One Guyanese medical doctor wrote that those seeking reparations are barking up the wrong tree, because, among other reasons, Africans actually practised slavery and sold their “own” to the Europeans. This individual showed a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of slavery; its consequences, and the need for reparative justice.
In African slavery, humanity was 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.
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 began 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. 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. 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.”
Racism is maintained by denying agency to the African in Emancipation: European texts give 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 – which would become Haiti – under the leadership of Toussaint L’Overture.
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’s 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.
