18 June 2007

Slavery is the oldest form of exploitation evolved by humankind. There are numerous accounts of the origins of the institution, but there seems to be general acceptance that originally enslavement was imposed on those unable to meet their debts. If that is true, it implies that enslavement was conceived as a temporary arrangement, until an owed debt had been discharged.

It is clear too that at a certain point prisoners of war, instead of being killed, were enslaved. It was this later practice of enslaving war prisoners, who might otherwise have been killed, that transformed slavery from a temporary condition  into the permanent fate of the defeated.

The redefinition of enslavement as something imposed on those captured by the victors in a war imparted to the institution its central tenet : the slave was a person under sentence of death, in whose case the sentence has been commuted on the understanding that the person will become the property of the victor. As someone under a death sentence, it was understood by both the enslaved and the enslaver that the death sentence could be invoked at anytime. The absolute power the slave-owner exercised over his/her slave derived from this.
 
Slavery thus entailed the reduction of other human beings to a status not too dissimilar to that of livestock. Despite its extreme cruelty there was an unassailable internal economic logic to enslavement. Slaves, being human, had exactly the same abilities as those who enslaved them – they could think, they had the ability to reason ; they could do conscious work; they had the capacity to imagine. All these human abilities meant that they could be extremely productive. The stave’s utility was that he/she could be compelled to consume far less than they produced. What slaves produced, over and above their own needs to sustain life, accrued to the slave owner.

In the wars of ancient times victorious armies seized the cattle, sheep, horses, pigs, goats, and other livestock of those they had defeated. Looting of property was the primary purpose of war. They also seized the non-combatants, the combatants who had survived the battles and any other humans. Like the animate and inanimate goods so seized, enslaved humans could be bought and sold at the market. And, like livestock, such humans were the property of their owners, who exercised power over them.

In all the ancient civilizations, Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese, Indian, Greek, Roman or Carthaginian, slavery was the dominant mode of production. While various forms of free labour were found in all of these, slaves came to dominate as producers and as providers of services – from domestic work up to and  including even becoming leading state officials. The palace eunuch was a feature of the Chinese state until the early 20th century. In the Rome of the emperors, enslaved state officials were even able to influence important government decisions and often conspired with the emperor’s enemies to overthrow or assassinate him. The post seventh century Caliphates employed enslaved officials in a number of capacities. In a few cases ex-slaves rose to become heads of state.

One of the most inspiring stories in the Old Testament is the Exodus, which recounts the narrative of Moses who led the “children of Israel” out of slavery in the Egypt of the Pharoahs. In the ancient Hebrew kingdoms it was customary to free all slaves every twenty five years, in what was called Jubilee, to mark the exodus from Egypt.

The Greeks referred to a slave as a tool who has the power of speech. A sharp distinction was drawn between the free and the enslaved. Apart from the slave’s likely foreign origins – as a person captured in war – the slave was not and could not become a citizen. A citizen was a member of the body politique and as such enjoyed certain rights and owed the state a number of obligations.

In Julius Caesar’s days in ancient Rome, slave labour had displaced free labour to an extent that the majority of citizens were not employed and relied to a grant from the state to live.  The oft used phrase “bread and circuses” derives from Caesar’s practice of distributing free grain to the citizens and staging regular   spectacles at the circus or the arena to entertain them. The the Latin word for slave is “servus”, from which we derive the English term “servile”, meaning behaviour suited to a slave.

Slavery in ancient Rome flourished to the extent that in certain parts of the empire slaves vastly outnumbered the free. Sicily, the site of the biggest latifundiae, mines, quarries and other works in the Roman Empire was peopled
almost entirely by slaves and those who oversaw them. The island was consequently the site of numerous slave revolts, though the most famous, led by the gladiator, Spartacus, was on the Italian mainland.

The economic rewards of slavery had declined radically by the time of the “barbarian invasions” that finally brought down the Roman empire in the west. The institution continued in both Byzantium and in the emergent Islamic empires after the seventh century A.D. as well as in other parts of the world. The primary victims of enslavement at this time were the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe, hence the term “slave”, derived from Slav.

Slavery had been known on the African continent since the beginning of time. It had been practised in ancient Egypt, Libya, Carthage, Nubia and Ethiopia. In west Africa household slavery was widely known and practiced in virtually all the medieval African kingdoms – Songhay, Ghana and Benin. Prisoners of war were the usual candidates for enslavement.

It was the arrival of the Europeans in the Caribbean after the 15th century that revived slavery and accelerated its plumbing depths of brutality. Their differences notwithstanding the Europeans shared a common goal: the conquest and exploitation of the Americas. Within the first century after contact with the Europeans, the peoples of the islands of the Caribbean had virtually been exterminated by the new arrivals. Along with foreign domination, forced labour, the gun and the whip, the Europeans had brought strange diseases. Having developed no resistance to such illnesses, once they were infected, these diseases spread like wildfire amongst the indigenes, wiping out entire villages.

Various forms of un-free labour were employed to “tame” the wilderness in the “new World”. In the Americas, both north and south, condemned prisoners
 were sent into servitude in the colonies to do the back-breaking work on plantations and in the mines. Australia is the classic example of this practice.
In the plantations of Virginia, the Carolinas and Maryland, convicted persons from England often worked alongside African slaves.

The European powers turned to African slavery as they realized that there could not be sufficient numbers of condemned prisoners to meet the demand for labour.

Slaves from Africa replaced the indigenes as the labour force in all the colonies in the Americas. Among the islands of the Caribbean, by the mid-eighteenth century, with the exception of Cuba, the demographic profile of the Caribbean was overwhelmingly African. On the North American mainland African slavery sustained the plantation economies of the southern states. South America also acquired huge concentrations of Africans - in Brazil and in many of the territories along its north coast where plantations were established. Brazil, reputedly, received fully 37% of the Africans transported across the Atlantic!

Within a decade of the establishment of a permanent European settlement at the Cape, the first slaves imported into South Africa were purchased off a Portuguese vessel. They were from west Africa. After that regular shipments of slaves were landed at Table Bay from the islands of the Indian Ocean, from Bengal, from Ceylon, Indonesia and various points along the east and west African coasts. For close to two centuries, until 1838, slavery became one of the chief features of the society the Dutch settlers created in southern Africa.

The scale of slavery in South Africa never reached the proportions seen in the Americas. But, as in the Americas, slavery was responsible for unprecedented population movements. Thousands of Asians became part of South Africa’s populations as a direct result of slavery just as a huge African presence in the Americas was created by slavery. .And, as in the Americas, the enslaved tended to be peoples from Africa and Asia, while those who were the enslavers, tended to be of European descent. Race very quickly became associated with social status at the Dutch colony in the Cape, imparting to the society that evolved from it an institutionalized racism that became deeper and more pervasive with time.

Like the other colonies founded by Europeans in the Americas and Australia, the Cape produced foodstuffs and other raw materials for export to Europe. Unlike the Americas, plantations did not play as dominant a role in the economy of the Cape. Consequently, though the numbers of slaves grew and their owners carried them further and further inland as the European colony expanded, their numbers were relatively small and they worked as household servants rather than as labourers in huge farms.

Post 15th century slavery differed fundamentally from that practiced in previous eras. In the ancient, medieval and late medieval worlds enslavement was a by-product of inter-state warfare. Slavery, as it evolved after the 15th century, became a system of international commerce – the slave trade – affecting the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. The principal source of slaves in this system was the African continent, though the Indonesian archipelago, the Indian ocean islands and the far East also became minor sources.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade was part of a triangular system of commercial exchange involving the sea-faring nations of Europe, Africa and the Americas. Slavers would depart from European seaports bound for the west coast of Africa laden with goods. At the various slaving ports these goods were exchanged for human cargoes; at the American ports the African slaves were exchanged for raw materials bound for Europe; in Europe these raw materials were worked into manufactured goods which could in turn be exported to west Africa to be traded for slaves.

As the demand for human labour power grew in the “new world”, so too pressure mounted for more captives in the slaving ports of Africa. Slave-raiding and wars waged to capture slaves became the norm in a number of kingdoms. The king of Dahomey became one of the more notorious slave traders of west Africa who enriched himself by mounting regular raids into the savannah to capture men. Women and children to be sold into slavery.

“….the whole history of the slave trade and slavery is a sequence of revolts.”
Professor Oruno D. Lara told a UNESCO meeting of experts in 1978.

Unlike livestock, slaves were conscious sentient human beings. Consequently, in every part of the world where slavery was practiced there were slave revolts, large and small. Slaves rose while on board slavers carrying them across the seas; slaves rose on the plantations where they worked; slaves rose in the harbours they were brought to for auction; they rose in the towns and the cities.

All such revolts were crushed with terrifying brutality. All, except for the revolution of the African slaves which began in 1791, two years after the Storming of the Bastille, in the French colony of San Domingo. 

Eighteenth century San Domingo was considered one of the richest colonies in the New World. But its wealth was built on an extremely brutal plantation regime that required the regular replenishment of the slave population with new arrivals from the mother continent. The upper reaches of San Domingo society were White, some of noble birth, but many were descended from commoners who had acquired land for the first time in the colonies. Ownership of land and the slaves who worked it, was the index of wealth and power in San Domingo.

As in all slave owning societies, the White slave owners, their White retainers and servants  - the petit blancs - had extracted sexual favours from the African slave women. A sizeable Mulatto population, which already outnumbered the Whites, had consequently grown up. Most of  San Domingo’s Mulattoes were free. Some had become very rich, owning both plantations and slaves. They sat awkwardly between the overwhelmingly African slave majority and the White plantation owners.

On 15th May 1791 , at Robespierre’s instigation,  the French National Assembly, established after the Revolution of  July 1789, passed a decree granting equality of  political status to Whites, Mulattoes and freed Africans in its colonies, including San Domingo. The revolutionaries in Paris had ignored the slaves. On 22nd August 1791 the slaves rose in revolt and in twelve years of war inscribed one of the most inspiring chapters in the annals of humantiy’s struggle for liberation.

Toussaint L’Ouverture, born on All Saint’s Day (hence his name) 1744 to the freedman, Pierre Baptiste, emerged as the most significant leader among the slaves.

Though his father was free, because Toussaint’s mother was a slave, he too shared her status. But his father’s freedom gave him access to a vital skill – literacy, which opened the portals of human knowledge to him.

Toussaint had also been fortunate in work assignments on the plantation. From a herdsman he rose to the position of a coachman, offering him opportunities to travel within San Domingo beyond the boundaries of plantation and parish, thus broadening his horizons.

Toussaint  emerged as a leader during the second phase of the revolt, after the republican government in Paris decided to lend its authority to what the slaves had achieved for themselves – emancipation – in 1793. From then on until his betrayal and capture, Toussaint was the senior leader of  San Domingo’s former slaves.

Under Toussaint’s leadership the self-liberated Africans of San Domingo fought off repeated attempts by the White planters, supported first by France, to re-impose slavery. After 1793, revolutionary France became the freed slaves’ principal foreign ally as they fought off English and Spanish armies. They gave such a good account of themselves that by 1799 US and British diplomats in the Caribbean were speculating about a possible invasion of Jamaica and the US to liberate the slaves.

.”His (Toussaint’s) army amounts to 55000 men, of which 30000 are of the line and disciplined. The remainder are militia”, wrote Edward Stevens a US consul on the island.

So formidable an army, made up of slaves who had won their freedom by their own hand, was considered a threat by all the powers in the Americas. Napoleon Bonaparte was so fearful of such an eventuality that he reportedly remarked that unless Toussaint was stopped, “…the sceptre in the New World would sooner or later pass into the hands of the Blacks.”

When Napoleon made himself military dictator of France, one of his aims was to re-establish San Domingo as a prosperous French colony. This, he was told, could only be attained through the restoration of slavery. Slavery was first re-imposed in the other French territories of the New World - Louisiana, Martinque, Gaudelope and Cayenne where there had been no revolt. 

Having tasted freedom, the former slaves of San Domingo would not submit without a fight. Skilfully using guerilla tactics and aided by what they called “General mosquito”, the freed slaves fought the French Armies to a standstill. But during the course of the war Toussaint was betrayed to the French and captured. In the end however, Napoleon was forced to admit defeat and abandoned San Domingo at the end of 1803. Historians speculate that this defeat persuaded him to sell the Louisiana territory, which extended along the Mississippi river basin as far north as present day Minnesota, to the USA.

Toussaint’s fate was a portent of future of the revolution he had led. After the 1793 emancipation decree, he had regarded France as an ally and had governed San Domingo as such. Transported to Europe as a prisoner, he died aged fifty-nine, after issuing a prophetic warning to Napoleon that he would meet the same fate.

When Haiti’s new national flag was about to be raised, Dessalines, who had replaced Toussaint as leader, briefly halted the proceedings in order to rip out a band of white bunting. “We want nothing white in our flag!” he declared. So embittered had the former slaves become after twelve years of fighting successive armies of White soldiers bent on the restoration of slavery.

From these revolts, rebellions and uprisings there even arose distinctive cultural practices, like the Capoeira dance of Brazil, which African slaves evolved as a means of training in martial skills in preparation for an uprising. It is an martial art developed by African slaves in Brazil, starting in the colonial period.
Slaves at the Cape too staged numerous acts of resistance. Given the relatively small numbers of slaves in South Africa, mass revolts was not a realistic option. Resistance assumed a number of forms, some covert, others overt. Escape plots were a regular device of resistance as when a Dutch slaver, the “Meermin”, docked at Table Bay, the slaves on board overpowered the crew and forced  them to take the ship out to sea in an attempt to return to their home countries. As in many other instances the slaves were outwitted and their rebellion crushed. Escapes in groups or by solitary slaves were also quite frequent. With the frontier within reach, escaped slaves sometimes found refuge among Khoikoi and other indigenous communities.

Individual acts of sabotage, like hay-rick firing, the burning of crops, setting alight the houses and homes of slave owners as well as random acts violence against particularly brutal slave owners took  place.

A mass march on Cape Town from the wheat fields of Mamre in 1828 was a stirring example of an attempt at open revolt, as was Gallant’s uprising, centred on  the farm “Houd Den Bek” in the Bokkeveld.

In the Americas, on the mainland of north America, south America and the islands of the Caribbean mass revolts, involving extended periods of armed conflict, was a regular feature of the slave economies. In Brazil, on the islands of the Caribbean and in some parts of north America, escaped slaves banded together and established free communities, similar to those of the Cossacks of the Tsarist empire. These communities, called Maroons, were stable enough to field armies. In Jamaica, for example, after repeated wars, the maroons were able to impose treaties on the British authorities who recognized the maroons as free communities by signing such agreements. Maroon communities retained a host of African cultural practices and in a number of instances, words from various languages.

But it was not the resistance of the slaves alone that finally led to the abolition of slavery. Motivated by Christian principles, liberal politics and humanist ideals, an effective movement for the abolition of slavery evolved in Europe and the Americas. The efforts of the slaves to free themselves form an important dimension of that story, though it is oft-times suppressed. Post-revolutionary France, as I have merntioned, first abolished slavery in France and its colonies in 1793; Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 then finally abolished slavery in the British Empire altogether in 1836.

After numerous slave rebellions, all of which had been suppressed with
sadistic brutality, in 1885, slavery was finally abolished in Brazil, bringing to an end well nigh four centuries of the most despicable form of commerce of modern times. Though formally "free", Brazil's former slaves occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder and subjected to every form of legal and non-legal
discrimination. Slavery and its legacy still haunts us in the 21st century.

In marking the bi-centennial of the end of the slave trade we are celebrating a giant step in the making of our modern world. A modern world in which all human beings are accepted as of equal value and worth irrespective of  their skin colour, their hair texture, the religion they observe,  their gender or the previous condition of their ancestors as slaves.

Z. Pallo  Jordan.
Cape Town.
June 2007.

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