Sugar, slavery colonialism and migration: St Kitts and South Wales

One of the recurring themes in Germain’s work over the years has been time, the effects of its passing, memory, the legacy of the past and prospects for the future, even if the wider context may have been education, family or football. His photographs from the former British colony of St Kitts in the West Indies and the Chepstow, Cwmbran and Newport area of South Wales are an attempt to respond to historical links between the two locations alongside contemporary issues. The sugar industry, slavery, colonialism and migration - the movement of people across borders and continents - are at the heart of the story, with particular reference to Nathaniel Wells who was born into slavery on Vambelles Estate in 1779, the illegitimate son of a Welsh merchant sugar plantation owner and one of his slaves. Extraordinarily, at the age of 9 he was sent to school in England and he later inherited his father’s plantations, making him, a person of mixed race, one of the wealthiest young men in Britain. As such he was able to purchase the magnificent Piercefield House in Chepstow which was one of the finest properties in the country, although it is now an abandoned ruin, despite its historical importance and protected status.  In Britain today, the evidence of slavery can only be seen with the help of knowledge, an understanding of how and where the vast wealth acquired from sugar was spent. The issue of migration, however, is ‘live’ and the emergence of ‘hand car wash’ businesses across the country is one of its visible manifestations because almost all of them have been set up by eastern Europeans or by Kurds seeking asylum from Iraq, Iran or Syria. The enforced migration of the slave trade was of course central to the establishment of St Kitts as an economic powerhouse of the British Empire in the 18th Century. Several generations may have passed since slavery was abolished and St Kitts secured its independence in 1983, but that history of sugar and slavery is all around the island; the ruins of sugar works (production finally ceased in 2005), self-seeding cane growing wild, an impressive British fortress and especially in the names of the people. Most Kittitians are descendants of slaves and they still bear the surnames of the plantation owners that were assigned to their ancestors.

Diffusion Festival, Cardiff, 2015

Extraordinary experiences, loaded with uncertainty > Julian Germain interviewed by Cécile Bourne-Farrell

What did you tell the people in St-Kitts, how did you approach the subject?

I told them Nathaniel Wells’s story and that I was there because I wanted to know more about Wells, where he’d come from and what he’d owned, even though he never returned to St Kitts. Actually, in general, I don’t think the absent plantation owners (of which there were many) visited unless they had to. Life in the tropics was regarded as very tough, hot, unhealthy and unsafe - seems strange in comparison to the luxury tourism of today. His story is inherently unexpected and interesting, loaded with contradictions - born a slave in St Kitts, illegitimate, then becoming a slave owning fabulously wealthy, black guy in Britain in the early 19th century. Very few people know about him in the UK or in St Kitts. Perhaps partly because of that there was a lot of interest in what I was doing and I got a lot of help - lots of pointers towards particular places and interesting people. As a result I was even able to make a portrait of four generations of the same family (great grandmother, grandmother, mother and child), three of whom had worked in the sugar industry. The great grandmother (and her husband) had worked as field labourers, the grandmother worked in the processing plant, her daughter was a secretary in the company office and she and her husband were both laid off when sugar production finally ceased on the island in 2005. It was only the four year old child who had no direct connection with sugar. Such ‘Generations Portraits’ (which I have been making for several years) are a way that I have found to provoke thoughts about time, the past, present and future life, death, different peoples experiences at different phases of history. So this is how it went, speaking with and meeting people and looking around for potentially significant motifs that suggested the past is in the present, and then obviously trying to make images that have resonance.

Arts Cabinet, 2020. Full interview here