On the 25th March 1807, The British Parliament passed The Slave Trade Act, a bill that made slavery illegal throughout the British Empire. To the shame of all of us, slavery still goes on, continuing not only within the confines of the old Empire but in all parts of the world where money is king and humanity a less valuable, but eminently tradable commodity. Today it’s called Human Trafficking, but it's slavery, pure and simple.
A chance meeting at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office of a high ranking East African Diplomat and an Archbishop of the Catholic Church forced Her Majesty’s Government to reluctantly open, as was aptly described later as, “a barrel of worms.”
The players, some initially involved only by innuendo, included the Vatican, the British Government Minister, the noblesse of Italian Pimps and ex-participants in the Rwandan genocide. Most tellingly, a small number of people who were prepared to stand up to speak, and to be counted, buoyed in the belief their story would now be told.
If HM Government wanted a quiet tidy investigation with a likewise conclusion they should have known better than to re-assemble Mr. Brown’s group and give him Carte Blanche to find out what was going on. He mustered his usual faithful factotums Bernie Collins and David Barlow together with a couple of minders. He also managed to “borrow” Jasper Codd from the British Embassy in Nairobi: a man of many talents. Jasper brought along to the party his faithful retainer Captain Jim, a Maasai by birth, but currently British by financial necessity.
From London to the Plains of East Africa: to the suburbs of Rome and the Holiest place in Spain, Frank Plaskitt followed his nose, sniffing out a trail of lies deceit and misery. Along the way he heard tales of abject misery and unbridled joy: of man’s inhumanity to man and the sheer decency of people even in the most trying of circumstances.
Frank Plaskitt is no William Wilberforce, what the great man would have thought of him bears no thinking about. But Frank knows right from wrong: sometimes in his life he has struggled to deal with the rights, he never had a problem dealing with the wrongs. That’s why he gets this kind of job. As Brown put it towards the end of the operation, if the job could have been done by a Boy Scout, I’d have sent one.
