As the Chief Environmental Officer for Saint Helena’s troubled £285m ($360m) airport project, Annina Van Neel learned of the island’s most terrible atrocity – an unmarked mass burial ground of an estimated 9,000 formerly enslaved Africans in Rupert’s Valley. It is one of the most significant traces of the transatlantic slave trade still on earth. 

Haunted by this historical injustice, Annina now fights alongside renowned African American preservationist Peggy King Jorde and a group of disenfranchised islanders – many of them descendants of the formerly enslaved – for the proper memorialisation of these forgotten victims. The resistance they face exposes disturbing truths about the UK’s colonial past and present.