Searching for My Slave Roots

Malik al Nasir was born in Liverpool, a mixed-race kid with the name Mark Watson which he changed when he converted to Islam in early adulthood. Bemused by memories of racist shouts for him to ‘go back to where you came from’ – he came from Liverpool after all – he began to look into his ancestry.

This resulting book charts the twists and turns of his 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 in and around Demerara in what was British Guyana, this is a story of sugar and of the barbaric transportation and abuse of human beings that emerged from our insatiable desire for the sweet stuff.

In Guyana, he discovers ancestors that had been both enslaved people and prominent 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 that he himself is descended from. 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.