ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to analyse my involvement with the bicentenary on a number of different, though connected, levels. Firstly, as curator of the African galleries at the British Museum, trying to think of ways in which such a monstrous, protracted and ongoing atrocity could be made the subject of an exhibition. Secondly, as an artist and writer responding to a subject that has often been deemed to be indescribable and impossible to depict: how I might try to communicate something of its reality. Finally, as a human being who had learned a little about the subject as part of his professional life but who was suddenly presented with the depth of his ignorance, the breadth and intensity of the emotional and psychological legacy of the slave trade and the bravery of those who resisted it and continue to resist it to this day.
