Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - The Sunday Times Bestseller

by Akala

  The British government’s treatment of its own rebel slaves and its refusal to recognise abolitionist Haiti contrasts sharply with its relationship with the slave owning Confederacy, Brazil and Cuba. For decades after abolition, Britain imported countless tons of slave-made cotton from the American south, which stimulated all kinds of industries, and British banks and businessmen made a mint investing in slave-owned mines and slave-built infrastructure in Brazil. Brazil and Cuba did not abolish slavery until the 1880s but still received massive inward investment from British companies and merchants, with the government’s knowledge of course. But in perhaps the most treacherous episode of the whole affair, the British anti-slavery squadron tasked with enforcing abolition on the seas received ‘head money’ for each African they ‘liberated’ – so no, it was not altruism – and they sometimes even sold the Africans they liberated back into slavery.16 Finally, slavery was not abolished in British colonies like Hong Kong, Aden and Sierra Leone until well into the twentieth century.

  So, despite Britain spending almost two centuries as the dominant transatlantic slave trader, with all the torture, rape and mass murder that entailed, despite Britain refusing to back abolition when other European powers had paved the way, despite Britain spending the 1790s warring to keep slavery intact all over the Caribbean, despite Britain trying to crush the only successful slave revolution in human history and then helping their French enemies attempt to do the same, despite Britain refusing to even recognise the first Caribbean state to abolish slavery, despite all of this, some ‘historians’, teachers and assorted nationalists are asking us all to believe the self-serving fairy tale that suddenly, in 1807 – just three years after Haitian independence – guided by William Wilberforce alone, Britain abolished slavery because it was ‘the right thing to do’. What a pile of twaddle.

  But the ‘Wilberforce did it all’ idea also springs from two other ideological founts, one the aforementioned classic white saviour trope and the other a seemingly human need for simple solutions to complex problems, for great men instead of the convoluted mess that is human history – in short, a need for heroes. Unfortunately, very little of human history is unsullied by the grit of reality and no humans are free from imperfections. Even if we take a far more prominent abolitionist than Wilberforce, a man who literally shed his blood for the cause of abolition – Toussaint L’Ouverture – we see these human imperfections and contradictions. Born into slavery but free by age thirty, the charismatic and militarily brilliant leader of what became the Haitian Revolution was at one time himself a slave owner. He instituted a draconian labour regime when he was governor of Haiti, had his own adopted ‘nephew’ executed for being too unkind to French ‘planters’ – slave owners – and even snitched to the British about a slave revolt brewing in Jamaica, of which the suspected instigators were hanged. L’Ouverture nonetheless did shed his blood and spent much of his adult life literally fighting for the abolition of slavery. Humans are complex. I suppose the difference between Wilberforce and L’Ouverture in this respect (other than the obvious fact that L’Ouverture’s contribution was far greater) is that even the most hagiographic writings on L’Ouverture would not dare to suggest he did it ‘all by himself’.

  Any analysis of the ending of Caribbean slavery that fails to even mention the only successful slave revolution in history and the wider phenomenon of slave resistance, as well as multiple other factors, is not to be taken at all seriously. There is also the glaring contradiction of the creation of apartheid semi-slave states in southern Africa that stayed in existence until well into the twentieth century, and which took a combination of armed struggle, protest and worldwide boycott to formally topple. If the British government abolished the slave trade way back in 1807 because of an inherent love for justice and for African human beings, how do we explain the British government backing apartheid rule, which did not end until I was seven years old? Remember that a regime of forced labour based on white supremacy was the cornerstone of apartheid.

  Let’s be totally clear though, I am not disputing that Wilberforce played a role in the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act passing in 1807, nor am I disputing that for all its contours and complications that the abolition acts were steps forward, nor that some Britons did indeed have genuine anti-slavery principles back then, some much more demonstrably so than Wilberforce, such as Foxwell Buxton or Clarkson or the British workers that went on strike against slave-made cotton, and of course the black British abolitionists living and publishing in England at the time, such as Mary Prince Ottabah Cuagano and Olaudah Equiano. What I am saying is that power concedes nothing without demand or motive, and the abolitionist movement needs to be viewed much like the anti-war movements of today, if you will forgive the crude historical parallel. Think of it like this; there are today British citizens – perhaps millions of us – who, however fringe we may be considered in mainstream politics, are genuinely horrified at our government’s foreign policy, its arms dealing and war-mongering, and there are also a few rogue MPs who constantly vote against the British war machine – but does any of that mean that the British ruling class generally take anti-war humanitarianism at all seriously?

  Of course not. This is how they can support terrorists in Libya while claiming to save Libyans with humanitarian bombs, and then let people fleeing from Libya drown in the sea while the Foreign Secretary makes jokes about clearing away the dead bodies to a laughing audience; or how they can sell arms to the Saudis for them to kill Yemeni civilians at the exact same time that they are waging war in Syria under the rubric of humanitarianism.

  The times have changed and the extremities of the crimes may be different and a little less direct, but the narrative and Machiavellian mentality have remained much the same. No one refers to the ‘white man’s burden’ any more, as it’s just too crude a phrase, so instead we speak of spreading democracy and human rights and of saving people from dictators, which funnily enough is almost exactly what the original nineteenth-century version of the white man’s burden claimed to be motivated by. The Scramble for Africa was justified in largely humanitarian terms; Europeans needed to go in and save Africans from their slave-dealing elites, apparently. There is no doubt of course that these slave-dealing elites existed in Africa – they had been Britain’s business partners after all – but the idea that the Scramble for Africa ‘saved’ the African masses is so ridiculous that even the most nationalistic of historians would find it hard to spin.

  And here we come to the old adage, the third slavery fact we learned in school and offered to us again by Geldof and so many others: ‘Africans sold their own people’. There are a number of obvious problems with the ‘Africans sold their own people’ cliché, but that still does not seem to have stopped people offering it as an ‘argument’. First and foremost, does the fact that Britain had ‘African’ accomplices rid it of any and all wrongdoing? According to many, it does. Second, there was no continental ‘African’ identity before industrial technology, the Scramble for Africa, the redrawing of borders and the modern pan-Africanist movement created it in the twentieth century, and that African identity is still fraught with contradictions and conflicts. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Africa was not a paradise where all humans sat together around the campfire in their loincloths singing ‘Kumbaya’ in one huge – but obviously primitive – black kingdom covering the entire continent and littered with quaint looking mud huts, any more than all of Europe or Asia was one big happy family. Africa had and has ethnic, cultural, class and imperial rivalries that every scholar of the period acknowledges are the very divisions that colonisers and slave traders played on. In fact, as the award-winning historian Sylviane A. Diouf notes, in none of the slave narratives that have survived do the formerly enslaved talk about being sold by other ‘Africans’, or by ‘their own people’ and only Sancho – who lived in England – even mentions the ‘blackness’ of those that sold him.17 The victims of the transatlantic traffic did not think that the
y were being sold out by their ‘black brothers and sisters’ any more than the Irish thought that their ‘white brothers and sisters’ from England were deliberately starving them to death during the famine.

  Oral traditions collected in eastern Nigeria in the 1960s speak of local groups that considered a particular family to be cursed because they had sold a daughter into slavery several generations ago; such treachery would hardly be considered grounds for a centuries-long curse if it were the norm. Even the major slave-trading states of western Africa – Oyo, Dahomey, Ashanti – all passed laws banning or limiting the sale of their own citizens, i.e. ‘their own people’, while they of course continued to raid for and sell other nations’ people. The early kings of the Congo wrote letters to Portuguese monarchs pleading with them to stop sending traders because they were taking away people, and to only send teachers and priests instead, and Benin, one of the most impressive West African states of the period, seems to have been the only one that successfully protected its own citizens from the beginning of the trade.18

  We need not romanticise pre-colonial Africa, we are not all descendants of ‘kings and queens’; most of us whose ancestors were sold into slavery are probably descended from serfs, servants, existing slaves and soldiers from warring parties. With that said, it is interesting that Olaudah Equiano made such a huge distinction between the kind of slavery that existed in African kingdoms and the kind practised in the Americas. Countless European witnesses made this same observation – that African ‘slavery’ was nothing like the racialised chattel slavery practised on the sugar plantations of the New World, including English slave traders like John Newton:

  The state of slavery among these wild barbarous people, as we esteem them, is much milder than in our colonies. For as, on the one hand, they have no land in high cultivation like our West Indian plantations, and therefore no call for that excessive un-intermitted labour which exhausts our slaves; so, on the other hand, no man is permitted to draw blood even from a slave.19

  Which brings us to Hugh Thomas’s assertion that Africans were ‘docile’. Reflecting the unscholarly value-judgment embedded in that statement, neither Hugh Thomas, nor any others who peddle it, offer any comparative data to try and prove the claim. They do not, for example, attempt to show that enslaved people in the Greco-Roman world, the European ‘Dark Ages’, eighteenth-century Russia or medieval Korea were any more likely to rebel than ‘Africans’. In fact, specialists in studies of global slavery note just how relatively rare slave rebellions were across all slave societies – for what should be obvious reasons to a scholar.20

  However, perhaps the most neglected area of study in the whole history of transatlantic slavery is the issue of resistance to enslavement in Africa itself. Most people are at least vaguely aware that there was some resistance from black people in the Caribbean but it’s always fascinated me that people, even many in the black diaspora, seem willing to believe that ‘Africans’ – undifferentiated by class, region or ethnicity – just allowed their family members to be taken away, or worse, that they were all collaborators. Thanks to decades of painstaking research we know this is fundamentally untrue. There were literally hundreds of rebellions and attacks against slave ships up and down the West African coast carried out by organised guerrilla groups much like the Maroons of the Caribbean. As many as 483 of these rebellions are recorded in British, French and Dutch records alone. The average death toll in these skirmishes seems to have been about twenty-five and the historian David Richardson estimates that a million fewer people had to go through the middle passage because of this one form of resistance alone.21 It is also estimated that one in every ten European slave ships to dock in West Africa experienced either a ship-board revolt or an attack from land.

  It is notable that there were not any major rebellions against transportation to penal colonies, let alone a revolution in the UK, during all the years that Britons were being shipped against their will to Australia and elsewhere. But I will not suggest that this is because white Brits are uniquely docile, as there are several other more likely possible explanations: the British State was too well armed; class divisions were too strong; people were too divided. In two final examples of how complex the picture and experience of the transatlantic traffic were from a West African perspective, there is even evidence of wealthy African families sailing all the way to America to get their children back during the nineteenth century and there are copious records attesting to the practice of ransom, i.e the practice of people capturing and selling two or more people to get back a loved one that had been sold into slavery. Can such a person be called a slave trader with any degree of certainty? Can you be sure that you would not kidnap people you did not know to get back your child if faced with such a dilemma? I certainly can’t.

  To make the simple bald claim that Africans were docile or that they generally ‘sold their own people’, knowing that most West Africans of the time were not involved in slave trading at all, is like saying the English killed their own people when they invaded Ireland or fought the French, because today we see them all as white and European, and of course it’s not as if the English ruling class were treating their own people wonderfully during the period in question. This colonial projection of Africa is useful to some as it avoids them having to use the usual tools to explain the behaviour of real human beings – economics, market demand, dynastic rivalries, ethnic enmity, class distinctions, pure profit-seeking, self-preservation, love and more. It allows one to offer a person’s ‘African-ness’, a concept that did not yet exist in the period, as an explanation for their behaviour. ‘Africans sold their own people’ is the historical version of ‘black on black violence’.

  None of this is offered to excuse African elites then or now for their greed and caprice, nor black people generally for our human flaws, but rather to paint a full picture of a complex phenomenon, as we would with any other region, time period and the peoples living in it. Is an Irishman like Bob Geldof in a position to assert that Africans are eternally shamed? Is the story of Ireland so uniquely pure among the history of nations that it places Geldof in a position to cast this kind of aspersion on an entire continent? No, of course it is not. There was slavery in Celtic Ireland long before the English arrived – this justifies nothing the English did of course; Irish merchants collaborated in selling Irish people to traders as early as the Vikings. Anglophile Irish chiefs collaborated with the English in their conquest of Ireland, and Irish merchants and landowners forcefully stole land from ‘their own people’ in the midst of the worst famine in modern European history.22

  As we’ve seen, the Irish in America became slave owners and ardent supporters of white supremacy, despite their own sufferings at the hands of the British. One of the staunchest Irish nationalists – John Mitchell – became a vocal supporter of black slavery despite the fact that one of the most prominent black churches in America managed to send aid to the Irish famine, even though much of its congregation was still enslaved. I don’t say any of this to suggest that the Irish are ‘eternally shamed’ nor to suggest that Irish humans are uniquely flawed, or that these actions represent the morality of all Irish people. Indeed, some Irish nationalists themselves called out this hypocritical behaviour at the time. I say this simply to say that if ‘Africans’ are eternally cursed for the greed and caprice of some of their number then so is all humanity, including Geldof’s Irish compatriots. It’s also fascinating that Geldof did not assert that British people – much less all white people – were eternally shamed for their role in enslaving their fellow human beings, but whatever. The average Irishman would certainly resent being conflated with an Englishman, yet Geldof and others can gloss over centuries of diverse and complicated history with the ‘Africans sold their own people’ cliché. Oh, and by the way, I am aware that this chapter is about Britain and that Ireland is obviously not part of Britain, but Geldof is such a part of the British establishment and represents so well its colonial arrogance I doubt my I
rish homies will object to me including him.

  Which brings us on to the wider way in which the British Empire as a whole is remembered.

  Back in 2005, future prime minister Gordon Brown let the world know that ‘the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over’ – leaving us all wondering when those days of apology were. In a 2014 YouGov survey, 59 per cent of Brits declared that they were proud of the empire. The historian Niall Ferguson gloated approvingly on his Twitter, ‘I won’. I’d love to see a similar survey done with only British citizens whose families come from non-white former colonies, and of course the not-quite-whites of Ireland. Wouldn’t the true measure of the British Empire’s supposed benevolence surely be attained by asking the billions of humans that descend from the people it ruled if they remember it so favourably?

  The fact remains; no one colonises another group of people out of love for them. Anyone familiar with the traditions of postcolonial scholarship will know that African, Asian, Irish and Caribbean intellectuals, and the peoples they represent, do not share Niall Ferguson’s fond memories of the Empire, which is why he as a ‘historian’ must ignore the most prominent intellectuals of those regions. In the British Caribbean, the postcolonial tradition was pioneered by Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, who are still pretty much standard reading for any educated Caribbean adult.

  In India, we could take Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy, perhaps the most prominent global critic of modern India’s corruption and its mistreatment of its vulnerable populations, and even an outspoken voice of dissent against Gandhi worship. Anyone familiar with Roy’s work will know that she, unlike some Indian Hindu fascists, has no nationalist axe to grind, yet her assessment of Britain’s empire in India and elsewhere is much like my own. We could also choose Pankaj Mishra, whose masterful book on the Asian intellectuals who challenged European hegemony to ‘remake Asia’ is a brilliant refutation of Eurocentric nonsense.23 He also, incidentally, once gave Mr Ferguson quite an intellectual spanking in the London Review of Books.