One such performance was Jackie Kays The Lamplighter which took the audience on a journey through the dark heart of triangular trade of weapons ,slavery and sugar/tobacco. it features four women and a man tell the story beginning with the anguished tale of an eleven year old girl , the hideous perils of transportation in slave ships, the harrowing life on the plantations, and the genuine dark heart of the growth of the British cities and the industrial revolution.
This Guardian article by the author gives the background research taken by the author
in writing the play.
"I belong to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town, but, alas, there is something the matter with Glasgow that's going round and round. Glasgow does not readily admit its history in the way that other cities in the United Kingdom have done - Bristol, Liverpool, London. Other cities are holding major events to commemorate the abolition. What's happening in Glasgow? - in the Gallery of Modern Art, for instance, which was originally Cunninghame Mansion, built in 1778, the splendid townhouse of William Cunningham, a tobacco baron? Or in Buchanan Street, the great shopping street, named after Andrew Buchanan, another tobacco lord, or in Jamaica Street, Tobago Street, the Kingston Bridge?
At school, I was taught about the industrial revolution, but not about the slave trade which financed and powered it. I was taught about the suffragettes, but not about the women abolitionists who came before them, and who went on to become them. Jane Smeal set up the Glasgow Ladies Emancipation Society in the 1830s. And as early as 1792, 13,000 Glasgow residents put their name to a petition to abolish slavery. I never learnt, for instance, that the movement to end slavery in the British Empire in the 18th century is probably the first human rights campaign in history."
In this video Jackie Kay discusses the history of six of her poems selected as part of the Scottish Set Text list for National 5 English.
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