Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

[Rootsie]

Bury the Chains
a book by Adam Hochschild

reviewed by Rootsie

“’Never doubt,’said Margaret Meade, ‘that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’ This book is about one such group.” (from the Introduction)

This new book by the Adam Hochschild, who brought us King Leopold’s Ghost, a devastating account of the Belgian Congo, endeavors to put a heroic spin on the efforts spanning nearly 50 years, of British Quakers and a few upper-class Anglican eccentrics, to outlaw the slave trade, which the British Parliament finally did in 1834.

One problem lies in the equivocal nature of the heroes, notably Parliamentarian William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, a ‘feisty musician and self-taught lawyer’, and Thomas Clarkson, perhaps the Western world’s first dogged political organizer. All fervent Christians, they were deeply concerned about the moral depravity of the trade, but apparently only insofar as it reflected poorly on the fictions with which the British continue to comfort themselves. They hated the brutality of the trade both for slaves and legions of press-ganged sailors, and the dreadful abuse of slaves on the Caribbean sugar islands.  The three, and particularly Clarkson, were certainly tireless. Clarkson in particular devoted virtually every moment of his adult life to the cause of abolition, crisscrossing the British Isles countless times, scouring the slaving ports for witnesses, collecting names for petitions, and raising people’s consciousness about the horrors of the trade.

Ultimately, however, he and his comrades failed to see their way through the racist assumptions of their time. They did not publicly advocate for emancipation until the very end, when it was an inevitability, and even then agitated for a ‘gradual’ approach (It was a woman, Elizabeth Heyrick, who spoke out in the 1830’s with the greatest clarity and moral force against the continuation of African slavery in any form.)

Hochschild writes:

“Like many white abolitionists to come, Clarkson shared some of the ideas of his
time about race. For example, to refute those who claimed that their skin color meant God destined Africans to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” he argued not that color doesn’t matter, but rather that Africans might not be permanently black after all. Skin color, he claimed, must be linked to climate, for are not children of African slaves in the New World often lighter-skinned than their parents? Apparently it didn’t occur to him that there might be another reason for this lighter skin, a point on which any slave or Englishman could have enlightened him.”

This disconnect is particularly curious given the fact that Clarkson collected reams of testimony, by white witnesses and participants, to the rape of black women on slave ships and on the Caribbean plantations. The point is that not only was it politically inexpedient to agitate for outright emancipation of the slaves, but that the very notion of human equality was not in the cerebral repertoire of most of these men. What they urged instead was a vigorous Christianizing mission, seeing this as the way to push blacks up the evolutionary ladder.

Even later anti-slavery ‘leaders’ like Thomas Fowell Buxton had this to say:

   “The Negro race are blessed with a peculiar aptitude for the reception of moral and religious instruction, and it does seem to me that there never was a stronger call on any nation than there is now…to send missionaries, to institute schools, and to send out Bibles. It is the only compensation in our power. It is an abundant one! We may in this manner recompense all the sorrows and sufferings.”

 Hochschild comments dryly, “It was small recompense.”

This preoccupation with black spiritual upliftment contributed in large part to the establishment of the disaster which became the British colony of Sierra Leone. Certainly the idea of a self-governed state populated with former slaves on the African continent was not the first thing the white fathers of the colony had on their minds. From the start, the colony’s ‘governors’ were white, fired up by the idea of establishing a Christian toehold in West Africa, comprised of devout exemplar blacks who, by the Grace of God, would soon be producing more sugar in this fertile Eden than could be imagined even in Haiti, with the added bonus of bringing the light of Jesus Christ to darkest Africa. This was also their end-run around the slavery issue. Rather than abolishing it, they would render slavery unnecessary and it would wither by itself.  The absurdity of planting a colony of free blacks from England and Nova Scotia on the African mainland just up the road from England’s largest slave depot in West Africa is something else that apparently never occurred to them.

Another disconnect is evidenced by the British abolitionists’ failure to acknowledge or in many cases even see the relation between their ‘human rights’ struggle and the earthquakes rumbling through European life in this age of Industrial and political revolution. 2% of the British population had the right to vote during the time in which this narrative takes place. Wilberforce, revered so highly to this day in Britain, viewed workers’ rights, universal male suffrage, women’s rights, Irish rights, with horror, failing entirely to bring his critique of the slave trade to bear on the vast inequalities which existed all around him. About this Hochschild is frank and forthcoming. The Quakers come off better in his account, outsiders as they were by self-definition, but they are in general peripheral figures in Hochschild’s narrative, and among the Quakers were also a number of slave traders, particularly in the American colonies.

True enough, the campaign against the trade featured the first Western examples of true political organizing, including pamphleteering, the boycott of sugar, etc. etc. But at the center of the narrative alongside Clarkson stands the disturbing figure of Wilberforce, lionized in British history as the great liberator of the slaves, conservative to the point of reaction on every other social issue, and a wacky fundamentalist to boot, deeply concerning himself with burning issues such as whether it is a sin for Christians to dance and sing.

Perhaps a more complex and useful narrative would have concerned itself with the millions of men and women without even the right to vote who petitioned Parliament every year for 44 years for an end to the trade, forcing debate there: landless, disenfranchised working people from industrial cities like Manchester and the coal mining towns of Scotland. They personally had nothing to gain from an end to the trade, and arguably the most to lose, since one acknowledged way to improve one’s lot in the world was to get on a slave ship and take a cut of the vast profits. They also were of course the work force in a factory system which slave products and slavery profits made possible.  One wishes that the voices of some of the signers of those many petitions could have been heard in the book.

The true change agents were of course the enslaved blacks of the Caribbean, whose bloody uprisings and the defeat of the two greatest armies the world had ever known made it clear that British and French impunity were impossible to sustain.  The British invasion of St. Domingue (later Haiti) resulted in a death toll of 60% out of a force of over 20,000. Naturally, this did not play well at home. It was the British defeat in St. Domingue, and the later slave revolutions in Barbados and Jamaica, which spelled the end of the profitability of the slave system, and this is what ultimately brought it down.

Virtually the only black person with a voice in the book is Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vasa. He is certainly a fascinating character who lived more than nine lives in his brief one, from African slave to freeman to sailor to valet to political agitator to author to publishing entrepeneur who did not hesitate to put his life and his free status at risk to fight for the end of slavery, on both an individual and public level. Toussaint L’Ouverture makes a brief appearance as well. While I understand that the story Hochschild chooses to tell is the story about whites’ response to slavery, I believe he inevitably ends up giving the impression that the various strategies and tactics employed by the British agitators had more to do with ending slavery than they in fact did. And because of this, the book comes dangerously close to joining the centuries’-wide canon of triumphalist imperial claptrap.

Hochschild for example seems to suggest that abolition efforts in England incited the Caribbean slave uprisings, as various writings made their way across the ocean, and accounts of activities were discussed at plantation dinner tables and such, especially in Jamaica. But it would be an impossible stretch to imply that the slave revolts of French and Creole-speaking St. Domingue (Haiti) were precipitated in large part by abolition efforts taking place in England. The pamphlets made good tinder, literal and figurative, that is sure, and the name Wilberforce took on mythic connotations for Jamaican slaves. But the slaves themselves were the ones who fought modern armies with sticks and shovels and guerilla tactics, and they were the ones who died hideously when captured. St. Domingue under Napoleon’s brother-in-law Le Clerc was nothing short of a torture circus ala de Sade.

Hochschild is no dummy. He frankly describes the failings of the abolitionists, and is careful not to draw sweeping conclusions, but remarks he makes like this one from the end of the book seem to me to make claims for this movement that are grandiose and distorted by deep-seated European assumptions of inherent superiority:

“All of the twelve [who first gathered in 1787 to plan a strategy to end the slave trade] were deeply religious…but they also shared a newer kind of faith. They believed that because human beings had a capacity to care about the suffering of others, exposing the truth would move people to action…Clarkson, writing of this ‘enormous evil,’ said that he ‘was sure that it was only necessary for the inhabitants of this favoured island to know it, to feel a just indignation against it.’ It was this faith that led him to buy handcuffs, shackles, and thumbscrews to display to the people he met on his travels. And that led him to mount his horse again and again to scour the country for witnesses who could tell Parliament what life was like on the slave ships and plantations. The riveting parade of firsthand testimony…is one of the first great flowerings of a very modern belief: that the way to stir men and women to action is not by biblical argument, but through the vivid, unforgettable description of acts of great injustice done to their fellow human beings…”

Unfortunately, it is not clear to what degree these men considered slaves human beings. And for the countless petitions over the years that, when unscrolled, covered the entire length of the Parliament chamber, for the vast number of the harrowing firsthand accounts, Parliament did not act for nearly 50 years, and then only because their prize colonies Jamaica and Barbados were little more than ash and cinders and an alarming number of white corpses. More than a few members of Parliaments needed no testimonies, for they had been eyewitnesses, beneficiaries, and participants themselves.

If Hochschild is trying to say that in nations committing horrific crimes there are always some who resist, I can agree, of course.  But this book reminds me of the fictions of Vietnam. People still can be heard to say, “It was us who stopped that damned war.” What stopped that war was the fact that the North Vietnamese were winning it, at devastating cost to them, and unacceptable expense for us.  Bury the Chains is a case in point of what the late professor Edward Said and others refer to as European and United States “exceptionalism,” which among other things claims a unique and exalted relationship to morality and truth, and by implication suggests that the ‘developed nations’ alone are capable of taking the lead in moving this planet forward. All I can say to this is show me the money. Prove it.

The Anglican Church has in the past few days publicly apologized for its involvement in the slave trade as owners of Codrington Plantation in Barbados, doubtless as a result of information divulged in this book. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/09/nsynod09.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/02/09/ixnewstop.html)
These sorts of gestures, while signalling some willingness to engage the history, will be meaningless as long as long as the essential Western discourse remains unchanged, and talk of compensation is confined to the fringes.

The surround of assumption that privileged whites are born into makes it very difficult to see our world and our history as they are.  The story Hochschild tells is undeniably an interesting one. I just don’t think it’s the one that needs to be told, and it inadvertently deflects from the astonishing story of a people’s revolt that raised up leaders from among the worst victims who were that age of revolution’s purest revolutionaries, not just giving lip-service to liberty, equality, and fraternity for some, but fighting and dying to secure it for all.

[Rootsie]

Powerful lobbying by black communities led to C of E slavery apology and the fight for reparations will continue, say activists

The Church of England’s apology for its role in slavery came about through pressure from black-led organisations, not a sudden change of heart. Let us not forget that as well as profiting from slavery the Church also sanctioned and legitimised it.

Mainstream press left out the role played by black communities

Reports last week in the mainstream press made quite a meal of the Church of England (C of E) apology over its participation in what Europeans refer to as ‘The Transatlantic Slave Trade.’

Using emotional quotes from Archbishop Rowan Williams referring to “the shame and the sinfulness of our predecessors” and its “repentance and apology” not being “words alone”; once again the British establishment has tried to claim the moral high ground on the issue of ‘The African Holocaust.’

Nowhere in any of the news reports the mainstream media offered up was there any mention of the involvement of reparations movements, campaign groups and church leaders from the black communities.

Black Britain learnt from Kofi Mawuli Klu, joint co-ordinator of Rendezvous of Victory (ROV) an anti-slavery, African led abolitionist heritage organisation, of the events that led to the C of E’s apology.

He explained that after the ROV’s People’s University of Lifelong Learning launch in 2004, (the year that the United Nations designated as the International Year for the Commemoration of the Struggle against Slavery) supported by Home Office Minister Fiona Mc Taggart; the C of E invited ROV to be part of a working group for its 2007 project.

Mawuli Klu then became part of the Executive of the Working Committee established by representatives of church groups. Anti-Slavery International (ASI) was also brought on board. He told black Britain:

“ROV was there as an African led community organisation so that the views of black communities could be fed into the discussions and debates.”

According to Mawuli Klu, the first meetings revealed that: “The only people the Church of England seemed to know about were: William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, John Newton and all the white abolitionists.”


How black-led organisations won over the Church of England

It was ROV who raised the issue of the role of enslaved Africans in the abolition of slavery. There were also several knowledgeable church activists on the committee including:

The Churches Commission for Racial Justice leader, Rev Arlington Trotman, Naboth Muchopa from the Methodist Racial Justice Committee and Mrs Uzoamaka Agyare-Kumi, National Co-ordinator of the Catholic Association for Racial Justice.

Mawuli Klu told Black Britain: “All these groups supported us very strongly in terms of legitimising the fact that we were expressing the voice of the black communities”, even though they did not have much support from their own organisations.

He added that it was also ROV who raised the issue of reparations and stressed that 2007 should not just be about commemorating the parliamentary abolition of the slave trade:

“The argument being put forward was that Britain ended the slave trade and Africans were selling themselves left, right and centre anyway.”

According to Mawuli Klu the C of E argued that Africans were brutalizing themselves and that Europeans were just participants but he pointed out how wrong that view was. He said:

“The kind of domestic servitude that existed among Africans did not lead to the dehumanization of black people. That occurred as a result of the transatlantic slave trade”

Domestically enslaved Africans within their own communities were not denied their humanity; they were given the opportunity to work and could liberate themselves through work.

Chattel slavery – where Africans were reduced to the status of animals which Europeans refer to as the Transatlantic Slave Trade was totally different because Africans were denied their human rights by being labelled as less than human.

The black led members of the Working Committee also pointed out the role of enslaved African people on the continent and in the Diaspora who fought to abolish slavery.

Mawuli Klu told Black Britain: “At one meeting there were clashes between the African perspective and the Eurocentric perspective on how slavery was abolished.”

Gradually the white members of the C of E network became more responsive and open to looking at the issue from a different viewpoint, with some admitting that they knew little about the African contribution to the abolition of slavery.

The 2007 project was launched with a grant from the C of E and a black director, Richard Reddy was appointed as the project leader, strengthening the participation of the black communities in all activities.

Mawuli Klu told Black Britain: “That is how we now have a committed body of black and white church activists including ROV and ASI working on the 'Set All Free' project raising the matter to the point that it went to the Synod and culminated in a public apology.”

Black Britain asked the ROV joint co-ordinator how meaningful the C of E’s apology really is and he replied:

"When we look at the role of the Anglican Church in the British State establishment and the power and influence it wealds right up to its participation in the parliamentary process in the House of Lords, the apology is very significant."

The Labour government however, has pointedly refused to apologize for the sins of its predecessors or to entertain any discussion around an apology. It has set up ten successive bodies to advise it on the 2007 commemorations but has dissolved them whenever the issue of an apology or reparations surface.

But Mawuli Klu warned: “The historical continuity of injustice as referred to by Archbishop Rowan Williams is something the government will now find extremely difficult to argue against because this argument has now been taken up by the churches.”

He vowed that ROV and the black communities it represents are by no means complacent in the wake of the C of E apology and said that the 'Set All Free' project has opened the doors of the churches to debate the issue of reparations:

“I think in the same way that we won them over to make an apology, once we re-double our efforts to heighten the work for reparations we will bring them round to true reparations.”


How Christianity underpinned ‘Chattel Enslavement’

 “The apology is just the very first step of European society beginning to acknowledge within itself this great injustice.” 
Esther Stanford, Lawyer & Secretary General of the Black United Front

Sociologist, cultural historian and speaker Dr William Lez Henry believes that too much emphasis is being placed on the financial aspect of the Church’s role in chattel slavery. He told Black Britain:

“They are focusing on how many slaves the Church owned, what properties the Church owned and how many slaves it owned, reducing the role of Christianity in the chattel enslavement of Africans.”

One of the first ships sent from Britain to the Americas was the Jesus of Lubeck commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I. John Hawkins, the sailor was the first Englishman to trade in slaves and cousin to Sir Francis Drake. Dr Henry told Black Britain:

“John Hawkins, Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh who are referred to as privateers were in fact pirates and murderers and they were all practising Christians. John Hawkins even made his crew pray before a slave expedition.”

Because of the way in which Christianity was practised Africans were seen as non-Christians and heathens and anything that was inflicted upon them by Christians were supposedly in their best interests.

Dr Henry believes that the role of Christianity in African chattel enslavement needs to be examined holistically rather than just talking about people disclosing a few plantations. He said:

“Europe was known as Christendom in those times, when Christians were going out to capture and enslave non-Christians. That was the role of Christianity. ”

The only Christians that weren’t actively involved in chattel enslavement were the Quakers. Dr Henry said:

“The C of E needs to come to terms with its legacy. If it is going to acknowledge its role in chattel enslavement it can’t make these crass statements saying that it only had one plantation and only got £8000 in compensation when Tate & Lyle got £8 million, or whatever. It’s ridiculous.”

Dr Henry told Black Britain that Sir Francis Drake once said: “Their gain shall be the knowledge of our faith and ours such riches as their country hath”, which sums up perfectly how Christianity was used as a means to plunder the African continent.


Reparations means relations between Africans and Europeans must change

Lawyer Esther Stanford sits at the heart of the global reparations movement as Secretary General of the Black United Front and the Forum of Afrikans and Afrikan Descendants against Racism.

She told Black Britain that despite the obsession in the mainstream press with the financial aspect of reparations: “Monetary reparations will not yield us the justice we are seeking.”

Ms Stanford citied examples in the US of various cases where corporations such as Lloyds of London and other insurance companies have been held liable for their role in enslaving African people.

These legal battles steer the process of reparations into a legal domain but “Reparations is not something that will be won in any court of law, not the World court, not the European court and definitely not the British courts.”

Ms Stanford told Black Britain that the success of financial compensation in court for reparations will not come about until there is political power within the black communities.

“Reparations as we in the movement understand it recognizes that it will not deliver anything for us unless there is a re-structuring of our current relations with Europeans.”

The historical trade in Africans, traded as cargo resulted in a re-ordering of our economic, political, socio-cultural family systems and reparations if it is to be final has to result in restructuring. Ms Stanford said:

“The real issue is not who reparations will be affected to, but what is our understanding of the damage that has been done?”

Unless there is an understanding of what the damage is and unless people of African heritage define the nature of these injuries in legal, political, economic and cultural terms then the repair that is being offered will not meet the needs of slave descendants.

Reparations is holistic and looks at all kinds of repairs and the financial case only comes in, in terms of quantifying in monetary terms what it will cost to repair the harm that has been caused through chattel enslavement.

Ms Stanford told Black Britain: “What we are also seeking is a return of our sovereignty and self-determination which is not just about financial compensation: we are talking about the return of land, all kinds of cultural and intellectual property, universal education, universal healthcare and a whole range of measures.”

Referring to the C of E’s apology Ms Stanford said: “I think the apology from the C of E is significant historically in that there is an admission of guilt. But it doesn’t go far enough because the apology is for the slave trade.”

She said that African descendants should not be satisfied with an apology for the slave trade but should actually be asking for an apology for the holocaust of enslavement.

By apologizing for the slave trade the C of E is legitimizing the concept that the African Holocaust was a trade: “They define it as a trade but we as African people do not see this period in our history as being a trade.”

“The term desensitizes the horrendous crimes against humanity of mass torture, mass murder and mass rape”, allowing these crimes to be put down to collateral damage. That is the significance of using this terminology. Ms Stanford concluded:

“The apology is just the very first step of European society beginning to acknowledge within itself this great injustice.”


Looks like I just got caught in my own assumptions. In the review above I wrote:

"The Anglican Church has in the past few days publicly apologized for its involvement in the slave trade as owners of Codrington Plantation in Barbados, doubtless as a result of information divulged in this book. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/09/nsynod09.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/02/09/ixnewstop.html)
These sorts of gestures, while signalling some willingness to engage the history, will be meaningless as long as long as the essential Western discourse remains unchanged, and talk of compensation is confined to the fringes."

I offer this up as a case in point of "The surround of assumption that privileged whites are born into ..." as I stated above. Maybe it's true that when an influential white pointed out the history, only then did the Church of England respond, but we see who has been doing the real work.

The article also reminds me of the first section of Hochschild's book, which fails to make the distinction between slavery as it was practiced by Africans and the chattel system the British practiced. He talks about the widespread practice of slavery all over the planet at the time, which, whether he intended it or not, minimizes the monstrous nature of Britain's brand of enslavement, and further glorifies Wilberforce and Clarkson for challenging what was a normal condition of the time.

[Rootsie]

Revised

Bury the Chains
by Adam Hochschild
Houghton Mifflin  2005

reviewed by Rootsie

“’Never doubt,’ said Margaret Meade, ‘that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’ This book is about one such group.” (from the Introduction)

This new book by the Adam Hochschild, who brought us King Leopold’s Ghost, a devastating account of the Belgian Congo, endeavors to put a heroic spin on the efforts spanning nearly 50 years, of British Quakers and a few upper-class Anglican eccentrics to outlaw the slave trade, which the British Parliament finally did in 1834.

One problem for Hochschild in this effort lies in the equivocal nature of the heroes, notably Parliamentarian William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, a ‘feisty musician and self-taught lawyer’, John Newton, a former slave trade trader (and author of the hymn “Amazing Grace”), and Thomas Clarkson, perhaps the Western world’s first modern political organizer. All fervent Christians, they were deeply concerned about the moral depravity of the trade, but apparently only insofar as it reflected poorly on the fictions with which the British continue to comfort themselves. They hated the brutality of the trade both for slaves and legions of press-ganged sailors, and the dreadful abuse of slaves on the Caribbean sugar islands, but mostly they seemed troubled that their England was involved in it.  Clarkson was particularly tireless, devoting virtually every moment of his adult life to the cause of abolition, crisscrossing the British Isles countless times, scouring the slaving ports for witnesses, collecting names for petitions, and raising people’s consciousness about the horrors of the trade.

Ultimately, however, he and his comrades failed to see their way through the racist assumptions of their time. They did not publicly or indeed even privately advocate for emancipation until the very end, when it was an inevitability, and even then agitated for a ‘gradual’ approach (It was a woman, Elizabeth Heyrick, who spoke out in the 1830’s with the greatest clarity and moral force against the continuation of African slavery in any form). It took Newton 35 years of devout Christian hand-wringing about virtually every other sin under the sun to finally get himself worked up about slavery, and even then he evidenced no personal remorse.

About Clarkson, Hochschild writes:

“Like many white abolitionists to come, Clarkson shared some of the ideas of his
time about race. For example, to refute those who claimed that their skin color meant God destined Africans to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” he argued not that color doesn’t matter, but rather that Africans might not be permanently black after all. Skin color, he claimed, must be linked to climate, for are not children of African slaves in the New World often lighter-skinned than their parents? Apparently it didn’t occur to him that there might be another reason for this lighter skin, a point on which any slave or Englishman could have enlightened him.”

This disconnect is particularly curious given the fact that Clarkson collected reams of testimony, by white witnesses and participants, to the rape of black women on slave ships and on the Caribbean plantations. The point is that not only was it politically inexpedient to agitate for outright emancipation of the slaves, but that the very notion of human equality was not in the cerebral repertoire of most of these men. What they urged instead was a vigorous Christianizing mission, seeing this as the way to push blacks up the evolutionary ladder.

Even later anti-slavery ‘leaders’ like Thomas Fowell Buxton had this to say:

   “The Negro race are blessed with a peculiar aptitude for the reception of moral
   and religious instruction, and it does seem to me that there never was a stronger
   call on any nation than there is now…to send missionaries, to institute schools,
   and to send out Bibles. It is the only compensation in our power. It is an abundant
   one! We may in this manner recompense all the sorrows and sufferings.”

 Hochschild comments dryly, “It was small recompense.”

This preoccupation with black spiritual upliftment contributed in large part to the establishment of the disaster which became the British colony of Sierra Leone. Certainly the idea of a self-governed state populated with former slaves on the African continent was not the first thing the white fathers of the colony had on their minds. From the start, the colony’s ‘governors’ were white, fired up by the idea of establishing a Christian toehold in West Africa, comprised of devout exemplar blacks who, by the Grace of God, would soon be producing more sugar in this fertile Eden than could be imagined even in Haiti, with the added bonus of bringing the light of Jesus Christ to darkest Africa. This was also their end-run around the slavery issue. Rather than abolishing it, they would render slavery unnecessary and it would wither by itself.  The absurdity of planting a colony of free blacks from England and Nova Scotia on the African mainland just up the road from England’s largest slave depot in West Africa is something else that apparently never occurred to them.

Another disconnect is evidenced by the British abolitionists’ failure to acknowledge or in many cases even see the relation between their ‘human rights’ struggle and the earthquakes rumbling through European life in this age of Industrial and political revolution. Two percent of the British population had the right to vote during the time in which this narrative takes place. Wilberforce, revered so highly to this day in Britain, viewed workers’ rights, universal male suffrage, women’s rights, Irish rights, with horror, failing entirely to bring his critique of the slave trade to bear on the vast inequalities which existed all around him. About this Hochschild is frank and forthcoming. The Quakers come off better in his account, outsiders as they were by self-definition, but they are in general peripheral figures in Hochschild’s narrative, and among the Quakers were also a number of slave traders, particularly in the American colonies.

True enough, the campaign against the trade featured the first Western examples of true political organizing, including pamphleteering, the boycott of sugar, etc. etc. But at the center of the narrative alongside Clarkson stands the disturbing figure of Wilberforce, lionized in British history as the great liberator of the slaves, conservative to the point of reaction on every other social issue, and a wacky fundamentalist to boot, deeply concerning himself with such burning issues as whether it is a sin for Christians to dance and sing.

Perhaps a more complex and useful narrative would have concerned itself with the millions of men and women without even the right to vote who petitioned Parliament every year for 44 years for an end to the trade, forcing debate there: landless, disenfranchised working people from industrial cities like Manchester and the coal mining towns of Scotland. They personally had nothing to gain from an end to the trade, and arguably the most to lose, since one acknowledged way to improve one’s lot in the world was to get on a slave ship and take a cut of the vast profits. They also were of course the work force in a factory system which slave products and slavery profits made possible.  One wishes that the voices of some of the signers of those many petitions could have been heard in the book.

The true change agents were of course the enslaved blacks of the Caribbean, whose bloody uprisings and the defeat of the two greatest armies the world had ever known made it clear that British and French impunity were impossible to sustain.  The British invasion of St. Domingue (later Haiti) resulted in a death rate of 60% out of a force of over 20,000. Naturally, this did not play well at home. It was the British defeat in St. Domingue, then Napoleon’s defeat,  and finally the later slave revolutions in Barbados and Jamaica, which spelled the end of the profitability of the slave system, and this is what ultimately brought it down.

Virtually the only black person with a voice in the book is Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vasa. He is certainly a fascinating character who lived more than nine lives in his brief one, from African slave to freeman to sailor to valet to political agitator to author to publishing entrepeneur, who did not hesitate to put his life and his free status at risk to fight for the end of slavery, on both an individual and public level. Toussaint L’Ouverture makes a brief appearance as well. While I understand that the story Hochschild chooses to tell is the story about whites’ response to slavery, I believe he inevitably ends up giving the impression that the various strategies and tactics employed by the British agitators had more to do with ending slavery than they in fact did. And because of this, the book comes dangerously close to joining the centuries’-wide canon of triumphalist imperial claptrap.

Hochschild for example seems to suggest that abolition efforts in England incited the Caribbean slave uprisings, as various writings made their way across the ocean, and accounts of activities were discussed at plantation dinner tables and such, especially in Jamaica. But it would be an impossible stretch to imply that the slave revolts of French and Creole-speaking St. Domingue  were precipitated in large part by abolition efforts taking place in England. The pamphlets made good tinder, literal and figurative, that is sure, and the name “Wilberforce” took on mythic connotations for Jamaican slaves, doubtless as a result of plantation owners’ grumbling about him.  But the slaves themselves were the ones who coordinated their uprising, fought modern armies with sticks and shovels and guerilla tactics, and they were the ones who died hideously when captured. St. Domingue under Napoleon’s brother-in-law Le Clerc was nothing short of a torture circus ala de Sade.

Hochschild is no dummy. He frankly describes the failings of the abolitionists, and tries, I think, not to draw sweeping conclusions, but remarks like this one from the end of the book seem to me to make claims for this movement that are grandiose and distorted by deep-seated European assumption about its disproportionate agency in the world:

“All of the twelve [who first gathered in 1787 to plan a strategy to end the slave trade] were deeply religious…but they also shared a newer kind of faith. They believed that because human beings had a capacity to care about the suffering of others, exposing the truth would move people to action…Clarkson, writing of this ‘enormous evil,’ said that he ‘was sure that it was only necessary for the inhabitants of this favoured island to know it, to feel a just indignation against it.’ It was this faith that led him to buy handcuffs, shackles, and thumbscrews to display to the people he met on his travels. And that led him to mount his horse again and again to scour the country for witnesses who could tell Parliament what life was like on the slave ships and plantations. The riveting parade of firsthand testimony…is one of the first great flowerings of a very modern belief: that the way to stir men and women to action is not by biblical argument, but through the vivid, unforgettable description of acts of great injustice done to their fellow human beings…”

Unfortunately, it is not clear to what degree these men considered slaves human beings. And for the countless petitions over the years that, when unscrolled, covered the entire length of the Parliament chamber, for the vast number of harrowing firsthand accounts (by whites), Parliament did not act for nearly 50 years, and then only because Britain’s prize colonies in Jamaica and Barbados were little more than ash and cinders and an alarming number of white corpses. More than a few members of Parliaments needed no testimonies, for they had been eyewitnesses, beneficiaries, and participants themselves.

If Hochschild is trying to say that in nations committing horrific crimes there are always some who resist, I can agree, of course.  But this book reminds me of the fictions of Vietnam. People still can be heard to say, “It was us who stopped that damned war.” What stopped that war was the fact that the North Vietnamese were winning it, at devastating cost to them, and unacceptable expense for us.  Bury the Chains is a case in point of what the late professor Edward Said and others refer to as European and United States “exceptionalism,” which among other things claims a unique and exalted relationship to morality and truth, and by implication suggests that the ‘developed nations’ alone are capable of taking the lead in moving this planet forward, a habit of thought all too evident these days in the ‘Save Africa’ rhetoric issuing from future British PM Gordon Brown. My only response to this is ‘show me the money.’ Prove it.

The Anglican Church has in the past few days publicly apologized for its involvement in the slave trade as owners of Codrington Plantation in Barbados, most probably as a result of information divulged in this book, although black groups in Britain have been agitating for years for an historical reckoning in the Church. When a white guy finally uncovered the facts, the Church found the inspiration to fess up.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/09/nsynod09.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/02/09/ixnewstop.html

These kinds of gestures will be meaningless as long as long as the essential Western discourse remains unchanged, and talk of compensation, the only acceptable form of atonement,  is confined to the fringes.

Hochschild begins Bury the Chains with a brief history of enslavement in the West and in Africa, in order to ‘contextualize’ African slavery, with the effect of attempting to normalize it. There were slaves in Asia, slaves in Europe, serfs in Russia, slaves in Africa—and the qualitative and quantitative differences between these and African chattel slavery? Hochschild does not discuss these. This has the effect of mitigating British crimes, and painting the British abolitionists as remarkable men out of their time who saw through to the core of their Christian values to create the first ‘civil society’ human rights movement in the Western world.

“At the end of the eighteenth century, well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another…It was from these millions of indigenous slaves that African chiefs and slave dealers drew most of the men and women they sold to Europeans and Arabs…African slaves were spread throughout the Islamic world, and the Ottoman Empire enslaved other peoples as well. In India and other parts of Asia, tens of millions of farmworkers were in outright slavery…Native Americans turned prisoners of war into slaves…in Russia the majority of the population were serfs…The ancient Greeks had slaves, the Romans…the Aztec and Inca had slaves…

Looking back today, what is even more astonishing than the pervasiveness of slavery in the late 1700’s is how swiftly it died. By the end of the following century, slavery was, at least on paper, outlawed almost everywhere. The antislavery movement had achieved its goal in little more than one lifetime.”

So from the start, Hochschild wants to give his abolitionists the credit for single-handedly bringing global slavery to an end, at least on paper. How we in the West love our paper: we look so good on paper, at least on the paper we produce. The particular British genius for creating the most monstrous and inhumane slave system in the history of the world is not discussed. It is perhaps most astonishing that it took over a millennium of the primacy of Christianity for Christians to even begin to note the inconsistencies between their professed values and the realities of their conduct. They certainly haven’t wrapped their heads around it yet.

The surround of assumption that privileged whites are born into makes it very difficult for us to see our world and our history as they are.  The story Hochschild tells is undeniably an interesting one. I just don’t think it’s the one that needs to be told. It inadvertently deflects from the truly astonishing story of a people’s revolt that raised up leaders from among the worst victims who became that age of revolution’s purest revolutionaries, not just giving lip-service to liberty, equality, and fraternity for some, but fighting and dying to secure it for all.

______________________________________________

1.   Ayanna Gillian. “Slave? What Slave?  A Study of the Traditional Systems of African Servitude.” http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/02112003.html .  2 November 2003.

2.   Ayanna Gillian. “Islam, Colourism, and the Myth of Black African Slave Traders.
http://www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/10022004.html.  10 February 2004.

3.   Deborah Gabriel. “Powerful lobbying by black communities led to C of E slavery apology,and the fight for reparations will continue, say activists” http://www.blackbritain.co.uk/feature/details.aspx?i=40&c=UK&h=Powerful+lobbying+by+black+communities+led+to+C+of+E+slavery+apology+and+the+fight+for+reparations+will+continue%2c+say+activists. 13 February 2006.

[Rootsie]

Easy on the euphoria

Slavery underpinned the Georgian economy as oil does ours: 2007 should give us a chance to learn

Saturday March 25, 2006
The Guardian   http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1739196,00.html

As befits the MP for Hull, John Prescott has assumed William Wilberforce's mantle and placed himself in charge of next year's 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in British ships.

It promises to be a suitably august commemoration with an exhibition in Parliament Hall, renovated museums in Liverpool and Hull, and academic conferences. But if the anniversary is to have any lasting value, the heritage sector must say something more challenging about Britain's multiracial past.

To historians such as Richard Beck, the story of the slave trade is a morality play with the British cast as evil knaves. Profits from the bloody trade secured the imperial hegemony of Georgian England. It was only brought to an end in 1807 because of the move from a colonial sugar trade to industrial capitalism. There was nothing noble about abolition and the proper response today is a comprehensive package of reparations.
By contrast, Whiggish champions of Britain's imperial past point to 1807 as symbolic of our "good empire". It was a heroic moment when idealism trumped materialism as the Royal Navy scoured the seas for illegal slave ships. This is the story of Rule Britannia, William Wilberforce and the Society of Friends.

Certainly, the slave economy underpinned the riches of 18th century society. It also had a dominating influence across the British politico-financial establishment. Institutional investors in slavery included the Hanoverian royal family, numerous Oxbridge colleges and even the Church of England.

This needs to be the starting point for any commemoration. As Professor James Walvin has commented: "My worry about 2007 is that there will be such a euphoria of nationalistic pride that people will forget what happened before, which was that the British had shipped extraordinary numbers of Africans across the Atlantic."

And in what conditions. The barbarity of the Middle Passage often led to 30% mortality rates among the 10 million slaves shipped across the Atlantic. They were shackled together and laid back to back for weeks on end; suicide and self-mutilation were daily occurrences. The lingering stench of vomit, sweat and faeces worked its way into the very planks of the ships. One escaped slave described how "the shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable". The response of good, Christian British captains was to throw sick slaves overboard - and then claim insurance on the lost cargo.

Despite its barbarity, ending this lucrative trade was an uphill struggle. Few today would go so far as to hail it, as one contemporary did, as "the most altruistic act since Christ's crucifixion", but halting trafficking had serious economic costs. Yet the moral certitude of Wilberforce and his evangelical allies convinced MPs, many of whom had slaving interests, of the ethical case for abolishing "the foul iniquity".

However, this had as much to do with purifying England from the taint of slavery as any great humanitarian concern for slaves. There was little sense of racial equality, and a new image of the ever-grateful black subject subsequently developed - seen to greatest effect in Josiah Wedgwood's cameo of a slave kneeling in chains. The inscription read: "Am I not a man and a brother?" But few among Wilberforce's Clapham Sect honestly thought so.

This is a complex, nuanced story for curators and councils to grapple with. What this must mean in terms of commemoration is a new emphasis on the black voice within the abolitionist movement. The contribution of such anti-slavery activists as Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho in mobilising society needs to be appreciated alongside the role of white parliamentarians.

The commemorations must also extend beyond the port cities. Slavery infected the Georgian economy as readily as oil underpins business today. The cotton mills of Lancashire and metal industries of the Black Country were seamlessly interwoven with the Atlantic trade, as were the riches of those aristocrats who dwelt innocuously in Mansfield Parks erected on the back of slave ships and sugar plantations.

So while the planned slavery museum in Liverpool is to be commended, similar themes need to be explored in the municipal galleries of Manchester and Glasgow as well as the industrial museums of the West Midlands. And I look forward to the Historic Houses Association putting its weight behind 2007.

Equally importantly, the anniversary should be a living one. Magnificently, Hull has long twinned itself with Freetown, Sierra Leone, the promised land for so many freed slaves. Next year will see a wealth of sporting and cultural exchanges between the cities.

Beyond such symbolism, 2007 offers a unique opportunity to say something new to a broad audience about our imperial and postcolonial past. For much of its modern history, Britain has stood at the hub of a series of global networks: religious, commercial, political. Much of it has been exploitative and racist. But it hasn't all been one way. Ideas, people, and cultures have influenced the British metropolis as much as the colonies. Ours is a global history of migration and multiculturalism stretching back long before the arrival of the Empire Windrush.

So, while the unrivalled horror of the slave trade should never be diminished, John Prescott could use next year's anniversary as much to enlighten 2007 as to commemorate 1807.

[Rootsie]

Jamaica and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Part II)

published: Sunday | March 26, 2006
Jamaica Gleaner    http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20060326/focus/focus5.html

THE FIRST African slaves to be brought to Jamaica came in 1534 when Pedro Mazuelo, one of the early Spanish colonists, brought thirty Africans from the Canary Islands. By the time the Spanish conducted the first census in 1611, the number of African slaves had grown to 558. There were also 107 free blacks. However, only 74 of the 60,000 indigenous Indians found by Columbus in 1494 remained. The rest had been decimated by disease, as well as by the severity of the labour regime imposed by the Spanish.

The planter/historian, Edward Long, estimates that three years after the British captured the island from the Spanish in 1655, "there were about 4,500 whites and 1,400 negroes." The white population included the white indentured servants described by Josiah Child in his New Discourse of Trade as "loose, vagrant people, vicious and destitute of means to live at home ... or had so misbehaved themselves by whoring, thieving or other debauchery  which merchants and masters of ships gathered up about the streets of London and other places, and transported to be employed upon plantations."

It was to replace this indentured labour force, which proved totally unfit for the labour required on the plantations, that African slaves were imported. In 1664, the arrival of Sir Thomas Modyford from Barbados with 700 planters and their slaves, signalled the rise of the plantation economy in Jamaica, which dramatically increased the demand for African slave labour. By 1703 the number of slaves had increased to 45,000.

A LABORATORY FOR RACISM

While racism was not a primary consideration at the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, it quickly became an endemic feature of plantation slavery. The sustained exploitation of Africans as slaves quickly acquired a racial character and over time required an ideology based on racism which made the terms 'negro' and 'slave' interchangeable. As Norman Girvan points out, the primary objective of this ideology was to depreciate the cultural and physical attributes of the enslaved race.

"African speech, religion, mannerisms and indeed all institutional forms were systematically denigrated as constituting marks of savagery and cultural inferiority ... and extended to the physical, genetic and biological attributes of black people. The very colour of the African skin was held to be the first and lasting badge of his inferiority; as were the characteristics of his mouth, nose and hair texture. The desired consequence of extending the ideology of racism from cultural to physical attributes was to ensure that the African ... was permanently imprisoned in his status as a slave in as much as he was permanently imprisoned in his black skin."

The effect of this campaign on the self-confidence of Africans and people of African descent continue to this day. Three centuries later, we seize upon every opportunity to disguise the physical features which define us as African.

DIVIDE AND RULE

The tribal and other divisions in Africa which were exploited by Europeans to enslave the Africans were again used by the white planters on the Jamaican plantation. Don Robotham, in a very insightful essay  'The Development of a Black Ethnicity in Jamaica' ­ makes the observation that "Whatever the historical roots of these hostilities, the fact of being sold into slavery sometimes by members of the self same group now confronted in Jamaica as fellow slaves could only have intensified the ill-will, which had already existed. Recrimination and individualism, rather than solidarity and cooperation, was thus what characterised the initial phase of enslavement."

For reasons of personal security, the European minority deliberately exploited the antagonisms among the African majority to the fullest. A planter from Barbados, Charles Leslie, who visited Jamaica in 1739, immediately identified the judicious placement of the slaves on the estates as integral to the security of the planters. "The slaves are brought from several parts in Guinea  and they hate one another so mortally that some of them would rather die by the hands of the English than join with other Africans  to shake off their yoke."

Over time the 'driver' emerged as the dominant African personality on the plantation. These were the men and women who led the labour gangs of which the 'number one' gang was the most prestigious. In the driver of the 'number one' gang was concentrated leadership, authority, the capacity to coerce as well as the power to dispense favours. As Robotham points out, a young man or woman as the repository of leadership signalled the erosion of "the most revered and authoritative of African statuses  that of the elder or the chief." The capacity to coerce rather than the ability to give wise counsel determined success and the aspirations of the people and their sense of themselves was transformed accordingly.

The emergence of the 'don' in the urban communities, which became political garrisons, is the closest parallel to the driver of the number one gang. The divisions which were a feature of slavery have become so institutionalised, that 168 years after the abolition of slavery African-Jamaicans still find it difficult to unite in any project for national development.

A LABOUR TO DEATH

The Atlantic slave trade was initially conducted on the premise that the African supply of slave labour was inexhaustible. The economic theory based on this assumption led to an extremely cynical and cruel abuse of the African on the plantation. For once it was assumed that the slave could be readily replaced "the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment than its productiveness while it lasts  the most effective economy is that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost amount of exertion." (Karl Marx).

This was the thinking which led to the

labour regime on the sugar plantation, which began at 4 in the morning, and except for a one hour break at noon continued until night, when the slaves on their way to their miserable huts "picked up a little brush wood or cow dung to prepare some simple mess for supper ... before midnight."

Over 700,000 Africans were brought to Jamaica as slaves in the 153 years between the capture of the island by the British in 1655 and the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807. Such was the toll in human lives exacted by plantation slavery in Jamaica that there were only 323,827 slaves and 9,000 free blacks alive when the slave trade was abolished in 1807. The only word to describe this absolute reduction in the slave population is 'genocide'. In contrast, after the first 150 years of freedom the African-Jamaican population increased some 700 per cent to over two million.

COLOURED AND BLACK SLAVE OWNERS

It is estimated that the time of Emancipation, free coloureds and blacks owned approximately 70,000 slaves. What is alarming is that some of them had earned the reputation of treating their slaves worse than their white counterparts. The white planters had deliberately promoted differences between coloureds and blacks by recognising four shades of colour between white and black  mulatto, sambo, quadroon and mustee.

C.L.R. James, writing about Caribbean society in 1963, 125 years after slavery, observed that "the surest sign of a man having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself?the people most affected by this are people of the middle class who, lacking the hard contact with realities of the masses and unable to attain to the freedom of a leisured class, are more than all types of people given to trivial divisions and subdivisions of social rank and precedence."

There are many who will argue that these divisions are not only still with us but also still regarded with some importance.

This essay is not intended to be an exhaustive account of the Atlantic Slave Trade and its impact on Jamaica. However, to the extent that there are important lessons to be learnt from a serious analysis of that part of our history, I would suggest to the members of the St. Elizabeth Parish Council that they think again. The activities to mark the bicentury of the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade need not only "remind us of our shame". It could be a turning point for the entire society as to how we understand our history and profit by that understanding.