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Campaigns: Activity 2

 Dinah's Story

Dinah was a woman who had been a slave and had been brought to Britain. After a Court case in 1772, 'The Somerset Case' and 'Mansfield Judgement' ruled that any slave who was brought to Britain could not be forceably taken abroad back to serve on the plantations. Although the case did not free slaves in Britain, it did send signals to slaveholders that their rights to own and control other human beings were beginning to be challenged-at least on the British mainland.
In reality, masters could and did ignore this judgement and some got away with it, for few slaves had the education or the money to challenge their masters in court. Black people brought to Britain were often unable to leave the service of their 'owners' as they would stop having any food or place to live, and unemployment was high, especially for Black people.

In some cases however the treatment of black 'servants' was often so poor that they ran away from the 'owners.' A number of cases of abuse and great cruelty by 'owners' were used by the campaigners against the slave trade as propaganda to inform people of how bad slavery was and what it meant on an everyday basis.

Ship's Captains often brought back one or two black people per voyage as their personal servants and then sold them on their return to Britain These 'Privilege Negroes' then served their new 'masters and mistresses'.
Black writers like Mary Prince and Oladuah Equiano caused a sensation with their personal accounts of what slavery had been like for them.

Dinah, whose 'owner' tried to take her back to the slave colonies against her wishes managed to escape and lived to tell her story:

Dinah's Story, adapted from Hannah More's letters to Horace Walpole (1790)

Even if they did escape forced return to a much harsher life, and even if their 'owners' were kind, the life of working people in Britain was hard, and it must have been very difficult to know that the rest of your family in Africa or the Caribbean did not know what was happening to you. For people like John Pinney's servant Pero, or Dinah knowing that the rest of your family and friends were being kept by cruel masters and mistresses on the slave plantations must have been very hard to bear, and there may well have been a real sense of loneliness and frustration.

However, we do know that there was also a strong spirit and sense of survival amongst these black people and that they were able to find some aspects of their life to give them pleasure and comfort.

Task:
Imagine that you could interview Dinah or Pero.
What would you ask them about their life?

Write your questions down on a sheet of paper.
What do you think that their answers would be like?

The short tour ends here. Click the 'next' button below to go to the next unit: 'Legacy'.
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