Slavery

  It is still raining and I will move from the safe subject of cycling to the much more controversial one of slavery. This post, should not be controversial, however, since I will state clearly that, I am against it. 

   There have been many articles about slavery recently, generally in relation to statues. I will not talk about statue removal, yet again, but I will point you to two articles which suggest that the number of problematic statues is likely much larger than you would think and not all of them are carved in white marble. The point is, that not all slavers were white Americans or Englishmen. 

   The first article is a syndicated one by Gwynne Dyer which appeared in many papers on July 30, 2020. Here is how it begins and in it he is attempting to make the point that slavery was not restricted to the American south:

“Assessing the people of America’s past by today’s standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains.”

That might seem to be the line taken by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas last week in his opinion piece for the New York Times. It caused great outrage, the opinion editor had to resign, and Cotton was roundly abused for “defending slavery.....”

The point is that I [Dyer] changed one word in that quote, and it wasn’t Cotton who said it. It was Nigerian journalist and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, and what she actually said, in an opinion piece for the BBC, was this: “Assessing the people of Africa’s past by today’s standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains.”

"She was talking specifically about her great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, who was a widely respected trader in tobacco, palm oil, and slaves in southeastern Nigeria in the early 20th century. The Atlantic slave trade had been banned by the European empires a century before, but slavery was still a flourishing domestic business in Nigeria and many other African countries.

Her great-grandfather became famous by defying the British colonial authorities, who were trying to stamp out slavery in Nigeria. They had confiscated some of his slaves, and he marched right up and demanded them back, waving a trading licence that dated back to the previous century.

The British were taken aback, apologized and returned his slaves. Indeed, they were so impressed by his boldness and self-confidence that they subsequently appointed him paramount chief of his region. So he became a local hero in his own day, and is still a hero to the Nwaubani family.

Slavery was normal in most pre-modern societies, including almost all the kingdoms and ethnic groups of sub-Saharan Africa. Africans had sold slaves north to various Islamic empires in the Middle East for centuries before Europeans showed up on the coast in ships. They were just another set of customers buying in the same market.

Most enslaved Africans didn’t travel more than a few hundred kilometres from home. It is estimated that in the 18th century one-third of the people in what is now Senegal were slaves who belonged to other Senegalese. But the ones who were sold to foreigners probably suffered more.

Historians believe around one-fifth of the 10 million Africans transported to the Americas over more than three centuries died on board ship. The fatalities among the estimated 17 million African slaves sold to Arab traders and forced to walk across the Sahara or carried around the India Ocean in ships during 10 centuries were probably just as high. What awaited the survivors when they arrived was pretty appalling, too."

   The second article was reprinted recently in The New York Review of Books. It had originally appeared in TNYRB in 1994 and was written as a letter rebutting the notion that large numbers of Jews were involved in the slave trade. The point again, is that many different peoples and religions participated in slavery, even some ex-slaves.

   The participants in the Atlantic slave system included Arabs, Berbers, scores of African ethnic groups, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, Jews, Germans, Swedes, French, English, Danes, white Americans, Native Americans, and even thousands of New World blacks who had been emancipated or were descended from freed slaves but who then became slaveholding farmers or planters themselves. Responsibility, in short, radiated outward to peoples of every sort who had access to the immense profits generated from the world’s first system of multinational production for a mass market.

“In the American South, in 1830, there were only 120 Jews among the 45,000 slaveholders owning twenty or more slaves and only twenty Jews among the 12,000 slaveholders owning fifty or more slaves.” David Brion Davis noted in 1994, on the question of Jewish involvement in the slave trade. “No one should defend the small number of Jews who bought and sold slaves,” he writes. “No one should defend the infinitely larger number of Catholics and Protestants who built the Atlantic slave system, or defend the Muslims who initiated the process of shipping black African slaves to distant markets, or defend the Africans who captured and enslaved perhaps twenty million other Africans in order to sell them to European traders for valuable and empowering goods. But while posterity has the right and even duty to judge the past, we must emphatically renounce the dangerous though often seductive belief in a collective guilt that descends through time to every present and future generation.”

(David Brion Davis, "The Slave Trade and the Jews," NYRB, Dec. 22, 1994)

The Bonus:

Peonage on the PGA Tour

   It is still raining and I will likely watch some golf.  Whenever I do, I am often irritated when I see the golfer holding his club out behind him, without looking behind him, fully expecting the caddy to be there to grab and clean it. When I went looking for a picture to illustrate all of this, I didn't find one, but I did find the one above that leads us back to the subject of slavery.

   The kind of behaviour that irritates me also upset the caddy of a famous golfer.  The caddy, who is white, said that the famous golfer, who is black, treated him like a "slave." Given that the caddy was white and had been made very wealthy by his black  'master', he was subjected to considerable criticism.

  Here is how the word was used by Steve Williams (the caddy) in his biography -Out of the Rough. 

"One thing that really pissed me off," he writes, "was how he would flippantly toss a club in the general direction of the bag, expecting me to go over and pick it up. I felt uneasy about bending down to pick up his discarded club - it was like I was his slave."

If you don't believe me see, for example: "Caddie Steve Williams Defends Using 'Slave' to Describe Working for Tiger," The Hamilton Spectator, Nov. 11, 2015. Also: "Caddie's Slave Comment Provokes Widespread Ridicule," Dominion Post, Nov. 5, 2015.

P.S. I suppose this last part could provoke some ridicule and controversy given that discussing slavery in relation to the PGA, which is the whitest sport on the planet, does not seem appropriate.