For me, the issue of my surname became apparent after watching the first episode of Alex Haley’s Roots in the late 70s. Even at 13, I had never before thought much about the significance of surnames. I had wrongly assumed that African Caribbean names, like those of other ethnic groups, were the product of a natural course of history far removed from slavery and ownership. But Roots put an end to this myth in my young mind. Watching for the first time on television slaves being brought from Africa to the New World and having their names changed as part of a process of subjugation was a life-transforming event. I will never forget Kunta Kinti being beaten until he called himself by his new slave name, ‘Toby’. The programme made me realise two things about my surname ‘Beckford’. First that it signified a brutal history of subjugation, in particular, the dehumanisation of African people. Second, the name tied me not only to a problematic past but also to a White English family of which I knew nothing about.

In other words: a part of my heritage was to be found somewhere in England. Once I began to question its status and utility, I began to feel a sense of alienation and estrangement from my surname. I began to experience a sense of diasporan longing for reconnection to an African identity and surname, which had been stolen from my ancestors. For the first time, I began to imagine myself in exile. One of my favourite Black feminist writers, Bell Hooks summaries this sense of being away from home in Art on my mind, when she states:

“Everyone forgets that when we talk about Black people living in the diaspora, we’re talking about a people who live in exile, and that in some ways, like all other exiles, we imagine home, we imagine journeys of return. We embark on such journeys by first looking for traces – by engaging the palimpsest that reveals the multilayered nature of our experience.”

I wanted to discover my real surname but I was cognisant of the fact that tracing histories is not a guarantee of resurrecting the past because as Anthony Pinn has so rightly deciphered in his book Varieties of African American Religious Experience:

“With each articulation of . . . cultural memories, they are moved that much further from the moment of their conception and their cultural context.”

Historical distance and historical perspective make recovering the history of my and other African Caribbean non-slave names difficult. There are no clear-cut historical records connecting me with a direct and transparent genealogy. Historical distance makes the construction of the past very difficult and a fragile process. Even the use of DNA testing can never truly reconnect us with the past, as the ruptures and fissures have estranged us from our African families. Hence, all we can hope to do is to seek insight into an already loose historical and cultural history. Even so, the longing that I have to redeem this situation is something that neither distance nor social location could wipe out.

How do I redeem the white family name, this “slave brand” that has stayed with me from slavery? There are two considerations. First, it is important that the broader history of the Beckford family is known. This is why I went to the BBC in 2003 with the idea of developing a story on the Beckford family, which was subsequently made as "The Slavery Business".

Second, another consideration is whether there is anything worth redeeming at all? For me, one of the most positive expressions of my surname was located in the discovery of a slave called Robert Beckford who was a part of a Christian-led rebellion in Jamaica in 1831. In this case the Beckford name signifies positive resistance to oppression. Bell Hooks provides a model for redeeming my family name based on these sorts of discoveries. Hooks' real name is Gloria Watkins. She writes in the name of her grandmother, Bell Hooks. Writing with someone else’s name occurs for a variety of reasons but here it is not to obscure the real writer but to promote the history and politics of the adopted name. By writing with her grandmother’s name, Watkins is giving voice to black women who, like many of her generation were silenced by race, class and gender politics in nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Could this process work for me?

Finding the slave rebel ‘Robert Beckford’ provides me with a similar avenue of expression. However, on this occasion there is no need for a literal name change although a change in orientation and consciousness occurs. By retaining the name, I can make a conscious effort to connect myself in a powerful and redemptive way with my namesake slave ancestor. That is to say, I make an effort to give voice to the hidden millions captured and brutalised on slave plantations, like the other ‘Robert Beckford’ from 1831 and thereby overturn the limitations of the brand or ‘slave name’ so that it signifies resistance and overcoming.

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