Roots in slavery

To the unsuspecting eye, Camilla Jensen may look anything but African. But despite her blond hair and blue eyes, the 31-year-old teacher carries a striking physical resemblance to photographs of her great-great-grandfather in West Indian island St. Croix.

"Maybe you think I sound a little crazy," she told the Copenhagen Post. "But somewhere in the back of my mind, I´ve always suspected that I was somehow connected to Africa."

Jensen worked and lived in Africa for years, and said she always felt at home there. Many years later, she began tracking down her biological father, whom she had never known. The search brought her an enormous surprise, a new self-identity and a cause to fight for.

Jensen´s great-great-grandfather, Charles Frederick Pickering, turned out to have been an African slave in the Danish West Indies, a descendant of one of at least 100,000 people shipped alive from what is now Ghana to work on Danish sugar cane plantations.

An equal number is believed to have perished on the long jorney over the Atlantic, chained together in apalling conditions on the slave ships.

The figures grant Denmark the dubious honor of a seventh place in the rank of the world´s biggest slavetrading nations - right after the United States.

But while many former slave-trading empires have come to terms with their past, the tendency in Denmark has been to forget about it.

"When my children were in school, only a line and a half in the history books were dedicated to Danish slavery," journalist and documentary film maker Alex Frank Larsen said. "People have never wanted to know very much about it ... it´s almost like we have repressed the memories. It´s like opening a forgotten book, and watching all these fascinating stories spring to live."

Larsen has taken on himself the responsibility of reminding the Danes of their past. Last Sunday, the first part of his documentary series on the slave´s descendants aired on Danish Television, telling the tale of Jensens´s search for her roots.

"Slavery was enormous in Denmark, compared with size," Larsen said. "The Royal Family and all the richest families in Denmark were implicated in the slave trade, and made an incredible profit on it."

Danish slave began in the 1670´s, when Christian V and the West Indian Company decided to boost Denmark´s economy with spices, tobacco, cotton, rum, and sugar. When Danish and Norwegian workers proved useless for labor under the Caribbean sun, African slaves were shipped in to do the work for them.

Denmark´s slavery ambitions ended in 1848, but the records remained. Meticulous bookholding provided Danish archives with some of the world´s best historical sources on slavery, as every slave´s fate was documented with care.

Jensen said the archives had proved a veritable fountain of information when she began tracking her ancestors down. But after she discovered her roots, she was amazed by the Danish historical amnesia.

"When I went to St. Croix, everyone went out of their way to help me find information on my relatives," she said. "When I came back to Copenhagen, I was shocked to see all the buildings and wealth produced by slave labour in the colonies. And still there are no signs of them anywhere in the city."

Jensen decided to take action and try to uncover her ancestors´ history. She joined forces with Larsen and founded the Center for Danish Tropical Cultural Heritage. The purpose of the center is to call attention to Denmark´s tropical heritage, get Danes to acknowledge the slaves´ existence, and organize the thousands of their Danish descendants.

The center also has tight ties with organizations in the former Danish colonies, which now belong to the U.S. Virgin Islands.

"I feel obligated towards our ancestors, who haven´t had an identity for such a long time, to tell this story," Jensen said. "I want to tell it to their descendants and get Danes to understand that the slave trade is a part of Denmark´s history. We can´t just pick and choose which parts of our history we pass on to our children."

Jensen said her self-identity had been transformed by her discovery, but that she still considered herself Danish.

"The slaves were also Danish," she said. "People born in the Danish West Indies were also Danes. I´m an Afro-Caribbean Dane. I like that."

(For further information: www.tropiskarv.dk)