The academic who became the UK’s first black female history professor has been hired by the University of Bristol to examine its links with the slave trade.
Professor Olivette Otele has been appointed the university’s first professor of the history of slavery. She will lead a two-year research project on Bristol’s – and the university’s – relationship with the transatlantic slave trade.
During the early 18th century, Bristol was one of England’s leading slaving ports, with Bristol traders thought to be responsible for around a fifth of the journeys enslaved Africans were forced to take on British ships.
Campaigners argued that the building should be renamed as the Wills family made their fortune in the tobacco industry, which used slave labour.
Otele, who currently works at Bath Spa University, has spent almost 20 years studying the legacies of colonial pasts – including trauma, recovery and social cohesion – but also the amnesia around this kind of history.
Speaking to HuffPost UK after her appointment as the country’s first female black history professor, Otele said she saw her role as a historian as combative – taking on a “western, Euro-centric” version of history and introducing other perspectives.
“Ninety-nine percent of my students are white from normally comfortable backgrounds and yet, they’re open. Teaching is not just a career choice – it’s a calling,” she said.
Meanwhile Otele – who studied at the Sorbonne in Paris – said the lack of equal representation in academia was one of the things that motivated her to become a historian. There are just 25 black female professors working in the UK at the moment, according to studies.
“I never saw myself doing anything else, and I was prepared to work extremely hard for what I wanted,” Otele said.
“I knew that, given the society we live in, if I worked hard as a black woman, I would only have half of the reward. So to have equal reward, I would have to work harder than my white counterparts.”
In a statement about her new role, which will begin in January, Otele said she wanted to students to see her as a “facilitator of dialogue” about the slave trade.
“I want to produce a rigorous and an extensive piece of research that will be relevant to the university, to the city and that will be a landmark in the way Britain examines, acknowledges and teaches the history of enslavement,” she said.
Bristol University deputy vice-chancellor professor Judith Squires added: “As an institution founded in 1909, we are not a direct beneficiary of the slave trade, but we fully acknowledge that we financially benefited indirectly via philanthropic support from families who had made money from businesses involved in the transatlantic slave trade.”
Otele’s new role will give the university “a unique and important opportunity to interrogate our history” and debate how it should “best respond to our past in order to shape our future as an inclusive university community”.