Grand Valley professor takes on slave trade project

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Every once in a while, somebody says something to you that you’ve never heard anybody say before.

Steeve Buckridge does that a lot.

He’s sitting at his desk sifting through photos from his travels and murmurs, “I’m looking for a picture of myself in Timbuktu.”

Later:
“I was in the desert with the nomadic Tuareg people, having a tea ceremony with the sheik ...”

And:
“The king was there with some of his wives and he shook my hand. That broke all protocol — you’re not supposed to touch the king.”

Somebody should be writing all this down.

Buckridge, 42, has taken tango lessons in Argentina. He has led protests in West Africa to save the elephants.

Then there was that time he was sleeping in a thatch hut along the Niger River and heard an odd snuffling noise in the middle of the night. He ... well, let’s let him tell it.

“The Bosa people live in these houses made of thatch,” he says. “There’s just a stool and a cot. No electricity.

“One night I was sleeping and I heard this snorting sound. It sounded like it was right in the room where I was. I went to get my guide, Malik.

“He got a torch and looked around. He said, ‘There’s nothing here.’

“I couldn’t go back to sleep. I sat on my cot, dangling my feet over the edge. The sound came back. I went to get Malik again. I said, ‘I know there’s something in here.’

“Malik moved the bed and there was a crocodile underneath it.”

Buckridge shudders.

“That thing could have been nibbling my toes!” he says. Then what?

Buckridge grins.

“I fainted,” he says.

He’s not exactly Indiana Jones. Buckridge is a refined and dapper clotheshorse, an organized perfectionist who always has a paper clip handy and hoards rubber bands.

He’s the kind of guy who remembers to ask if you’d like coffee or tea, has a bowl of mints on his desk and says, “after you.” Born in Jamaica, he speaks with a crisp and dignified accent — more English than Jamaican — that makes him sound as if he knows more than you do. He says “precisely” a lot.

Yet he sleeps in thatch huts populated by wild crocodiles.

“I like to think of myself as an enigma,” he says, laughing.

Right now he’s in an impeccable navy blazer with shiny brass buttons in his office at Grand Valley State University, where he is associate professor of history, specializing in African and Caribbean history.

His latest adventure is close to home.

He’s in charge of a massive yearlong project called “Remembering the Crossings,” a commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Between 10 million and 21 million Africans were sold into slavery between the 1500s and 1800s, he says. Many Africans were imprisoned in castle dungeons along the West African coast before being crowded onto slave ships that sailed to the Americas and Europe. In 1807, the British Parliament outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as did the U.S. in 1808.

Buckridge started hearing about a global commemoration of the anniversary. He wanted to do something. He started calling everybody in town he could think of — other colleges, libraries, museums, the symphony. Everybody was on board.

“Lots of places around the world are doing one event, but this is a yearlong program,” he says. “It’s a huge undertaking.”

Ask him why we should commemorate this, and Buckridge has an answer that makes your blood feel frozen in your veins.

“It was horrific,” he says. “Imagine waking up in the morning and going off to work, and when you come home, your place is ransacked and your children are gone. A neighbor tells you the slave raiders captured your children. Imagine being that mother. Imagine the horror.

“Let’s say you were captured. You’re chained, connected to others in chains and marched to the coast. The journey could take a week or two. Then you’re housed in these castles, crammed into dark dungeons. You’re hot, hungry. The Europeans pick the women they want to set aside to rape.

“Then the slave ships arrive, and the horror continues. You’re bound, examined, branded, packed into the hulls of the ship, packed in like sardines. People are defecating and giving birth and dying all in the same place.

“People are whipped. Women are raped. If you rebelled, you were tortured into submission. If the seas get stormy and the cargo is too heavy, slaves are simply thrown overboard. This journey could take four weeks.

“You know your family will never see you and you will never see them again.

“We don’t treat our dogs this way,” he says. “It was the Africans’ Holocaust.”

It’s as if there are no more words to say. Except Buckridge, in his travels to Africa, has stood in those castles in Ghana where slaves were kept while they waited for the slave ships to come.

“One can never be emotionally prepared,” he says quietly. “The first time I stood there, I was so angry. I couldn’t understand how one human being could do that to another.

“The second time I went, I broke down and cried. I cried like a baby.

“Now,” he says, “I can’t go there anymore. It’s too hard. The inhumanity of it is unbelievable.

“It doesn’t matter what race you are,” he says. “I’ve seen people of all races standing there, crying.”

(The Grand Rapids, Mich., Press)