by Akala
She expected me to share in her joy, but I was just thoroughly confused. ‘What, all by himself, miss?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you mean he helped?’
Her face distorted and she took the exact same flustered breath that liberals everywhere would take in 2008, right before they were about to lecture any black person who had the gall to declare themselves a non-supporter of Barack Obama. (I was there in 2008, I was one such sinner, I know that face of ‘you can’t possibly know what is good for you and how could you be so ungrateful’ very well.) ‘No Kingslee, he stopped slavery,’ she retorted, clearly annoyed at my refusal to blindly accept what I was being told.
We were on a school visit to the National Portrait Gallery and the painting on the wall was of one Mr William – patron saint of black emancipation – Wilberforce. I did not have the strength or wherewithal to argue back with my teacher, I was only seven after all, but I knew her statement was absurd, hence the memory staying put. By what force of magic could an educated adult be compelled to believe that one man, all by himself, could put an end to a few centuries of tri-continental multi-million-pound business enterprise – and genocide – by the sheer force of his moral convictions? What’s more, why would this teacher try to convince me, of all the students in our class, of such an absurdity? I was not the only child of Caribbean origin in our class, so it could not have been a ‘let’s just pick out the black kid’ scenario, but I was the only one who went to pan-African Saturday school, and thus had demonstrated a particular penchant for challenging what I was being taught. Courtesy of that community schooling, by the time this teacher was telling me that Wilberforce had set Africans free I already had some knowledge of the rebel slaves known as ‘Maroons’ across the Caribbean, and of the Haitian Revolution, so I had some idea that the enslaved had not just sat around waiting for Wilberforce, or anyone else for that matter, to come and save them.
While it’s certainly true that Britain had a popular abolitionist movement to a far greater degree than the other major slaveholding powers in Europe at the time, and this is in its own way interesting and remarkable, generations of Brits have been brought up to believe what amount to little more than fairy tales with regard to the abolition of slavery. If you learn only three things during your education in Britain about transatlantic slavery they will be:
1. Wilberforce set Africans free
2. Britain was the first country to abolish slavery (and it did so primarily for moral reasons)
3. Africans sold their own people.
The first two of these statements are total nonsense, the third is a serious oversimplification. What does it say about this society that, after two centuries of being one of the most successful human traffickers in history, the only historical figure to emerge from this entire episode as a household name is a parliamentary abolitionist? Even though the names of many of these human traffickers surround us on the streets and buildings bearing their names, stare back at us through the opulence of their country estates still standing as monuments to king sugar, and live on in the institutions and infrastructure built partly from their profits – insurance, modern banking, railways – none of their names have entered the national memory to anything like the degree that Wilberforce has.
In fact, I sincerely doubt that most Brits could name a single soul involved with transatlantic slavery other than Wilberforce himself. The ability for collective, selective amnesia in the service of easing a nation’s cognitive dissonance is nowhere better exemplified than in the manner that much of Britain has chosen to remember transatlantic slavery in particular, and the British Empire more generally.
My Wilberforce moment was not unique or isolated, but springs from this larger tradition of extremely selective recall that Brits tend to call propagandistic when it occurs in other nations. For example in 2007, on the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, the government and media organised a season of celebration and commemoration. Tony Blair expressed his deep sorrow and regret about Britain’s involvement with slavery but stopped short of an apology, and a glut of articles appeared across the press asking if Britain should apologise, most of which inevitably regurgitated the ‘we were the first to abolish, why can’t you just get over it’ line. The only major film to emerge from these festivities was, of course, one about Wilberforce, predictably titled Amazing Grace – after the redemptive hymn written by the English slave trader John Newton.1 The film depicts a simple, Hollywood-style narrative of one brave and visionary soul who challenges the dominant and powerful interests of his day and in the end wins them over with his plucky righteousness. There were some other voices during this abolition season, including my sister, who presented a documentary about the Jamaican Maroons on BBC Two, but those voices were extremely faint in comparison to the Wilberforce chorus that echoed across the nation.
Black activists and scholars were offended by the Wilberforce-centric narrative, so much so that community activist and founder of legali.org Toyin Agbetu was compelled to make an entire independent documentary calling into question what was dubbed the ‘Wilberfest’.2 Agbetu and others were responding not just to the 2007 celebration but to the longer tradition of miseducation, and to programmes such as the 2005 BBC doc The Slavery Business, where the presenter tells the viewer that ‘in 1807, Britain did something remarkable; it ended the slave trade and turned its back on its enormous profits. This was largely down to one man’. This childishly idyllic – and completely inaccurate – sentence is largely representative of mainstream narratives around abolition. A couple more examples will suffice to make the point. In the conclusion to his 900-page tome The Atlantic Slave Trade, the historian Hugh Thomas fails to even mention slave resistance as a factor in abolition at all, lists a number of European abolitionists and of course positions Britain as the abolitionist in chief, apparently motivated by pangs of conscience and nothing more. Thomas also asserts that the slave trade went on as long as it did because Africans – apart from the Muslim ones, apparently – were ‘good natured and usually docile’.3
In recent years, three separate schools in different parts of the country have made headlines because of their teaching and remembrance of slavery; two of the schools gave their students worksheets that were essentially business plans for buying and selling African people as slaves, and a teacher at another school thought it would be a good idea to get children to come in dressed as slaves for black history month!4
Even Bob Geldof, our very own latter-day Wilberforce, this generation’s chief white saviour in command, is not above this kind of reductionist rhetoric when it comes to Africans. In his series Geldof in Africa we see him strolling along the shores of a West African beach, telling the viewer that Europeans came to Africa in search of gold, ‘but, to their eternal shame, what the Africans had to sell was their own people.’ Geldof may well not have written the script, but he said the words.
So what are the facts then? Did Wilberforce do it all by himself? Was Britain the first nation to abolish slavery and were Africans queuing up on the shores of the Atlantic to sell their own children to the highest bidder? No, no and nope.
Britain quite simply was not the first nation to abolish transatlantic slavery; Denmark did so in 1792 and France briefly abolished slavery during the height of the French revolution in 1794. What was ‘abolitionist’ Britain’s response to these abolitions? Was it to quickly follow suit? No. The British government’s response was to send its armies to the Caribbean to invade French-held islands and to try and reinstall slavery everywhere the French had abolished it. This conflict with France included imprisoning some 2000 black French fighters in Porchester Castle, among them some of the most prominent black abolitionists of the era, and this at a time when the entire black British population was somewhere between 10–15,000.5
The British invasion of the French Caribbean included an invasion of Haiti, which is particularly significant given Haiti’s place in the history of the period; during the 1780s Haiti was by far the most profitable
slave colony in the Americas, exporting as much sugar as Brazil, Cuba and Jamaica combined,6 producing half the world’s coffee and generating more revenue than the entire thirteen colonies of what had just become America. Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was then known, was the pearl of the Antilles, the cash cow that allowed the French Empire to still compete with the British. To capture such a prize would have been a massive boost for both the British Empire and for the continuation of industrial-scale, racialised slavery.
As it panned out, formerly enslaved Africans fighting under the French flag were able to defeat the British armies and retake the portions of the island Britain had won – reinstalling slavery as they went, remember. This mass campaign for re-enslavement in the Caribbean was undertaken by none other than Prime Minister William Pitt, the very same man who would encourage Wilberforce to front the abolitionist campaign in parliament just a few years later. In fact, Pitt himself raised the question of abolition of the slave ‘trade’ in parliament before even Wilberforce.7
The Caribbean campaigns of the 1790s proved to be one of the greatest military disasters in British imperial history with defeats, setbacks and unwanted treaties undertaken right across the Caribbean. British troop losses are estimated to have been at least 50,000, by some estimates quite substantially more. It is absolutely inconceivable that Britain would have suddenly had a moral epiphany in 1807 if they had won Haiti from the French, making them undisputed masters of the Caribbean by holding the two most important Caribbean colonies of the time, Haiti and Jamaica. Remember, at this point America had only just won its independence, a fact about which Britain was less than happy – see the war of 1812 – and was not yet a global power like Britain and France.
Just a few short years later, France would renege on its temporary abolitionist principles and attempt to re-enslave the people of Haiti, the same people who had fought and defeated the Spanish and the British and kept the island for France. Toussaint L’Ouverture had proved his willingness to accommodate the French planters even to the point of letting them keep their plantations and forcing former slaves to continue to work for them – albeit with meagre pay – but Napoleon just could not bring himself to work on anything resembling equal terms with a negro; legend has it that on his deathbed, Napoleon said ‘I should have recognised Toussaint’.
Britain helpfully removed the naval blockade it had previously had in place in the English Channel during the years of war with France to allow French troops, headed up by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, to travel to Haiti and try to put the ‘gilded negroes’ back in their rightful place. The latest British prime minister, Henry Addington, said ‘we must destroy Jacobinism, especially that of the blacks.’8 The British Governor of Jamaica sent weapons and assistance to the French mission in Haiti; like Addington, he understood that the preservation of slavery and white supremacy, even that of their French rivals, was preferable to empowering abolitionist-minded rebel negroes.
Once the French realised, as predicted at the time by British abolitionist James Stephen (and by the Haitians themselves), that the Haitians could not be re-enslaved, the French plan was to exterminate them all and start over again with newly enslaved people brought from Africa. The war that ensued became an explicitly genocidal one, in which the French troops were instructed to exterminate all of the blacks on the island.9 This extermination attempt included the massacre of families and surrendered soldiers, the elderly and the sick, but the French also excelled themselves in the range of human barbarities they introduced with this war. These included turning ships into gas chambers, mass drowning – Toussaint L’Ouverture’s brother and his family died this way – and importing thousands of dogs from Cuba that had been trained to eat people. None of this savagery cowed the Haitians, rather it appears to have only emboldened them; French soldiers and observers have left many terrified records from the period.
The formerly enslaved African and Creole (Haitian-born) ‘slaves’ and their allies – the Maroons, the free people of colour and the Polish defectors – defeated the French just as they had defeated Spain and Britain before them, and Haiti declared itself independent in 1804. This was the first and only successful slave revolution in human history, and only the second colony in the Americas to be free of European rule. Haiti abolished slavery immediately upon independence – thirty years before Britain would do so in its Caribbean possessions – and became the first state in the world to outlaw racism in its constitution, despite everything done in the name and practice of white supremacy on the island over the preceding centuries. As alluded to earlier, the Haitians in fact went one step further than merely outlawing racism and declared that the ‘whites’ – in reality Polish and some Germans – that had fought with the revolution were now officially black; honorary blacks, if you will.
Britain and the other major Atlantic powers (France and the USA) refused to recognise the independent black republic despite its abolition of slavery (in fact because of this very abolition), and despite their willingness to recognise the newly created nations that would rebel against Spanish rule in the coming decades. To add bitterness to this irony, it was the newly independent black state of Haiti that aided Simón Bolivar in his attempts to liberate South America from the Spaniards, providing him with money, arms and military expertise with the condition that he free the enslaved in any territories that he liberated. Yet the states Bolivar created were recognised more quickly than was Haiti itself.
Clearly, whatever the British government’s ‘abolitionist’ convictions, they did not extend to recognising the nationhood of the only state in human history founded by rebel slaves who’d won their freedom.10 Furthermore, ‘abolitionist’ Britain stood by as France and then the US repeatedly punished Haiti for winning its freedom and its abolition of slavery. Under threat of re-invasion, the French extorted a debt from Haiti in 1825 of 91 million gold francs for the loss of their ‘property’ – i.e. the Haitians themselves. It took up until 1947 to pay this ‘debt’, and in fact Haiti had to borrow the money to pay the debt from French banks.
After independence, Haiti was afflicted by a series of fratricidal wars between the victorious revolutionaries that often had a racial overtone to them – blacks vs. mulattoes – and the legacy of that colour-based, slave-era privilege still afflicts every former slave colony to this day. The USA then invaded Haiti in 1915, removing the stipulation in the Haitian constitution that prevented foreign whites from owning land there, killing 15,000 Haitians and backing a brutal dictatorship for the best part of the twentieth century, and then, when Haiti finally went to the polls, the USA collaborated with the Haitian elite to have their democratically elected leader overthrown, twice.11 To my knowledge, no senior British government official uttered even so much as a word in protest about any of this, though we can all be sure they would have found their moral indignation about ‘human rights’ if Russia or Iran had been the culprits.
But the duplicity of the British government as it relates to abolition did not end with attempts to crush the Haitian Revolution. Upon abolition in Britain’s own colonies, it was the slave owners who were given compensation to the tune of £20 million, roughly £17 billion in today’s money,12 the largest public bailout until the aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The formerly enslaved were given nothing; in fact, they were expected to remain slaves for five more years under a system euphemistically entitled ‘apprenticeship’ and of course East Indian ‘coolies’ continued to be scattered across the Caribbean to labour as ‘indentured servants’ well after the abolition of slavery.13
We must remind ourselves that we are talking about a period of British history where it took almost a century of debate, reform and much consternation to abolish domestic child labour. Are we really to believe that a British parliament that had only just come to abolish the labour of its ‘own’ children felt such a loving affinity for faraway negroes? Furthermore, when the enslaved in the British Caribbean struck out for their freedom, sometimes in the mistaken belief that
the British government had actually set them free, how did the local arms of the British state respond? After the 1807 act there were a series of major slave rebellions in the British Caribbean, first in Barbados in 1816, Demerara (British Guyana) in 1823 and then Jamaica’s Baptist War in 1831. The Baptist War was the largest rebellion in the history of the British Caribbean, involving perhaps as many as 60,000 rebels.14 The genuine fear that Jamaica and other territories might go the same way as Haiti cannot be overstated – indeed, had the Jamaican Maroons not helped British forces put down the rebellion it may well have developed into a full revolution. In response to that rebellion, Lord Howick, under-secretary for the colonies and the son of Prime Minister Lord Grey, wrote to the new governor of Jamaica that his information was that:
The slaves were not being in the least intimidated or cowed by the dreadfully severe punishments which have been inflicted, but on the contrary as being quite careless of their lives, and as regarding death as infinitely preferable to slavery, while they are exasperated to the highest degree and burning for revenge for the fate of their friends and relations . . . it is quite clear that the present state of things cannot go on much longer, and that every hour that it does so is full of the most appalling danger . . . my own conviction is that emancipation alone will effectively avert the danger, and that the reformed parliament will very speedily come to that measure, but in the meantime it is but too possible that the simultaneous murder of the whites upon every estate which Mr. Knibb apprehends may take place.15
It as an odd way to express one’s love for an oppressed class of people, to leave them in conditions so horrendous that they have no choice but to rebel and then, rather than ameliorate those conditions – remember £20 million was found for slave masters – to engage in mass executions of the very same people one had apparently set free out of sheer and undying love.