Searching for My Slave Roots

This book will be an exploration of an untold chapter in both Black and British history, seen through Malik’s own investigation into his mixed Guyanese heritage.

With ancestors that had been both enslaved people and prominent slaveholders, Malik Al Nasir will uncover a completely new narrative on historical transatlantic slavery and the role of Scottish, Dutch and English Merchants, whose holdings were financed through the proceeds of the Demerara sugar and slave trade. Malik will uncover a lineage linking slaveholdings to high sheriffs, mayors, a late Prime Minister and bankers, whose companies formed major modern-day financial institutions. Travelling around the Atlantic world, he will unravel the legacies of slavery, plantation economics and the wealth of a slaveholding dynasty that he himself descended from, and the nuanced ways that historic trauma plays down through generations of the enslaved, and how wealth and privilege plays out across generations of slaveholders and their descendants.