“Descendant”, a powerful documentary about Africatown in Alabama, asks who gets to tell and profit from America’s history
by the victors, the saying goes. Yet in America black history in schools is still largely told from the vantage point of white slaveholders, the losers of the American. “Descendant”, a powerful documentary by Margaret Brown, presents another uncomfortable possibility: that the first-ever discovery of an American slave ship, a crucial artefact of black history, may not benefit the families who have suffered from the evil trade.
Its existence was disputed in some quarters until 2019 when researchers confirmed that they had found the wooden wreck in the mud of the Mobile river. The freed slaves kept silent about their trials for decades, fearing retaliatory violence. “Descendant” helps their stories come to light. Silence is a recurring theme of this sobering tale: as the documentary was released on Netflix in October, members of the Meaher family issued a public statement decrying the actions of their forebear. “Our family has been silent for too long on this matter”, they said.
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