Ships left our shores with the intention of condemning people to torturous lives of great peril and pain and danger.

We cannot forget this. Only when we come to terms with our nation's role in the transatlantic slave trade can we begin to understand this.Once we come to understand it, and accept it, then, and only then, we might be forgiven. But that is not up to us.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
Daniel C. Wright