WHITE DEBT-THE DEMERARA UPRISING AND BRITAIN'S LEGACY

Charlie Gladstone. Educated at University of Oxford, Charlie spent eight years working in music (Head of A & R at Warner/Chappell Music) before moving to Scotland to farm and create the homewares retailer Pedlars. Subsequently he has created and still runs restaurants, holiday businesses, an events business, and is a farmer, retailer, Christmas tree grower and property manager. He lectures and mentors on Gentle Leadership and has written and published two books (Random House, 2012 and Do Book Co. 2021). He is a father of six and grandfather of three. He is one of the founder members of the group Heirs of Slavery.

When Thomas Harding discovered that his family had profited from slavery, he set out to interrogate the choices of his ancestors and Britain's role in this terrible history. His investigation took him to Demerara (now Guyana), the site of an uprising by enslaved people in 1823, the largest in the British Empire and a key trigger in the abolition of slavery. Charting the dramatic build-up to this landmark event through the eyes of four people - an enslaved man, a missionary, a colonist, and a slaveholder - Harding lays bare the true impact of years of unimaginable cruelty and incredible courage and asks how those who benefitted from slavery can take responsibility for the White Debt.

Dr Michelle Yaa Asantewa is an award-winner author, cultural educational consultant and spiritual mentor. She is the co-founder of Way Wive Wordz Publishing, Editing and Tuition Services, which specializes in creative expression and personal development. She has authored several books and recently edited the anthology, In Search Of Mami Wata, featuring African water spirits, highlighting her environmental interests as well as spiritual practice. As an independent scholar, Dr Asantewa delivers courses and workshops in creative writing, literature, African History and culture.

Ulele Burnham’s practice spans the law relating to mental capacity and mental health, equality and human rights law. She is a member and former Chair of the Executive Committee of the Discrimination Law Association (Chair 2004-2006), a member of the Advisory Board of the AHRC Research Centre for Law Gender and Sexuality and was for 5 years (2002-2006) an occasional tutor in Labour Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is regularly invited to provide specialist training in respect of both equality and human rights law and mental capacity/mental health law. She has for the past four years delivered training on the Equality Act 2010 at the annual Justice/Sweet & Maxwell Human Rights Law Conference and has done a raft of training sessions on a variety of aspects of Court of Protection practice for local authorities and solicitors in private practice. Prior to coming to the bar she was a part-time lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London

Juanita Cox gained her PhD in 2013 from the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham, and is a winner of the prestigious RE Bradbury Memorial Prize. She is currently the leading authority on the life and work of the Guyanese novelist, Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965) and is editor of the compendium, Creole Chips and Other Writing (2018). Other publications include 'Buried in the Landscape: Edgar Mittelholzer's Creative Gene(sis)/Geni(us), and Revolting Subtexts' in Aje, L., Lacroix, T. and Misrahi-Barak, J. (eds) Re-imagining the Guyanas (2019). Juanita was a former Associate Fellow of the London Metropolitan University, where she lectured for three years in Caribbean Studies and Black British History. She co-founded the ground-breaking series Guyana SPEAKS in 2017, an education and networking forum, which has become a key monthly event in the calendar of the London-based Guyanese diaspora. In 2019 she worked on the “Nationality, Identity and Belonging: An Oral History of the ‘Windrush Generation’ and their Relationship to the British State, 1948-2018” project at the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies and is now working at the Institute of Historical Research on a three-year AHRC-funded oral history project, “The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context”. She is a trustee on the Board of the Oral History Society.