THE SLAVE TRADE
Ravi Dev Column
Kaieteur News
March 25, 2007
This week, I am going to take a break from the discussion with Mr. Clarence Ellis on seeking common ground to build a society and state for all the peoples that inhabit this land.
After all, today marks one of milestones in the one of the most sordid episodes in human history that brought one of those peoples to these shores – Africans, and which is directly responsible for much of our present travails.
I am speaking, of course, of the vaunted “abolition of the African Slave Trade” exactly 200 years ago, on March 25th, 1807.
For us in Guyana , which was then a Crown Colony and not needing Parliamentary fiat, the ban came a bit earlier - January 1st, 1807.
Britain has seen it fit to organise widespread commemorations – both at the local and national level, which, I am sure, will celebrate the “British values” of justice and fair play.
Last year Tony Blair was praised for going as far as expressing “deep sorrow” for Britain 's role in the slave trade. Ah well, but there are, however other sides to the story.
For me, one side is captured in the very name, “the Slave Trade”. The phrase connoted to me as a schoolboy, the transport of “slaves”, which immediately lessened the degradation of what was really taking place. I mean, what did “slaves” expect? The descriptions went beyond connotation and invoked the Arab slave trade across the Sahara and the local slave practices. The texts went to great lengths to point out that it was local Africans who captured their own people and sold them into slavery. The European slave traders, therefore, were merely continuing an old tradition.
But the old “traditions” were different from the one introduced by the Europeans in a fundamental way: even though a person may have been enslaved, he remained a human. This was never denied to the slave.
The British and other Europeans never saw the African man, woman or child they chained in the holds of their ships as humans. The reason was simple but the impact was profound. The Europeans, after all were Christians, and were exhorted to see all other humans as “brothers”. How then, could they enslave their brothers? Well, how about if the Africans were not humans? That would straighten out any cognitive dissonances that remained after counting up the profits.
And that is precisely what the Europeans did. In Islamic and local African slavery, slaves were never denied their humanity…and this qualitative difference makes a world of difference for the descendants of those slaves.
The European's remarkable solution to his moral and theological dilemma was the beginning of an anti-African racism which remains as a central pillar in the European cosmology to this day.
As Eric Williams wrote, “Slavery was not born of racism – rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.” The African was now a chattel, a thing, an object to be bequeathed and inherited, sold and bought.
The beginning of the European enslavement of Africans predated the need for cheap labour in the New World .
It actually begun in 1442 when two very Christian captains of the Portuguese Prince Henry the navigator, brought back a dozen Africans they had captured.
It started a trend. Soon every pretender to nobility had to have his own African slave and Lagos in Portugal became the Prime slave port.
Africans were heathens and the staunch Portuguese Christians asserted that they were saving their souls. It would not have hurt that they also provided free labour.
The Spaniards therefore, simply turned to a known supply of humans to fill the labour breach when the indigenous Indians inconsiderately died off like flies when they were enslaved in the newly “discovered” colonies after 1492.
The Portuguese could not keep up and contracts (“Asientos”) were issued to other nations. The British got into the act in 1562 when John Hawkins became a subcontractor with Queen Elizabeth as a silent partner. His ship was named, “Jesus” and one can be sure he prayed for the salvation of his cargo. He was knighted by the good queen after ten years of ferrying souls. The Dutch, French, Danes and other Europeans also rushed in to save souls.
By the beginning of the 18th Century, Britain had emerged and was acknowledged as the official trader of Africans – in a trade which had now grown to gargantuan proportions.
In the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Spain signed off on the British monopoly and the expansion of African slavery became one of the major commercial policy goals of Britain .
They were not just a nation of shopkeepers: they played the pivotal role in the international trade in human beings. British ships dominated the market for slaves in the Americas and supplied African captives to Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish colonies, as well as to the parts of the world controlled by the British Empire . In some 12,000 trips, British ships transported 2,300,000 African souls across the Atlantic .
By the 18th century when the European “Enlightenment” dawned, the light did not appreciably extend to the conception of who was the African. The Enlightenment thinkers conceded that the African “may” be a species of man.
For instance, in 1753 the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume declared, “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.”
The services of “reason” were soon dragooned in a host of social and natural sciences to prove the inferiority of the African on the great, “chain of being”.
The famous question posed by the chained, kneeling African in the Wedgwood medallion in the anti-slave campaign, “Am I not a man and a brother?” has not really been answered by the Europeans. And the canker of racism has spread into other peoples through the hegemony that they established during the colonial period. We are supposed to fight to determine who is closer to the white ideal.
Part of that hegemony is maintained by denying agency to the African: one just recently released English movie, Amazing Grace, on the abolition of the slave trade gives scant recognition to the role played by Africans, for instance through revolts.
The most important of these revolts, documented by CLR James, occurred on 14 August 1791 in Saint Domingue, the French colony that would become Haiti .
With the French largely displaced, the British hoped to take the colony of Saint Domingue for themselves – and sent the Royal Navy to put down Toussaint's rising. Four years later in 1798, the British were routed and Toussaint led his victorious army into Port-au-Prince . It was one of the greatest military disasters in British history.
Another side of the story that is usually glossed over is the ubiquity of the wealth that was built on the backs of the slave trade. Institutional investors in slavery included the royal family, who followed in Elizabeth footsteps, numerous colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities, and even the Church of England.
In 1773 the Heywood brothers founded a bank in Liverpool to fund slave expeditions and deposit their profits. Today the firm is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland . The Barclay brothers were involved in the slave trade from 1756. The trade paid for impressive projects such as the cathedral-like library of the most elite All Souls College in Oxford . It was not ironic, but a measure of the intransigence of racism in the modern world, that Eric Williams was denied membership to All Souls when he was at Oxford .
A fitting act by our government to commemorate the abolition of the “slave trade” would be to initiate a proper multicultural curriculum in all our learning institutions that fills the deliberately constructed gaps in our knowledge of ourselves.