The main square in America’s biggest city–Times Square–at Broadway and 42nd Street is famous for New Year’s celebrations. In 1904, The New York Times moved its headquarters to the new Times Building, and that’s where the name comes from.
The main square in Britain’s biggest city–Trafalgar Square in London–once known as Charing Cross, is steeped in British history. Ever since the 13th century, distances measured in the city stem from here. The square is named after the Battle of Trafalgar, a British naval victory in 1805.
In Paris, France’s biggest city, there is Place de la Concorde, the spot where Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette met their maker during the French Revolution. It got its current name in 1795, although that was later changed, but it’s been Place de la Concorde since 1830.
In Canada’s biggest city—Toronto—we have Sankofa Square. And what exactly is that? As I attempt to answer this question, keep in mind the city calls itself “world-class.” But first, let’s venture down to the place formerly known as Yonge-Dundas Square and take in those huge neon signs currently on display.
One of them begins like this:
As we gather in the heart of Tkaranto, we acknowledge this land is the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.
I was born and raised in Toronto, went to school here, and graduated from the University of Toronto. I studied history and had never heard of Tkaranto. When I went online to check it out, the first thing that showed up was an article saying people now refer to the city this way. Really?
Below the headline was a banner displaying “TKARANTO” and under that the words “ABOLISH THE POLICE.” The article said, “Using Tkaronto in place of Toronto is merely one small step toward abolishing the systemic oppression of Indigenous people.”
And what about that other sign at Sankofa Square? It reads:
As we gather on Sankofa Square, we acknowledge all Treaty peoples, including those who came here as settlers, migrants either in this generation or in generations past—and those of African descent who came here involuntarily through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery.
This presents some serious problems.
My grandparents were Jews who left Eastern Europe for Canada to build a better life. No mention of them on these signs. My wife is Macedonian and came to Canada with her family from Greece when she was three. No mention of them either. Instead, we’re all lumped together —along with the French, English, and Dutch who first came to these shores, never mind everyone else not Indigenous or African—as “settlers” and “migrants.”
I find that insulting. Yet no one ever asked me what I thought.
But this isn’t the worst problem with the Sankofa Square debacle. On Saturday, the city will celebrate its first annual Sankofa Day. Feel free to attend, but anyone who regards history as a key building block of a nation should be alarmed about what passes as history there because those signs, especially the second one, are deceitful. No one of African descent came directly here via slave ship to Upper Canada, where Toronto is today, “involuntarily through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.” Slave ships went to South America, to islands in the Caribbean, and to the Thirteen Colonies, which later became the United States. American ports that received slave ships were in Boston. And Newport, Rhode Island. And Charleston, South Carolina. It’s all in the historical record.
But they never came directly here.
Blacks who found themselves in Upper or Lower Canada, or Canada West and Canada East, as they were known, arrived through the Underground Railroad to escape slavery in the U.S. However, some slaves—estimates range from 500 to 700—lived in Upper Canada and remained slaves after their slaveowners brought them. Joseph Brant, a noted Mohawk leader and statesman, was one of those slaveowners; he came to Upper Canada from New York state and brought 30 to 40 slaves with him.
Thus, Sankofa Square is a huge space of historical misinformation in the central square of our biggest city, a place no longer affiliated with the name Dundas. And who was he? Henry Dundas, a Scottish parliamentarian in the late 1700s, has been declared persona non grata by Toronto City Council when it comes to streets, libraries, subway stations, and public squares. The Council seeks to remove every trace of his name.
The country of Ghana, which is where Sankofa comes from, was once called the Gold Coast on the west coast of Africa. A major departure point for the slave trade, it was where slaves were sold to European slave traders. Slavery wasn’t abolished in Ghana until 1874. England abolished it in 1807, and Scotland even before that, and there is an interesting footnote about the Scottish experience.
A lawyer defended an escaped enslaved man who had been purchased as a slave in Jamaica before being taken to Scotland. The lawyer pleaded the case on appeal and won over a majority of Scottish lords, some of whom were slaveowners. The slave got freed, and it was ruled that no slave could remain a slave on Scottish soil, which meant all other slaves in the country were also freed.
That lawyer was Henry Dundas.
He later became a politician and appointed John Graves Simcoe as the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. Both men were abolitionists. In 1793, the latter introduced the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada, making it the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to limit slavery. Because of that law, more than 40,000 blacks fled the U. S. over the next seven decades and wound up in Upper Canada through the Underground Railroad.
So why the fuss about Dundas?
In 1792, he spoke about the complicity of African leaders in the slave trade. The Parliamentary Register in London has his exact words, and there is no mistaking that he was an ardent abolitionist. Another member of Parliament wanted to abolish slavery outright, but didn’t have enough support to get it done. Some Scottish lords were slaveowners themselves, and there were economic considerations at play. And so, Dundas proposed the “gradual” abolition of slavery, and this passed; it was the first step to legally abolishing the slave trade. However, uninformed critics of Dundas dwell on the word gradual and accuse him of preserving slavery.
Bull-dung. This is revisionist history, and the result is Sankofa Square.
Moral of the story? If Toronto is world-class, it’s only as a laughingstock.
