Searching for My Slave Roots: From Guyana’s Sugar Plantations to Cambridge

Join us as Malik charts the twists and turns of his journey into the past and explores

an untold chapter in both Black and British history. As Malik investigates his roots, he

reveals a new history of the transatlantic slave trade. This is a story of sugar and of the barbaric transportation and abuse of human beings that facilitated our insatiable desire for the sweet stuff.

Malik Al Nasir was born in Liverpool to mixed parentage, with a white mother and a Black father. Bemused by childhood memories of racist shouts for him to “go back to where you came from” – he came from Liverpool after all – he began to look into his father’s ancestry.

Join us as Malik charts the twists and turns of his journey into the past and explores an untold chapter in both Black and British history. As Malik investigates his roots, he reveals a new history of the transatlantic slave trade and the role of Scottish, Dutch and English merchants. Largely set between Liverpool and Demerara, in what was British Guiana, this is a story of sugar and of the barbaric transportation and abuse of human beings that facilitated our insatiable desire for the sweet stuff.

In Guyana, he discovers ancestors who had been both enslaved Africans and prominent white slaveholders. He finds himself part of a complex lineage linking slaveholdings to high sheriffs, mayors, a British Prime Minister and bankers, whose companies formed major modern-day financial institutions, some of whom have yet to acknowledge their connections to the slave trade.

Announced by the University of Cambridge as the winner of the Vice-Chancellor’s Global Impact Award for his research, Malik Al Nasir is an author, filmmaker, performance poet and award-winning academic from Liverpool. Malik started tracing his roots back through Caribbean slavery over 20 years ago, and his pioneering research has been recognised by Sir Hilary Beckles, historian David Olusoga and the University of Cambridge, where Malik has just completed a PhD in history with a full scholarship. In recognition of the significance of his research, Malik received several awards while at Cambridge, as well as an honorary doctorate from Liverpool Hope University.

Malik is a co-founder of the policymaking initiative Black Academia – Lifting the Barriers. He has produced and appeared in several documentaries with Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Benjamin Zephaniah, Public Enemy, Ice T and many other luminaries.

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