This Thursday, 4 million people in Scotland will vote in a referendum on whether to end its 307-year political union with England. Final opinion polls show the result on a knife edge, with a remarkable 97 percent of the electorate registered to vote.
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Among the many communities energized by the debate are 37,000 Scottish residents of African descent. In such a close election, when every vote counts, they may even tip the balance in favor of yes.
Most Afro-Scots were born on the continent of Africa, but they also include black North Americans and Caribbeans, like Graham Campbell, a poet and community activist who leads Africans for an Independent Scotland. Born in Jamaica to a Grenadian mother and Jamaican father, Campbell moved to Glasgow, Scotlandโs largest city, in 2002, having lived and worked in Canada and London in his 20s. Campbell explains many Afro-Scotsโ support for independence: โOur countries left Britainโs control and understood the challenges that meant, but in this instance, Scotland will have all the advantages we didnโt have.โ
By โadvantages,โ Campbell means a modern, diverse economy, boosted by oil: Sixty percent of the European Unionโs oil reserves lie in Scottish waters. Indeed, many recent African migrants have come to work in Scotlandโs oil and gas industries, while others have come to study at the countryโs universities. Another prominent Afro-Scot for independence is the Vogue model, designer and hip-hop artist Eunice Olumide. Olumide won a scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania. In the U.S., she met up with Naughty by Nature and toured with them before returning to Scotland, where, along with her brother, Ibrahim, she launched Northern Xposure, the first hip-hop band to rap in the Scots dialect.
For Olumide, the โreferendum is the single most exciting thing to happen within my lifetime and might be the only chance that this will ever happen in this generation.โ
Decisions about the economy, jobs and welfare, Olumide argues, should be made by a Scottish government, which supports free university tuition and health care to all citizens, in contrast with the privatization agenda of London.
For other Afro-Scots, including those seeking political asylum from African war zones, a yes vote is seen as a break from the restrictive immigration policies of Londonโs Conservative and Liberal coalition.
โIndependence would mean a better life for Africans in Scotland mainly because of the restrictions around student visas and the lack of a post-study work visa, which the Scottish government has promised to reintroduce,โ says Campbell.
Africans for independence are clear that Scotland is not a racism-free paradise, but as Campbell notes, โSociety in Scotland is a bit more egalitarian, more to my liking โฆ more friendly, more civil and social in their attitudes. That comes from a sense of social solidarity, which is still very strong in Scotland.โ
Campbellโs reference to โegalitarianโ and โsocial solidarityโ echo the views of two 19th-century African-American civil rights giants who had deep, intimate and transformative experiences in Scotland: James McCune Smith, who studied at the University of Glasgow in the 1830s and was the pre-eminent black intellectual prior to W.E.B. Du Bois; and Frederick Douglass, who in 1846 launched Scotlandโs first human rights crusade. Douglass took his name from โthe Black Douglas,โ a fugitive in a poem by the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott. Like Abraham Lincoln, he was also influenced by the radical Scottish poet Robert Burns; the first book Douglass bought after escaping slavery in 1838 was a collection of Burnsโ poems.
Ten years later, in 1846, Douglass was at the heart of a campaign to force the Presbyterian Free Church in Scotland to return money sent by American slaveholders to the churchโs mission to the Scottish poor. Douglass traveled the length and breadth of Scotland, lecturing in packed churches and street corners. His slogan, โSend back the money,โ was chanted in the streets, sung in ballads, and even carved onto the turf of an Edinburgh city park by Douglass and two Scottish female abolitionists.
Although the campaign failed in its immediate objective of forcing the Free Church to send back the slaveholdersโ money, it inspired a transatlantic abolitionist movement and undoubtedly transformed Douglassโ own sense of purpose.
McCune Smith, a 19th-century black New Yorker whose achievements and writing are finally getting their due recognition, had a very similar experience. Between 1832 and 1837 he earned three degrees at the University of Glasgow, including the first medical degree earned by an African American. During his time in the โSecond Cityโ of the British Empire, Smith helped establish the Glasgow Emancipation Society, which was concerned with ending slavery in the British West Indies and Africa, as well as the United States.
If McCuneย Smith and Douglass were able to view the current political debate in Scotlandโperhaps over a cappuccino at the recently opened McCune Smith Cafรฉ in Glasgowโthere would be much for them to admire in a referendum that has engaged people of all classes and backgrounds. That debate has been about taking greater political responsibility in the present. It has also spurred a growing scholarly and popular debate about Scotland taking greater historical responsibility for its role in Caribbean slavery.
As for the future, and regardless of the referendum result, Africans for an Independent Scotland has made it clear that it will continue to seek an expanded role for Afro-Scots in the political process. ย
Steven J. Niven is a native of Scotland and the executive editor of three biographical projects at Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research: the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, the Dictionary of African Biography and the African American National Biography. He is also the author of Barack Obama: A Pocket Biography of Our 44th President.
Steven J. Niven is executive editor of the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, the Dictionary of African Biography, and the African American National Biography at Harvard Universityโs Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is also the author ofย Barack Obama: A Pocket Biography of Our 44th President.
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