A Story of Bones (12A)
Directed by Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere

 
THE island of Saint Helena, a tiny British overseas territory, is most renowned for being Napoleon Bonaparte’s place of exile and death, and where his empty grave is a major tourist attraction. But what is less well known is its disturbing history connected to the transatlantic slave trade. 

Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere’s powerful and sobering debut feature documentary shines a much-needed poignant light on British colonialism, slavery, racism and identity. 

In October 2015 they went to the island to document the opening of its new £285 million airport, financed by the British government but which, due to delays and planes not being able to land because of the windy conditions, became dubbed “the world’s most useless airport” by the global media.

However when they met the airport project’s environmental officer Annina Van Neel they learnt of the island’s greatest atrocity — an unmarked mass burial ground of an estimated 9,000 formerly enslaved Africans in Rupert’s Valley. That, and the unearthing of the remains of 325 liberated slaves in 2008 to make way for an airport haul road. The bodies were then moved to the pipe store next to the prison for “temporary storage,” which lasted  years, even though the British government had provided £90,000 for their reburial. 

So, instead of being about an airport, the documentary chronicles Van Neel’s relentless fight for justice for these victims, which included a proper reinternment and a memorial in their honour, with the help of renowned African-American preservationist Peggy King Jorde and a group of disenfranchised islanders.

Jorde states: “It matters how we choose to remember.”

The extraordinary resistance they faced exposed alarming and disgraceful truths about Britain’s colonial past and present.

While St Helena commemorated the bicentennial of Napoleon’s death with island wide events it took 14 years finally to rebury the 325 human remains in a mass grave in Rupert’s Valley instead of individual plots. And, to date, there is still no memorial. 

“Why is it OK to take care of Napoleon’s [empty] tomb but completely and utterly ignore what’s in Rupert’s,” asks Van Neel.

You share her dismay and outrage and hopefully this moving film will help to bring justice to these forgotten victims and convince the British government to right this longstanding wrong. 

In cinemas August 2.