P Jordan: Slavery discussion at Cape Town Book Fair

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 or 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
slave's utility was that he or 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 civilisations, 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 Pharaohs. In the ancient Hebrew kingdoms it was customary
to free all slaves every 25 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
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 out numbered the free. Sicily, the site of the biggest
latifundia, 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 and 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 practised 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 realised 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 institutionalised 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 practised 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" 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 who were 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 United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation (Unesco) meeting of experts in 1978. Unlike livestock,
slaves were conscious sentient human beings. Consequently, in every part of the
world where slavery was practised 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 15 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 12 years of war inscribed one of the most
inspiring chapters in the annals of humanity's struggle for liberation.
Toussaint L'Ouverture, born on All Saint's Day (hence his name) 1744 to the
freed man, 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 slave's
principal foreign ally as they fought off English and Spanish armies. They gave
such a good account of themselves that by 1799 United States (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 55 000 men, of which 30 000 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 guerrilla 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 59, 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 12 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 a 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 recognised 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 mentioned, 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.

Issued by: Department of Arts and Culture
18 June 2007
Source: Department of Arts and Culture (http://www.dac.gov.za)