191. Slave, Slaver, Abolitionist: Three Scots in Africa

Empire

Jack Davenport

History

4.6 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2024

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The extraordinary lives of three Scotsmen - John Henderson, Richard Oswald, and David Livingstone - encapsulate the polarities of the Scottish experience in Africa prior to the 20th century. Henderson, formerly a soldier for the Swedes and the Danes in Europe, was captured and enslaved by the Arabs of Zanzibar in the Mediterranean. Before long though, he had won the heart of a princess of Zanzibar, and eloped to Alexandria with her. By contrast, Richard Oswald was a rich and prodigious slaver who went so far as to purchase an island where he would play golf, surrounded by his enslaved golf caddies in tartan, before later playing a major role in negotiating the Declaration of Independence. Finally, there was David Livingstone, a pioneering missionary, explorer and abolitionist, who nevertheless supported British colonial expansion, and whose influence on Western attitudes toward Africa endure to this day. In every case, the story of Scots in Africa is riddled with courage, cowardice, horror and adventure… In today’s episode, William and Anita are joined once again by historian Murray Pittock, to discuss the remarkable lives of the Scots who shaped and were shaped by their interactions with Africa, and the insight they give into the experiences of Scots overall. To fill out the survey: survey.empirepoduk.com To buy William's book: https://coles-books.co.uk/the-golden-road-by-william-dalrymple-signed-edition Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [email protected] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of empire, a chat community,
0:06.7	discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly
0:11.5	newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at
0:14.4	W.
0:15.1	Empire pod UK.com.
0:18.2	Is your business growing places?
0:22.2	Are you ace up north and awesome in North America?
0:26.0	Got roots in the southeast, but branching out to Southeast Asia?
0:30.0	No matter where you see your business growing, we'll support you,
0:33.4	with regionally based business specialists across the UK and experts on the ground in over 50 markets.
0:39.6	Search Grow with HSBC, named UK's Best Bank 2024 by Euromoney.
0:45.0	Restrictions apply for certain countries. Hello and me William Deremple.
1:05.0	Now you are still in the Scottish series, not the Scottish play, but it's the Scottish
1:09.9	series that we've been doing here on the Empire podcast and we talked in the last
1:14.2	time we met about Scots in India and the impact they had on India and the impact
1:19.9	India had on Scotland the amount of money that flowed into the country which was
1:24.4	transformative. We're going to talk about the relationship between Scots and Africa in this
1:30.1	podcast, the continent and actually there's a really interesting story about the
1:33.8	earliest Scott to visit that continent a John Henderson was his name William you
1:39.3	love this story tell us this story I love this story and it frames everything that's followed. The rest of this story will be rather less edifying tales of Scots involved in slavery and colonialization. But it's probably worth just putting this right at the beginning just for a
1:53.9	wee bit of context because Sir John Henderson, the fifth Laird of Faudill in Fife, I think, was the first Scott we know who visited India. And I remember 20 years ago when I was
2:08.0	sent to write a travel article on Zanzibar, visiting the Scottish National Gallery and James Holloway, who was then the keeper, took me down to the basement and they have all their portraits that are not on show on these sort of runners and he pulled out this rack of old
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jack Davenport, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Jack Davenport and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.