Nobody at the trial had much sympathy for the dead Underwood. Even his wife said she had warned her husband that the laborers “would retaliate upon him for his cruelty to them.” Kapitani was found guilty of manslaughter, a lesser crime than murder. He was sentenced to one year of hard labor, but released after only a few months.
By the time Kapitani killed Underwood in 1871, public opinion was turning against blackbirding. Bishop J.C. Patteson had been an outspoken critic of the trade, but his face was not well-known to Pacific islanders. On September 20 of that year, natives of the Solomon Islands killed him and another missionary in revenge for the way white men treated the islanders. Their deaths horrified British citizens in New Zealand, and the news reports brought attention to the kidnapping of natives. New Zealand’s premier, William Fox, called blackbirding an “infamous slave trade,” and in 1872, Britain passed the Pacific Islanders’ Protection Act, making it illegal for any British subject to kidnap a native. In 1875, Fiji became a British territory. Britain now policed a huge swath of the Pacific Ocean. Slowly, blackbirding came to an end.
China
Slavery was ending in the South Pacific, but it continued in China. Ancient Chinese writings tell us that slaves played a role there from the earliest times. A slave was considered to be a different sort of person – a creature of lower status (chien, “not good,” unlike ordinary people who were liang, “good”). This lowly status was passed on to the slave’s children. To make sure that everyone recognized people who were chien, slaves were often tattooed or mutilated, their noses cut off.
Sometimes the government would enslave a whole family. If a family member was found guilty of being a traitor, the traitor would be executed, along with his hapless male relatives. The traitor’s female relatives and children would become slaves. But most people became slaves by the tragic routes of war and poverty.
A Chinese philosopher who lived over two thousand years ago described how war captives became slaves:
The great state marshals its armies of boats and chariots to attack a blameless country.… The people who resist are beheaded, those who do not resist are put in bonds and brought back. The men are made drivers and grooms [to take care of the horses]. The women are made grinders of corn.
The Mui-tsai
In China as in so many other places, famine forced starving people to sell themselves. Many Chinese became tenant farmers who were bound to their landlords for a few years. Some fell into more permanent forms of bondage.
Mui-tsai were often clothed in rags, like this girl in a 1930 photograph. In China, the custom of selling daughters as mui-tsai lasted from ancient times until the Communist Revolution in the 1940s.
Photo Credit 11.4
Sometimes families sank so deeply into poverty that they faced a grim choice: either watch their loved ones starve, or sell their children. In China, children of the poor – especially daughters, who were not valued as highly as sons – were often sold into slavery. The consequences for these girls could be disastrous. Called mui-tsai (“little younger sister”), they became servants in households both rich and poor. Although the owner was generally expected to arrange a marriage for the girl when she reached her teens, many sold the girls to be concubines or prostitutes.
Janet Lim was born in Hong Kong in 1923. Her father named her Qiu Mei, “Autumn Beauty,” after his favorite season. He was unusual for his time and place – a Christian who promised his daughter the rare privilege of an education.
Then bad luck struck. Janet’s father died when she was six years old. Her mother could not support her family alone, so she married a man from a nearby town. They sank into poverty, and her mother and stepfather decided to sell eight-year-old Qiu Mei to a dealer. The poor girl was distraught. Her mother promised to come and get her if they could earn the money to buy her back, but this never happened. The child never saw her mother again.
Janet entered the home of a woman who sold children, some as young as four years old. There she had a job she loathed: massaging the fat, lazy woman and serving her tea until she fell asleep. One day the gate was left open, and Janet escaped. She followed the train tracks toward the city where she believed her mother lived, but a passenger on an oncoming train recognized her and returned her to her heartless owner. What happened next was a nightmare.
I had never seen the mistress so savage before; she was like a tigress, she sprang at me and shouted that I was an ungrateful dog. She got hold of my hair and flung me to the floor. She sat on my stomach and pinched my body between her great long fingernails. They sank deeply into my flesh.… I must have fainted, for the next thing I remember is waking up to find myself chained to a door and there I remained chained for a month.
Like the witch who kept Hansel locked up until Gretel outwitted her, Janet’s mistress was more cruel than clever. Janet convinced her that she was a medium, someone who could contact the spirits of the dead. Her mistress believed her, and finally released the child from her chains.
A while later, her owner took Janet and some other children to the island of Singapore, which was also under British control. There, an old man and his wife bought her. She and another mui-tsai with the same family had no beds to sleep on, and little to eat except leftover rice. Janet did housework and looked after the poultry:
Indeed the geese were my great friends. I talked to them about my sorrows and worries, and, turning their heads this way and that, they seemed to understand me.… I was very lonely, and after my day’s work I would go into the garden to be comforted by my friends, the geese.
But she was terrified of the lecherous old man, who pursued her every night. One night she hid in a treetop. Another night, she hid among the geese – anywhere to escape him. She even thought of taking her life.
Relief finally came when Janet was sent to stay for a time with the mistress’s aunt, a “very gentle woman with a soft voice” who shared companionship, food, and even the daily chores with the girl. It was at her house that Janet finally understood what was in store for her: she was to become her elderly master’s concubine. The thought horrified her.
When Britain colonized parts of China in the first half of the 1800s, English colonists were disturbed by this sale of girls, and the reports of their miserable lives. Singapore was British soil and, following British law, slavery was illegal there. In the 1920s and 1930s, both the British Parliament and the League of Nations (an early version of the United Nations) labeled the mui-tsai practice a form of slavery. That did not stop it, but it was a first step.
It took a law passed by the British colonial government in 1932 to save Janet. All mui-tsai were to be registered. When her mistress went to the government office with Janet and the other young mui-tsai in her household (dressed up in pretty clothes the girls had never worn before), a “blue-eyed woman” took Janet aside, held her hand, and told her she would be visited regularly and should complain if her mistress mistreated her.
Now that they were protected, the two mui-tsai planned their escape. The next morning her friend slipped out to the police to tell her story, and the “blue-eyed lady” came to Janet’s house and freed her from slavery.
The disgraced owner had to pay Janet for all her unpaid work. Janet enrolled in a mission school, where she took her English name. She never found her mother, but she got the education her father had promised her, and became a nurse. After World War II she finished her training and became the first Asian head nurse at St. Andrew’s Mission Hospital in Singapore. She married an Australian doctor and had three children. In 1958, Janet Lim took another daring step: she told her life story in a book, Sold for Silver. Freed mui-tsai, like many former slaves, were too ashamed to speak about their past, even among themselves. The mui-tsai girls at Janet’s school had never sought comfort from each other by sharing their stories. Janet Lim broke the silence, opening a window on a sad chapter of China’s history.
The successful battles to end mui-tsai service and blackbirding were just two strikes against
slavery in Asia and the Southern Pacific region. But laws and practice are sometimes two different things, and slavery continues there today.
DEED OF SALE FOR A DAUGHTER, 1927
When Chinese parents gave up their daughters as mui-tsai, it was a legal sale. This document outlines the agreement between the parents of ten-year-old Ah-Mui and the person buying her, Chan Yee Koo, in 1927. If Ah-Mui was unhappy and disobeyed her owner, her parents would not be able to buy her back, since the sale of their daughter was final.
This deed of sale is made by Poon Shi of Mak family.
In consequence of urgent need for funds to meet family expenses, I am willing to sell my own daughter, Ah Mui, 10 years of age, born in the afternoon, 23rd day of 11th moon, Mo Ng year (i.e. 25th December, 1918), to Chan Yee Koo through a go-between. In the presence of three parties, it is mutually agreed and arranged that the purchase price is to be 141 dollars. After this sale, Chan Yee Koo shall have the right to change the name of the girl. If the girl is disobedient, Chan Yee Koo shall be allowed to resell her, and the mother shall have no recourse. In the event of any misfortune befallen the girl, there is no blame to either Party.…
This is a straightforward sale and purchase between two parties and lest verbal contract is invalid, delivered to Chan Yee Koo as proof thereof.
Poon Shi of Mak Family hereby acknowledges receipt of the purchase price of 141 dollars in full, without deduction.
Finger prints of Poon Shi of Mak Family … Go-between, Poon Shi of Chan Family.
Dated
The Republic of China, 13th June, 1927
CHAPTER 12
SLAVERY IS NOT HISTORY: THE MODERN WORLD
When the abolitionists won their battles in Britain and the Americas, they thought that their dreams of a world where every person was free had been realized. Tragically, the fight for freedom isn’t over. Millions of people of all ages are enslaved today, leading lives very much like those of slaves hundreds and even thousands of years ago. Some are born into slavery, but others are bought and sold, sometimes for years and sometimes for life. They are paid little or nothing, and have no choice about what work they do, where they live, or what their future holds.
The Aleutian Islands
The United States acquired the Pribilof Islands – St. Paul and St. George, off the southwest coast of Alaska – when it bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867. The islands’ fur industry was worth a fortune, but not much of the profit went into the purses of the native Aleut people. After 1910, the government managed the industry. In other words, the Aleuts were government employees whose job it was to slaughter and skin seals and foxes. They had little choice because there was no other place to work. They could work for the government or they could starve.
We take it for granted that government employees get paid in money, and that they have other benefits too. But the Aleuts were not paid in cash, and they certainly didn’t receive benefits. Instead, they were given credit at the government store – the only place to buy food – and not only was the food expensive, but the shelves were often nearly empty, so there was hardly anything to buy.
From offices in faraway Washington, D.C., the government controlled the Aleuts’ daily lives. They were not allowed to leave the islands without permission. They were not allowed to speak their native language. Their chiefs were not allowed to have any say in how they were governed. Men were even told when they could marry. Until 1924, they were not even allowed U.S. citizenship.
These rules did not always sit well with government officials who worked on the islands and saw the hardship firsthand. In 1910, a government agent wrote to his supervisors in Washington:
[The] fact cannot be denied that the people of St. Paul (and St. George as well) are living in actual slavery and that this condition exists and is maintained under the immediate control and direction of the United States government.
Thirty-one years later, Fredericka Martin, an American nurse on one of the Pribilof Islands, organized a group of whites to try to eat only what the Americans gave the Aleuts.
This Aleutian fisherman is wearing a “gut parka,” a lightweight, waterproof jacket made from the guts of a sea lion, harbor seal, fur seal, or whale. The intestines were cleaned, dried, split open, cut into strips, and then sewn together with thread made of fox or whale sinew.
Photo Credit 12.1
I planned to limit us to the experiment for a week. One day was enough. Or, rather, too much. We had to calm our surprised, protesting, neglected stomachs before we could go to sleep. It was not only the kind of food but the small quantity which ended our test. I no longer wondered why the kids sneaked around the garbage cans and ate some filthy refuse.
Hard as life was for the Pribilof Aleuts, it was about to get worse. Months after the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the Navy needed the Aleuts’ houses, and sent the people to southeastern Alaska, 1,500 miles (2,400 km) away. Their new homes were dilapidated, abandoned fish canneries with poor sanitation, no bunks or mattresses, and only two stoves for 290 people.
When the government sent them back home again, after the war, the natives began to insist on their rights as Americans. One of their supporters was Fredericka Martin. She wrote magazine articles and letters to politicians to raise awareness of the shameful form of slavery imposed on the Aleuts.
In 1951, the Pribilof Aleuts sued the U.S. government for back wages. Alaska became a state in 1959, but the suit was not settled until 1978, when the government’s Indian Claims Commission announced that the government would have to pay the Aleuts for the profits made off years of their labor. Sadly, many of the people who had suffered the most were no longer alive to share the wealth.
Freedom eventually came to the Aleuts because they and people like Fredericka Martin exposed the abuses. But totalitarian governments, like the strict Communist regime that used to control Russia, or the Nazi government of Hitler’s Germany, punish those who speak out – sometimes by enslaving them.
The Soviet Union
The world’s first Communist country – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union – established a prison system in the 1930s for anybody who criticized the government. Built by the country’s harshest dictator, Josef Stalin, the prison camps, called gulags, were used as a way to stamp out freedom of expression in religion, newspapers, and the arts. The gulags were always in remote areas where the prisoners were forced to do hard physical labor.
The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin compelled slave laborers to work on many construction projects, including this canal between the White and Baltic seas.
Photo Credit 12.2
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an artillery officer decorated twice by the Soviet Army for bravery in World War II. But his valor did not help him when he was arrested for writing a letter to a friend criticizing Stalin; he was sentenced to eight years in prison. Following his experience in the gulag, Solzhenitsyn wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was published after Stalin’s death. The novel opened the world’s eyes to the brutality of these forced-labor camps in the bitterly cold northern area of Siberia. The workers survived mostly on thin soups with almost no meat or vegetables, a meager daily ration of bread, and mush made from “the amount of oats [Ivan Denisovich] fed to horses when he was a boy, and he never thought he’d long for a handful himself one day!” The cooks cheated the prisoners on their food to feed themselves and buy favors from others. Solzhenitsyn describes the men, wearing leaky boots stuffed with cloth, and rags wrapped around their faces against the icy Siberian wind, as they construct a brick wall, and warm themselves by the stove used to loosen the frozen mortar. Some had been sentenced to ten years, some to twenty-five, but many were not allowed to return home even when they were released from the camps.
Nazi Germany
In World War II, Nazi Germany conquered and occupied most of Europe. As it expanded its army to invade and control more and more land, it had a problem: where would it get workers to farm
its fields, produce weapons and ammunition in its factories, and work in its mines? The answer was to enslave the people of the countries it occupied. The Nazis rounded up Italians, French, Poles, and others, and shipped them to Germany to work. They took men, women, even children as young as six years old, and they didn’t care if they tore families apart.
Among the enslaved were three million Russian civilians. Some were sent to work in German homes, where the families were allowed to treat them however they chose. Germany also enslaved Russian prisoners of war, although this was illegal under the Geneva Conventions, treaties that Germany had signed after World War I.
The Nazis’ treatment of slave laborers fit their warped ideas about race. They said that Germans were a “superior” race and therefore had the right to enslave and brutalize those who were less than human, like the Slavic people. Signs outside the Krupp factories, which made tanks and munitions, read, “Slavs are slaves,” and supervisors did not hesitate to beat workers with whips or clubs for the slightest mistake.
This starved, almost blind Russian prisoner was one of the people liberated by the U.S. Army from Nordhausen, a Nazi slave labor camp, at the end of World War II. At least he was lucky enough to survive.
Photo Credit 12.3
Although the Nazis’ ultimate goal was to exterminate groups of people that they felt were inferior, including all Jews, they also exploited Jewish people as slave labor. They rounded up the Jews of Eastern Europe and moved them into crowded and tightly controlled areas known as ghettos. Factories in the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, for example, produced all the uniforms for the German air force. Jews who were not immediately sent to death camps could be assigned to forced-labor camps, where they were often worked to death. In the Hasag plant in Poland, where weapons and explosives were manufactured, the prisoners’ skin turned yellow from the chemicals they worked with, and they ultimately died.
Five Thousand Years of Slavery Page 18