Canada as Refuge and Resistance: A Conversation with Dr. Afua Cooper

Recorded interview with Dr. Afua Cooper, completed by Blessing Ogunyemi for the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Dr. Afua Cooper: So, two things can be true at the same time. I mean, five things can be true at the same time. So, yes, indeed, Canada was a place of refuge for people coming up on the Underground Railroad. It was a place of refuge for Black Loyalists in the previous century who came to these colonies after the American Revolution. That’s true, no doubt, but what is also true is that upon arrival here, as they build communities and start to establish themselves, they face a debilitating kind of antiblack racism. I’m just gonna give two examples. The first is the educational situation in Southwestern Ontario for Black children during, you know, after the Fugitive Slave Act, even before the Fugitive Slave Act. We are looking like from the 1818, 1828. We have a petition from Black parents in Ancaster, talking about the lack of education for their children, how their children were chased away from the regular public school into the 1840s, into the 1850s. Certainly, after the 1850s, you see more and more school districts in Southwestern Ontario banning Black children from going to school.  

I mean, it’s incredible, because if you’re thinking about a democratic society or a society that strives to be democratic, then education is a cornerstone, or ought to be a cornerstone, education for all. But here you had Black people, the parents, children, teachers, struggling to get an education. In fact, many of them did build their own schools, hire their own teachers to teach their children. And in Ontario, we had various iterations of something called a Separate School Act, which in fact legalized the segregation of education for Black children. So that was just one example of the struggles that Black people endured once they came and lived here, and had children, and sought to establish themselves. Education is huge. We can’t really, you know, not talk about that one.  

The second example I’m going to give, which comes from the previous century, the 18th century, was when the Black Loyalists came, both in Upper Canada and in Nova Scotia, how they faced severe limitations on their freedom. White people still expected Black people, even though they had fought for their freedom in the American Revolutionary War, got their freedom certificates from the British; came to these spaces, but white people still expected them to behave in a servile position. You’re still slaves. You still work for me. Your rights are gonna be proscribed. And Black folks were like, hell no! You know, we fought hard for this, the land that they were promised in places like Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the overwhelming majority of Black loyalists did not get that land, the supplies, the food, the corn, the flour, the oil, the what have you, the seeds were also not forthcoming. Meanwhile, the White Loyalists, they get all of those. 

So, for nine years, and on the point of education, to which I won’t reiterate, they faced all kinds of educational restrictions. So, for nine years, they endured those limitations, and some people were also captured and sold into slavery. In 1792, 1200 of them, under the leadership of Thomas Peters, packed up and sailed to Sierra Leone because they could not take the racism in Canada anymore. In places like Upper Canada, you had people like Richard Pierpoint and other black loyalists who banded together, who came together, who wanted to establish a community for their own safety and well-being because of the racism they faced.  

So yes. So, on one hand, the place was a haven. There was a refuge. They were no longer enslaved, but on the other hand, their freedom was really compromised, and their freedom was insecure. In Eastern Canada, they could be captured, and re-enslaved, and sold to the West Indies or to the American South. So we have to, you know, history is not just kind of like a one-note discipline. History is. . . it has so many layers, and we have to investigate and interrogate all of them, and say, yeah, several things can be true at the same time. And that makes the discourse and the discipline richer.