The Roman Emperor Paulus once ruefully opined, “Homo homini lupus” – “man, to man, is a wolf” and nowhere was this more apparent than the institution of slavery instituted from the 16th century by the Europeans to provide labour by Africans shipped to the “New World”, which Columbus had stumbled over in 1492. While the Greeks, Romans and indeed Africans also had slaves, New World “chattel” slavery was qualitatively so different as to usher in consequences that still hold the entire world in thrall.
In chattel slavery, the slaves were the personal property of owners (masters) had total control over them. Chattel slaves were not even considered human. To justify this abomination, Europeans created a host of theories which were then promulgated in their educational, legal, political and other systems of thought to convince even the enslaved to accept their condition.
One was the story of Ham, who, the Christian Bible said, looked at his naked, drunken father Noah and was cursed along with all of his descendants to be slaves. As to how dark-skinned Africans were deemed descendants of Ham was never explained but was used as late as the 20th century by the Mormon Church to discriminate against people of African Descent. Be as it may, the Spanish, who were the first to bring Africans as slaves to the Americas deemed them to be bereft of souls and as such were being done a favour to be associated with Whites. They were also deemed to be “savages” and bereft of culture – never mind that if culture is a people’s ‘way of life”, all men have culture. Whites, then, would also be “civilising” the Africans and presumably they should have been thankful.
The cruelty inflicted on the slaves to extract their labour was unimaginable and from one perspective, even irrational. One would have thought it made sense for the plantation owners to conserve their property but this is where the dehumanisation of the enslaved Africans came in: they were also considered as expendable and who would be “burdens” when old. In defining the slaves as “savages”, all of their cultural practices were forbidden and were subjected to severe punishment if caught engaging even in drumming, for instance.
The British abolished the slave trade across the Atlantic to their colonies in 1807 and in 1833, passed the Emancipation Act to take effect the following year on Aug 1st. However, they mandated that there be a period of “Apprenticeship” during which the ex-slaves would transition into paid labourers but compelled to work for specified times and conditions. In Guyana, around 82,000 Africans were freed, with their owners receiving the highest compensation for their “loss” in the entire Caribbean. The British tried to convince the world that they emancipated their slaves on “humanitarian” grounds. But while there were these sentiments, as usual , the actual rationale was to serve the greater interest of Britain.
By the end of the 18th century Britain had become the most industrialised nation and policy makers advised that the mercantilist economic principles, which demanded imports be discouraged through high tariffs, be abandoned in favour of free trade. The proposal was argued by Adam Smith in his “Wealth of nations” of 1776. Under free trade, British manufactured goods could enter other foreign markets, but the latter countries would then demand the same terms for their products, like sugar. But British mercantilism was undergirded by the “Triangular Trade”: trinkets and guns from Britain to Africa for slaves; slaves to the Caribbean for local agricultural products and the last back to Britain for pounds. Jettisoning mercantilism meant jettisoning slave trading and slavery and these were duly jettisoned.
The planters, who remained influential in Guyana, lost their preferential sugar prices in Britain and refused the demands of the freed Africans at the end of Apprenticeship in 1838 for higher wages. They instead reintroduced an old exploitative labour mechanism – indentureship – from India, which unleashed repercussions that still reverberate in our body politic.
