So King Charles is due to visit various islands in the West Indies I read. I also read that he will face a barrage of accusations and claims for apologies and reparations from the various islands where slavery was once practised.
Those slaves would have been transported from Africa, where the organized slave trade has been practiced for over a millennium, with external networks like the Arab-Muslim trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades flourishing from as early as the 7th century, while the Barbary Pirates raided the North African coast – Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco – as well as coasts as far away as Ireland and Cornwall from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Spanish writer Cervantes was among their captives, and condemned to rowing in their galleys until ransomed.
Meanwhile the British practised the “peculiar institution”, as it was known in the American South, for 240 years. They were the first nation both to abolish it and fight it – using the Royal Navy to try to stop trading on the seas, for over sixty years until it was ended – losing both ships and some thousands of sailor’s lives during this campaign.
So if King Charles is to be exhorted to apologize and pay up, there are many other people, groups and societies who should be ahead of the queue.
Tidiiana N’Diaye, the Senegalese anthropologist, says that what happened in East Africa over the centuries should be openly discussed.
“Most of the African authors have not yet published a book on the Arab-Muslim slave trade out of religious solidarity. There are 500 million Muslims in Africa, and it is better to blame the West than talk about the past crimes of Arab Muslims. Initially, the Arab Muslims in Eastern and Central Europe took white slaves to sell them to Arabia,” Tidiane N’Diaye said in an interview. “But the growing military power of Europe put an end to Islamic expansion and now that there was a shortage of slaves, Arab Muslims were looking massively to black Africa.”
When missionary David Livingstone was exploring central Africa, and based at Zanzibar, one of the centres of the slave trade, he estimated that 80,00 to 100,00 Africans were captured by Muslim Arab traders every year. He wrote: “The strangest disease in this country seems really to be broken heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves”. And out of those huge numbers of slaves captured to be sold and transported from Zanzibar, only one in four survived the journey, most of them died from hunger and exhaustion. A stick was chained to their neck and linked to the next man in the long chain of desolate captives.
It was not until 1873 that Sultan Seyyid Barghash of Zanzibar, under pressure from Great Britain, signed a treaty that made the slave trade in his territories illegal. But that decree was not enforced effectively. It was in 1909 when slavery was finally abolished in East Africa. It was the mid thirties before it ended in Ethiopia.
According to author N’Diaye, slavery still exists, albeit in a different form. It is estimated that nearly 40 million people worldwide – in Mauritania they abolished slavery in 1981, but in reality the situation in North Africa has not changed much. Young people are still enslaved against their will, forced to work and sexually exploited.
“When it comes to racism, the woke – racism weapon against the past is to see only the West’s part in the terrible historical centuries old crime of slavery and the apparent miseries of colonialism. Even a search of the internet, in entries about Africa, only mention the Atlantic West coast slavery.
Between the late 1870’s to the 1960’s, Colonialism took over from tribal warfare throughout most African kingdoms, tribes, and provinces. The tales of the atrocities and tortures and massacres that were visited previously on defenceless peoples, or on the beaten armies, or revolting tribes, are horrendous. James Bruce, the British explorer who traced the source of the Blue Nile in 1770, spent two years at the Ethiopian court, and described not only the dreadful fates of the king’s constantly warring enemies, but the Ethiopian habit of enjoying fresh meat cut from a living beast, describing one horrible victory feast when a bull was tethered and steaks systematically carved from the bellowing desperate creature.
The accounts of other explorers over the hundred years before western rule, tell of the same brutalities and cruelties by psychopathic rulers who inherited bloody tribal rites and continued to practise them. In spite of ancient civilisations which had risen and fallen in other ages on this continent, the Africa the explorers found was primitive and bloodthirsty.
In 1861, explorer Christopher Speke described King Rumanika of Karagwe’s harem, whose wives were force fed milk through pipes from a gourd, to become so horrendously fat that they couldn’t stand, but rolled around like seals, he said. Men with whips stood by to enforce the endless fattening up.
While Speke was detained at his court for months in 1860, he described King Mutesa of Buganda killing people at his court daily, for trivial reasons such as a girl speaking too loudly, or a page neglecting to open or close a door, innocent people burned alive, tortured and murdered in all manner of ways.,
So was the advent of colonial rule for that one hundred years, really such a tyranny? In Nigeria for example, the governor, Sir Evelyn Lugard having brought peace to the warring north, ‘set out the same principles of the administrative system subsequently institutionalized as ‘indirect rule’. Essentially, local government was to be left in the hands of the traditional chiefs, subject to the guidance of European officers.
‘ While this system had built-in contradictions, over the years the Nigerian system developed into a sophisticated form of local government, which became the hallmark of British colonial rule in Africa. ‘
The colonial authorities of most nationalities, French, Portuguese, German, as well as British, left behind the rule of law, plus roads, hospitals, schools, railways, drains, and most of the advantages of western civilization. Since these countries gained independence, many have ignored ‘due process’ of law, press freedom, individual liberty and human rights’, in the words of Amnesty International. Systems of democratic government established at independence have been dismantled, and corrupt authoritarian regimes imposed, with many presidents declaring themselves in office for life.
Since Independence there have been unspeakable massacres, tribal wars, repression of any dissent, and previously prosperous countries like Zimbabwe reduced to bankruptcy – though to read the internet, you would think it was a thriving happy prosperous society, untroubled by violence, famine, corruption, unemployment, and bulging prisons filled with people from the wrong tribe. ( I know, I have a close relative who was matron of the hospital in Harare. I have two friends who worked in Kenya for a few years, where they had to have an iron door fitted to their bedroom like everyone else so that they wouldn’t be murdered in their sleep by robbers. When they left, they left all their possessions, being allowed only enough cash to buy a coffee and bun at the airport.)
Human rights groups have gone on record as describing ‘extensive political repression, including illegal and arbitrary detention, threats or other forms of intimidation, disappearances, politically motivated trials, and the massacre of peacefully protesting civilians ‘ in many countries.
None of these regimes are castigated by the critics of the West. Both the crimes of the past, and the crimes of the present are ignored, overlooked or unknown to those pulling down statues and condemning European and American slave owners. Slave owners who were also philanthropists whose generosity sustains the very colleges and schools, hospitals and libraries, art galleries, orphanages, that today’s woke critics benefit from. And apart from all their other crimes, these were mostly old white dead males – an unbeatable combination if you’re inclined to find a good whipping boy… while modern woke culture requires that we change our minds and our beliefs about these men and about the past, and condemn them too.
The philanthropy of many traders and owners, which contributed to the great civilization of the west, their gifts to the arts, to medicine, to science, to music, to literature, to architecture, to good government and a decent society may be forgotten in this present orgy of righteous indignation and judgement, but let us hope that the pendulum swings back before all that they gave and achieved is obliterated.
Those lovely words from the book of Ecclesiastes honour these sort of men, ‘Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begot us’… Some of the most famous and indispensable men in history have been slave owners – men who reflected the customs of their times and place. Like most of us they all had gifts and they all had flaws, and they were men of their time. In time to come we may be abhorred too, by more advanced societies for the way we treat and eat other species, and exploit the natural world
These slave-owners include men like the Prophet Muhammad, William Penn, the great Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the unforgettable words of the Declaration of Independence, Demosthenes, influential ancient Greek statesman, many US presidents, including George Washington, most rich Romans and ancient Greeks, not many British, they tended to have money invested in trading, and so we come to wonderful William Wilberforce, and his supporters who battled so long to abolish the slave trade.
Many of their descendants have been proud of the achievements of such men, others have been influenced by them, or inspired by them, while others have followed them – as in the case of Muhammad. So perhaps their critics could try to forgive them, leave their statues where grateful people erected them, and remember that it is because so many of them worked for a decent humane society, that we have the freedom today to say and think without fear – a freedom which applies to us all in the West, black or white, privileged, terf or transgender. “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls,” said Elizabeth I back in the 1550’s, and I think she had the right idea. So lay off King Charles !
Food for Threadbare Gourmets
Leftovers are wonderful! I had two buttery garlicky new potatoes sitting in the fridge, and wondered what to do with them, as well as wondering what to have for supper. It didn’t take long to decide to concoct a makeshift Spanish omelette for one, using a mushroom, small tomato, small piece of ham, and the aforesaid potato. Their garlicky flavour made up for not bothering to fry an onion, so after chopping everything up, and frying first the mushrooms, and adding the potatoes, then the tomatoes and then the ham, I tipped two beaten eggs over the the mixture, and cooked the omelette to the soft side, which is my preference.
Eaten with a crusty warm roll, it was as good as the real thing.(With apologies to Spain.)
Food for thought
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; … but to weigh and consider”. Sir Francis Bacon 1561- 1621
