THE ABOL I TI ON OF S L AVERY

Selective Remembrance

James Walston

SOMEevils are relatively easy to comprehend: about genocide, for example, there are few areas of moral contention. Debates exist about whether enough was done to prevent mass exterminations, by Pius XII during the Shoah or Kofi Annan during Rwanda, but few apart from the perpetrators try to justify the killing of Jews or Tutsis. The crimes of slavery present us with greater nuances between perpetrator and victim. During the slave trade, it was Africans who procured the raw material for sale to Europeans or Arabs. They dealt with the Europeans as equals –often as superiors both economically and politically –deciding what type of slaves would be sold and conditioning the price. It is significant that the first slaves to pass through the Portuguese castle of Elmina on the Gold Coast were imported and sold to work in the Asante gold mines to the north. At the beginning of the trade at least, colour was not the deciding factor between bondage and freedom. Even on the other side of the Atlantic, there were black slave owners and white slaves. 2007 commemorates the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade by just one country, Britain. This was an important step by the largest trader and the most powerful naval nation, but the trades that existed within Africa, and those eastward of it, continued for twice as long and sold a greater number of slaves. The Wilberforces, Clarksons and Equianos who led the movement for abolition knew that they had no chance of persuading Parliament to end the trade in all the British Empire; theirs was a moral movement, but also an eminently practical one. This year, the abolition of the slave trade has for the most part been commemorated in what seems to be a rather grudging way. It is naturally right and proper that Liverpool, Bristol and London should recognise their role in the industry, and that children and adults alike should learn more about their city’s involvement; but this anniversary is above all one of the few occasions when ‘the good guys’ won. Ghana, a key outpost for the trade in the Gulf of Guinea, has become particularly conscious of its heritage during this, its fiftieth year since independence. As tourists are taken round the slave dungeons at Cape Coast Castle or Elmina, the guide dwells on the horrors of the treatment of slaves awaiting shipment, but tells the visitors nothing about how the slaves reached those dungeons. The display panels are more explicit but it is still a rare Ghanaian who will admit that one of his forebears was a slaver. One Ghanaian historian has provided perhaps the first serious account of slavery in West Africa. In 2005, Akosua

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Perbi published Indigenous Slavery , a book that has done much to raise public awareness of the issue. Of far greater impact both in Ghana and the US the initiative begun almost three years ago by Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, the expansive and mediasavvy Minister for Tourism. Entitled the ‘Joseph Project’, because Joseph redeemed his people from slavery, it is inspired by the Israeli aliyah –the ascent or return to the Holy Land from the Jewish diaspora. Obetsebi-Lamptey does not expect thousands of black Americans to ‘return’ to Ghana to live, but already he has demonstrated how the country can offer an emotional and psychological journey which goes some way to exorcising the heritage of cruelty and suffering. As well as coming in through ‘the gate of no return’ at one of the slave castles, participants symbolically retrace a path that their ancestors may have taken, including a ceremony of ‘expiation’ on the part of people representing the original enslavers. ‘Joseph’ is a combination of good marketing and the fulfilment of a deep psychological need. For all the work being done on the trade, there are still shaded areas which anniversaries like this one help to shed light on. The public knows all about the triangular trade where manufactured goods were sent from Europe to West Africa, slaves went to the Caribbean and North America, and sugar, rum, cotton and tobacco made their way to Europe. Yet most Americans are genuinely surprised to learn that maybe less than 5% of the more than 11 million transported to the Americas went to continental North America – the same proportion transferred to Dutch colonies. Of course, whatever distinctions are made, ultimately ‘it’s about colour, stupid’. European-American guilt derives more from the America’s post-slavery racism, and the French and British colonial exploitation of Africa, followed by discrimination against non-white immigrants, than from the trade itself. The legacy of slavery continues to sear the United States; the Civil War is still a reality in much of the South, and race relations throughout the country are a consequence of the usually violent racism which followed emancipation. Parallel to the way in which the British view the trade as a precurser to the colonisation of Africa, the Americans see it, more correctly, as the condition for lynch mobs, Jim Crow laws and black ghettoes. Although most ‘black’ people in the Americas have European as well as African genes, for centuries they were identified as ‘black’ and treated negatively accordingly. The slave trade remains a potent symbol of organised inhumanity. Its abolition, though, should be understood as a correspondingly powerful symbol, an inspiring act of justice.

James Walston is Chair of the Department of International Relations at the American University of Rome.