How well do you know your city? Do you know its history? Why it's laid out as it is? Whose names are immortalised on the streets that dissect its heart?

Glasgow is celebrated for its art, academia and song, its multiculturalism and its warmth but scrape that surface and you'll find a different story lurking beneath.

It is a tale of people, considered to be only partially human, stolen from their lands and trafficked across the seas to labour camps, the profits of which were used to build the Glasgow we know today.

This brutal history is one that the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER) is campaigning to have included in the Scottish Curriculum and memorialised in a museum of Empire, Slavery and Colonialism.

CRER organises Black History Month, an annual event that counters the hidden histories of African, Caribbean and Asian people in Scotland.

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Throughout October they held a Sunday walking tour around Glasgow's city centre and its mercantile past, examining its sinister entanglement with the Transatlantic slave trade.

At the David Livingstone statue in Cathedral Square, guides Anabelle Njenga and Yvonne Blake point out the friezes that encircle the celebrated adventurer and missionary credited for converting many African countries to Christianity. In one, an enslaved man is whipped by another man wearing a turban - an attempt at whitewashing the extent of Scotland's involvement while pointing a bloody finger at middle eastern and north African slave traders.

The propagandist statue was built to distance Glasgow from its slaving past - here was a Scot who not only discovered the continent but saved Africans through Christianity in the process, so the story goes. Except, he had a "tour guide" says Ms Njenga, who cleared the explorers path through the undergrowth, as seen on the statue. "He discovered nothing."

It's vital to be clear-eyed about this history, she says. There lies real threat in "the lingering stereotypes that the conditions of slavery were better than living in Africa".

In the 18th century, Scotland saw the grotesque wealth England was amassing as a result of the triangular slave trade - enslaved people exchanged for goods then sold into servitude and their crops returned to be traded.

Scots were so well regarded for their cruelty they were in high demand to run plantations where the average survival rate for enslaved people was three to five years, they were worked so hard.

The proximity of tobacco merchants Andrew Buchanan and Richard Oswald's graves to the Cathedral - one directly outside the entrance, the other in the nave - show exactly how much clout they held in the city. These men, and the others like them, wielded political power, Buchanan as Lord Provost and Oswald, as one of the brokers of 1782's Treaty of Paris.

READ MORE: Every Scottish street linked to slave-trade revealed - find your address

Despite media publications at the time of Abolition in 1833 professing that "not one brick of Glasgow" was built on the broken backs of enslaved people, the history books beg to differ.

A sum of £20 million, or £17 billion in today’s money, was paid to the slavers - despite their offensive wealth - to compensate for lost trade. A tax only paid off in 2015 by all of us.

Ms Blake says she balks when she hears the city's slogan, Let Glasgow Flourish.

She said: "Let Glasgow flourish on the children thrown as bait to the crocodiles, on the women being raped and torn away from their breastfeeding children. When people say there were not involved, they were involved. They were involved up to their neck."

It was not only the wealthy merchants the streets are named after, Ingram, Glassford, Buchanan and Dundas, who were culpable, but the Glaswegians who worked in administrative roles and processed the tobacco and sugar that passed through.

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The city had a "disproportionate" involvement with the slave economies, despite its calculated cover up.

The Stirling family who held the estates of Keir, near Dunblane and Cadder, in the north of Glasgow hastily changed their family crest post abolition, removing the silhouette of a Black man's head signifying their trade and replacing it with a gleaming white swan, as can be seen in the stained glass windows of the Cathedral.

The main thoroughfares built by merchants so they could have comfortable passage from their palatial homes to the counting rooms that totted up their wealth, the parks built as play areas for their wives and children and the commercial buildings rising from the piles of bodies of enslaved Africans are all a legacy of Glasgow, and Scotland's, heavy involvement in the slave trade.

It is a history that needs to be remembered, argue Ms Blake and Ms Njenga. Particularly in a cultural climate that is leaning to the right and elevating politicians and commentators that trade in racism, hatred and misogyny.

Ms Blake said: "Slavery is not in the past because even today people are benefitting from it.

"If this history was known a lot of stereotypes would not be as strong. These stereotypes are harmful to everybody"

After visiting the site of the Tontine Heads, where sugar was traded, the Old College, Glasgow University's first incarnation, and the Merchant City area, the tour comes to a close outside the Gallery of Modern Art, built as an extension to sugar and tobacco trader William Cunninghame's mansion.

Ms Njenga said: "Glasgow used to be 13 streets but because of the wealth of the slave traders it expanded. Without slavery, Glasgow wouldn't exist. The fabric of this pace is weaved by these people. We have to push for institutional change and change how we think about race."

This article was written in October 2019 during Black History Month.