As we close out this year’s commemoration of Emancipation, we must not forget the abominations that preceded it, especially what was callously called “the slave trade.” The European ‘remarkable’ solution to the moral dilemma posed was the beginning of an anti-African racism that 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.
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 returned with 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.
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 entered the trade 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 Hawkins 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, which by then had now grown to gargantuan proportions. In the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, 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 preconception of who the African was. 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 in 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 they established during the colonial period. We natives are supposed to fight over which of us is closer to the white ideal.
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.
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