Dear Editor,
As this Black History Month, February of 2018, draws to a close in this the fourth year of the UN-proclaimed decade (2015 to 2024) for “People of African Descent”, I hasten to yield to a challenge to write a letter on this subject.
We understand without question that the UN proclamation of this decade is directed at speeding the dissipation of the adverse legacies of that historical period of some 250 years, when tens of millions of black Africans were taken as chattel slaves by Europeans of that era, in their global expansion and dominance, to provide enslaved labour for their plantations in their newly discovered and conquered lands of the Americas and the Caribbean.
What should be the attitude today of people of African descent to that period of horrible slavery? That period cannot be erased from the history of Mankind, but in time it ought to become a bald fact of history — much as England, along with a great part of Western, Middle and Eastern Europe, unto the borders of Asia and North Africa, were brought under the dominion of Rome; much as we were taught in our Christian Sunday Schools about Moses leading the people of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt.
It was his brothers who had sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt, but fortune made Joseph, a slave, the right hand man of Pharaoh, and Joseph’s people were afforded a place of honour through that dynasty. However, as happens in the course of time, in the rise and fall of peoples and nations, there arose a new dynasty of Pharaohs who knew not, and would pay no heed to, the special honoured place of the people of Israel in Egypt, and made them slaves.
Slavery has been, it can be argued, one of the most common practices amongst Humankind: making forced servants of conquered people. There is probably no one who does not have a number of enslaved as well as slave-holding persons among his ancestors, but the European slavery of black Africans had a number of particularly pernicious features.
During a tour of ancient sites in Greece in 1978 (after a bauxite conference), the tour guide pointed out the columns on which the names of erstwhile slaves were enscribed as they were freed. Most of those slaves were from other Greek city states, who had been on the defeated side in one of their frequent battles. In such circumstances, the fact of having been a slave might be lost within a generation with little, if any, adverse effects.
My mind turned to that quote from Alex De Tocquville, “the institution of slavery has disgraced the race, and the physiological peculiarities of the race (have) perpetuated the disgrace”. There was an interesting nuance in a quote from a Brazilian (Iberian) author, “the propensity to discriminate is a function of the degree of separation of the ideals of physiological beauty”. For him, however, the ideal of physiological beauty is the physiology of the conqueror, the winner, the successful – and he argued that Iberian people who had seen black Africans in the conquering Moor armies from North Africa saw beauty in the black African physiology, and were less inclined to discriminate against black Africans as absolutely as northern Europeans, many of whom only knew of black Africans as disgraced chattel slaves.
There was a lot unconsciously inherent in that cry, in the 1970s, about Angela Davis, “Bright, Beautiful and Black”.
I welcome the work being done to make available a history of black Africa before and beyond that of the land from which captive black African slaves came – the emerging stories of ruling families and kingdoms, and intrigue in black Africa, which would be the match of similar ones from Europe.
Yours truly,
Samuel A A Hinds
Former President and
Former Prime
Minister
