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Nobody ever chose to be a slave
By Thabo Mbeki
More than 200 years ago, in 1802,
Haiti was in the grip of an intense military and
political struggle that was waged by African slaves, to
liberate themselves from French slave owners, and
from French domination. Angered by the sustained
struggle of the slaves, Napoleon said:
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Toussaint . . .this
gilded African . . . I will not rest until I
have torn the epaulettes off every nigger in
the colonies. . . . Toussaint L'Ouverture
has chosen a course of action which is quite
impossible and that which the Metropole
considers most intolerable. At this
time, they don't even wish to discuss the
matter further, these black leaders, these
ungrateful and rebellious Africans. |
However neither Napoleon nor the
French armies commanded among others by his
brother-in-law, General Leclerc, could tear the
epaulettes off the "ungrateful and rebellious Africans."
The struggle in Haiti culminated in the proclamation on
1 January 1804, of Haiti as the first ever, independent
Black Republic.
Unfortunately, the global
celebrations in 2004 to mark the bicentenary of this
historic event were much more subdued than the more
recent celebrations, in 2007, to mark the bicentenary of
the adoption in 1807, by the British Parliament, and the
signing into law of the Abolition of Slave Trade Act,
which, while not prohibiting slavery, made it illegal
for British subjects and institutions to participate in
the transportation of slaves.
However, it was important that the international
community should commemorate this bicentenary as part of
its response to the challenge to address the massive
legacy of slavery and the contemporary forms of its
manifestation.
Prophets and Rebels
In the Introduction to his seminal
2005 book,
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to
Free an Empire's Slaves, the historian, Adam
Hochschild, writes:
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At the end of the
eighteenth century, well over three quarters
of all people alive were in bondage of one
kind or another, not the captivity of
striped prison uniforms, but of various
systems of slavery or serfdom. The age was a
high point in the trade in which close to
eighty thousand chained and shackled
Africans were loaded onto slave ships and
transported to the New World each year.
In parts of the Americas, slaves far
outnumbered free persons. The same was true
in parts of Africa, and it was from these
millions indigenous slaves that African
chiefs and slave traders drew most of the
men and women they sold to Europeans and
Arabs sailing their ships along the
continent's coasts. African slaves were
spread throughout the Islamic world, and the
Ottoman Empire enslaved other peoples as
well. . . .
One measure of how much slavery pervaded the
world of the eighteenth century is the
traffic on the Atlantic Ocean. . . . So
rapidly were slaves worked to death, above
all on the brutal sugar plantations in the
Caribbean, that between 1660 and 1807, ships
brought well over three times as many
Africans across the ocean to British
colonies as they did Europeans. And, of
course, it was not just to British colonies
that slaves were sent.
From Senegal to Virginia, Sierra Leone to
Charleston, the Niger delta to Cuba, Angola
to Brazil, and on dozens upon dozens of
crisscrossing paths taken by thousands of
vessels, the Atlantic was a conveyor belt to
early death in the fields of an
immense swath of plantations that stretched
from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro and beyond. |
About three weeks ago, on 25 March,
the international community joined together to celebrate
the bicentenary of the signing into law, at noon on 25
March 1807, by King George III of Great Britain, of the
Abolition of Slave Trade Act. Adam Hochschild explains
that the Act "banned British subjects, shipyards,
outfitters, and insurers from participating in the slave
trade to the colonies of France and its allies...(It)
stopped all slave ships from leaving the world's major
slave-trading nation after 1 May 1807, (and) gave hope
to millions of people around the Atlantic."
In a letter to one Pavel Annenkov, in 1846, Karl Marx
also wrote about the fundamental importance of slavery
to the birth of the new, post-feudal world. He
said:
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Direct slavery is as much
the pivot upon which our present-day
industrialism turns as are machinery,
credit, etc. Without slavery there would be
no cotton, without cotton there would be no
modern industry. It is slavery which has
given value to the colonies, it is the
colonies which have created world trade, and
world trade is the necessary condition for
large-scale machine industry.
Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the
colonies sent very few products to the Old
World, and did not noticeably change the
face of the world. Slavery is therefore an
economic category of paramount importance.
Without slavery, North America, the most
progressive nation, would he transformed
into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North
America off the map and you will get
anarchy, the complete decay of trade and
modern civilisation.
But to do away with slavery would be to wipe
America off the map. Being an economic
category, slavery has existed in all nations
since the beginning of the world. All that
modern nations have achieved is to disguise
slavery at home and import it openly into
the New World. |
International Solidarity &
Reparations
Important as it was, in the ways
indicated by Marx and Hochschild, ultimately the slavery
they spoke of became a thing of the past. This came
about as a result of the heroic struggles waged by the
African slaves of Haiti, and their colleagues throughout
the "New World". But this historic result was also
accomplished because of the actions of people of
conscience in the slave-owning countries, who felt it
their duty to act in solidarity with the slaves who were
laying down their lives to secure their emancipation.
In good measure, the book
Bury the Chains is an outstanding tribute to
these people of conscience, and especially those who
raised the banner of anti-slavery in Great Britain, then
the principal slave trader along the African Atlantic
coast. These include
Thomas Clarkson,
John Newton, the freed slave
Olaudah Equiano,
Granville Sharp,
James Stephen, and, of course,
William Wilberforce.
Writing of these people of honour, Adam Hochschild says:
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Their passion and
optimism are still contagious and still
relevant to our times, when, in so many
parts of the world, equal rights for all men
and women seem far distant.
The movement they forged
is a landmark for an additional reason.
There is always something mysterious about
human empathy, and when we feel it and when
we don't. Its sudden upwelling at this
particular moment caught everyone by
surprise. Slaves and other subjugated people
have rebelled throughout history, but the
campaign in England was something never seen
before: it was the first time a large number
of people became outraged, and stayed
outraged for many years, over someone else's
rights. And most startling of all, the
rights of people of another colour, on
another continent.
No one was more taken aback by this than
Stephen Fuller, the London agent for
Jamaica's planters, an absentee plantation
owner himself and a central figure in the
proslavery lobby. As tens of thousands of
protesters signed petitions to Parliament,
Fuller was amazed that these were 'stating
no grievance or injury of any sort or kind,
affecting the Petitioners themselves'. His
bafflement is understandable. He was seeing
something new in history. |
The new thing Fuller saw was the
inevitable growth, given the birth of the global
capitalist market, of the phenomenon of international
solidarity, which, later, gave birth to the powerful and
global solidarity movement against apartheid. The Church
of England and the Anglican Church internationally was
an important activist in this anti-apartheid struggle,
including its present head in his personal capacity, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Rev Rowan Williams.
It therefore came as no surprise that, on the occasion
of the celebration of the bicentenary of the adoption of
the British Abolition of Slave Trade Act of 1807,
Archbishop Williams raised a question considered
difficult and contentious by some in the former
slave-owning countries - the issue of reparations. In
this regard, the Archbishop's office said: "The point
about moral responsibility is that the slave trade
yielded considerable profit for institutions - but how
that is dealt with now means asking the wider question
about how that heritage is used to help most effectively
those suffering because of the legacy of slavery."
More specifically, the Archbishop of Canterbury raised
the important issue whether the Church should not find
ways and means by which to return to those who were
enslaved the compensation it received when the slaves it
owned were freed as a result of the adoption in Great
Britain of the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act. For his
part, British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed his
profound sorrow and apology for British involvement in
slavery.
In their 2002 Report to the Office of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Human Rights, entitled "Abolishing
Slavery and its Contemporary Forms", David Weissbrodt
and Anti-Slavery International say with regard to the
issue of reparations:
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While the Declaration (of
the Durban 2001 UN World Conference against
Racism - WCAR) acknowledges that the
transatlantic slave trade and slavery were
"appalling tragedies" in history and are a
source of racism and related intolerance, it
states little in terms of express
reparations for descendants of victims of
slavery. The Declaration notes that "some
States have taken the initiative to
apologise and have paid reparation, where
appropriate, for grave and massive
violations committed," and it suggests that
States find appropriate ways to restore the
dignity of victims and calls on States to
take measures to halt and reverse the
lasting consequences of such practices. In
addition, the Final Declaration urges States
to ensure the right of victims to seek just
and adequate reparation and satisfaction. In
conclusion, the WCAR "acknowledge[d] that
slavery and the slave trade, including the
transatlantic slave trade, were appalling
tragedies in the history of humanity not
only because of their abhorrent barbarism
but also in terms of their magnitude,
organised nature and especially their
negation of the essence of the victims, and
further acknowledge that slavery and the
slave trade are a crime against humanity and
should always have been so, especially the
transatlantic slave trade, and are among the
major sources and manifestations of racism,
racial discrimination, xenophobia and
related intolerance, and that Africans and
people of African descent, Asians, and
people of Asian descent and indigenous
peoples were victims of these acts and
continue to be victims of their
consequences." |
In the light of these decisions,
agreed by the international community in Durban in 2001,
it is clear that Archbishop Rowan Williams was perfectly
correct to raise the issue he put back on the global
agenda - the need to find ways and means to address the
persisting material and other consequences of slavery.
Slavery in New Clothes
The challenge facing the
international community in this regard is compounded by
the fact that the contemporary global economy and
society have given birth to various forms of economic
activity affecting millions of human beings, that are
akin to the loss of personal freedom experienced by the
classical slaves. This suggests that the past historic
victories against slavery succeeded to defeat and
suppress slavery only for a limited period of time.
However, I believe that it will help us better to
contend with the new reality if we consider what Karl
Marx meant when he said - "All that modern nations have
achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it
openly into the New World."
In the substance, he sought to make the point that,
ineluctably, economic systems predicated on private gain
will always seek ways to enslave the people who work for
others, while accepting that employers might be obliged
to pretend that their relationship with their employees
is something other than one between a slave and a
slave-owner.
Surely this must mean that within the context of our
pursuit of the objective of a people-centred society, we
must at all times remain vigilant to confront the
tendency towards the enslavement of the working people,
however disguised. To help us in this regard, there has
emerged a large body of knowledge that seeks to define
what are considered to be modern forms of slavery. In
this regard the view has been presented that:
Common characteristics distinguish
slavery from other human rights violations.
A slave is:
* forced to work - through mental or
physical threat;
* owned or controlled by an "employer,"
usually through mental or physical abuse or
threatened abuse;
* dehumanised, treated as a commodity or
bought and sold as "property";
* physically constrained or has restrictions
placed on his/her freedom of movement. |
With regard to the foregoing, the
point has been made that the following are the various
types of slavery that exist today:
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Bonded labour (that)
affects millions of people around the world.
People become bonded labourers by taking or
being tricked into taking a loan for as
little as the cost of medicine for a sick
child. To repay the debt, many are forced to
work long hours, seven days a week, up to
365 days a year. They receive basic food and
shelter as "payment" for their work, but may
never pay off the loan, which can be passed
down for generations;
Early and forced marriage (that) affects
women and girls who are married without
choice and are forced into lives of
servitude often accompanied by physical
violence;
Forced labour (that) affects people who are
illegally recruited by individuals,
governments or political parties and forced
to work - usually under threat of violence
or other penalties;
Slavery by descent (which) is where people
are either born into a slave class or are
from a "group" that society views as suited
to being used as slave labour;
Trafficking (which) involves the transport
and/or trade of people - women, children and
men - from one area to another for the
purpose of forcing them into slavery
conditions; and,
Worst forms of child labour (that) affects
(according to the ILO), an estimated 126
million children around the world in work
that is harmful to their health and welfare. |
An African Tragedy—A
Luta Continua
In an earlier Letter in ANC TODAY
(Vol. 5 No 40), we drew attention to the tragedy facing
large numbers of Africans who, driven by dire poverty,
daily risk their lives to reach Europe in search of even
the meanest of jobs, provided these give them the means
to avoid death by starvation.
This desperate flight from poverty in Africa creates the
perfect circumstances for some in Europe to employ
Africans (and others from Asia and Latin America), in
conditions of disguised slavery. Surely the moment will
once again come round when the newly enslaved will once
more rise up to liberate themselves. Undoubtedly, once
again there will be people of conscience within the
developed world, who will join the newly enslaved in a
concerted and sustained uprising that will, once more,
constitute a landmark in the evolution of human society.
It is in this context that our movement and this journal
join the rest of the world to celebrate the bicentenary
of the adoption by the British Parliament, in 1807, of
the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act and its acceptance
by King George III. We do this cognisant of the fact
that this epoch-making outcome was the result of the
historic victory of the African slaves in Haiti and the
relentless solidarity struggle of progressive men and
women in England.
Together, these comrades-in-arms created the possibility
for modern society to address the challenging question
of how the heritage represented by the progress achieved
by those who benefited from open and old slavery, and
those who benefit from disguised, contemporary slavery,
should be used to help most effectively those suffering
because of the legacy of slavery in all its forms.
When we opened the Durban UN World Conference against
Racism on 31 August 2001, we said:
| Our common humanity dictates that as we
rose against apartheid racism, so must we
combine to defeat the consequences of
slavery, colonialism and racism which, to
this day, continue to define the lives of
billions of people who are brown and black,
as lives of hopelessness. Nobody ever
chose to be a slave, to be colonised, to be
racially oppressed. The impulses of the time
caused these crimes to be committed by human
beings against others. Surely, the impulse
of our own time says to all of us that we
must do everything we can to free those who
to this day suffer from racism, xenophobia
and related intolerance because their
forebears were enslaved, colonised and
racially oppressed. |
* * *
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Hubert Cole. Christophe: King of Haiti. New
York: The Viking Press, 1967.
C.L.R. James.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(1938)
Edourad Gissant.
Caribbean Doscourse (2004)
/ Barbara Harlow.
Resistance Literature (1987)
Josaphat B. Kubayanda.
The Poet's Africa: Africanness in the Poetry of Nicolas Guillen and Aime
Cesaire
(1990)
Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman.
Open
Gate An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry
(2001)
David P. Geggus, ed.
The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.
University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
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Witnessing to Self
A Response by
Marguerite 'Ezili Danṭ' Laurent
Haitian Perspectives,
April 15, 2007
In the article entitled, "Letter
from the President: Nobody ever chose to be a slave,"
South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, duly recognizes
and acknowledges the importance of Haiti in eradicating
slavery before he commemorates the British law
prohibiting the slave trade. This is critical and we
thank President Mbeki for being one of the very few to
give Haiti its due respect and proper accolades. Thabo
Mbeki writes it this way: "the global celebrations in
2004 to mark (the bicentennial of Haiti's independence
and abolition of slavery and colonialism) . . . were
much more subdued than the recent celebrations, in 2007
to mark the bicentenary of the adoption in 1807, by the
British Parliament, and the signing into law of the
Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which while NOT
prohibiting slavery, made it illegal for British
subjects and institutions to participate in the
transportation of slaves."
This statement, along with this
quote: "All that modern nations have achieved is to
disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the
New World," are the most important observations of the
article.
But while Mbeki begins by
acknowledging Haiti's great accomplishment, he also
quotes Hochchild's book (Bury
the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
Empire's Slaves) in glowing terms. Obviously
those of you who have closely followed Ezili's HLLN,
know well we own a very different view from that of Adam
Hochschild, who elevates white "abolitionists?" such as
William Wilberforce and even
Napoleon, nurturing and pandering to Officialdom's
cultivated racist psyche, at the expense of always
failing to fairly acknowledge the great avant guard
genius of Jean Jacques
Dessalines,
Toussaint Louverture,
Boukman, the
Haitian maroons and Dessalines descendants. Britain's
liberty activists cannot match Haiti's founding fathers'
feats. Not by one iota. For, what Haiti's native son,
Jean 'Jafrikayiti' St. Vil, has written about the
so-called US and French revolutionaries also apply to
Britain's (non) abolitionists!
Jean (Jafrikayiti) Vil, writes:
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Men like Dessalines and
Toussaint do not have equals in U.S. or
French history where so-called revolutions
took place only to further entrench racial
slavery and denial of its consequences to
this day. For, unlike Napoleon, Dessalines
and Toussaint weren't fighting to steal
other people's resources. Unlike Thomas
Jefferson, these illiterate men actually
believed it to be self-evident that all men
were created equal...."
(See also: Jean (Jafrikayiti) St. Vil,
"Napoleon
was no Toussaint: Spare us the Insult (Adam
Hochschild)!
Haitian Perspectives, Feb. 27, 2007
Marguerite Laurent,
Adam Hochschild's Neo-Colonial Journalism"
(May 30, 2004)
Ezili Danto, "What
white folks feed on is not so eye-opening,
just typically parasitic,fearful,
self-serving and delusional"
March 3, 2007 |
President Thabo Mbeki and the ANC are
to be commended for keeping Haiti's accomplishments at
the forefront of these 2007 commemorations.
For it is not lost on this Haitian woman and Ezili's
HLLNetwork that the ANC and you, join the rest of the
world to celebrate the bicentenary of the adoption by
the British Parliament, in 1807, of the Abolition of the
Slave Trade Act? But that you do so, as you write,
"cognizant of the fact that this epoch-making outcome
was the result of the historic victory of the African
slaves in Haiti and the relentless solidarity struggle
of progressive men and women in England."
However, we at Ezili's HLLN would emphazise and also
recall, again and again, to one and all that Britain's
1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which William
Wilberforce is credited with, DID NOT, prohibit slavery!
It just "made it illegal for British subjects and
institutions to participate in the transportation of
slaves."
Yet, as President Mbeki's article points out, that
bicentennial drew forth MORE global celebration and
accolades than Haiti's 2004 bicentennial marking the
abolition of slavery AND colonialism! In fact, we would
add, the former enslavers and current neo-colonizers
have steadfastly REFUSED to acknowledge Black peoples'
greatest modern feat, and instead, brought the bloody
2004 bicentennial coup d'etat and foreign occupation
(under UN tutelage as their military proxies) to Haiti
as THEIR WAY to mark and continue to undermine Black
people in general, through Haiti, in particular.
Indeed, Haiti's independence debt
(now estimated at over $22billion owed Haiti by France)
was used by the modern nations (France, then the US) to
disguise indentured slavery in Haiti, while the British
abolition of the slave trade was used to rewrite history
and convince the world that the white nations and
settlers, not a viable Black nation, should receive
accolades for eradicating that which they've never truly
eradicated either at home for their Black populations
nor abroad in the developing worlds.
No matter. Our will is indomitable and unconquerable.
And, in terms of accolades, as I've written many times
over, all Black people, all Haitians must witness to
themselves, must witness the good within themselves for
themselves and extend it - witness
Boukman's prayer for the ancestors. Yes, it is only
fitting that we witness to ourselves like the sun
witnesses itself, eternally.
No occupation, containment in poverty or
foreign-sponsored-coup-d'etat can contain what's already
free and witnessed within us for us by the Ancestors.
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Marguerite 'Ezili Danṭ' Laurent,
Esq.Founder and Chair, Haitian Lawyers Leadership
Network ("HLLN") (Dedicated to protecting the full
civil, human, economic and cultural rights of Haitians
living at home and abroad) April 15, 2007
posted 18 April
2007 * * *
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updated 20 October
2007 |
