From time to time some outraged group, railing against Western countries (seldom against non-Western countries, although they are quite as guilty), demands reparations for slavery. This demand seems at first glance justified.
Slavery is an evil thing, cruel and humiliating, crushing human endeavour. People have suffered horribly under it, and whole nations have been broken by it. But when you look more closely at how to meet this demand, it all becomes confused and contradictory.
Demands for reparation seem almost completely limited towards European countries dealing in black African slaves, but this is a tiny fraction of the world’s history of slavery. The question arises: who pays reparation to whom? Should the government of the USA give money to the governments of West African countries from which its black slaves were taken – or, quite the contrary, should the governments of West Africa give money to black people in the USA, since it was rich black West African slave traders who made a fortune capturing black people as slaves and selling them to the white men to be shipped across the Atlantic. (It is likely that the political leaders in West Africa are descended from the West African slave masters.) It might be a good idea to look at the history of slavery.
Slavery was universal throughout the world. Every one of us is descended from slaves or slave masters, or both. It goes back as far as we can trace. It looks as if modern man, Homo sapiens, evolved somewhere in what is now northern Kenya, about 200 000 years ago (the date keeps on being revised, usually pushed back in time). For a long time, we struggled to survive at all, and then, rather suddenly, we flourished and took dominion over most of Sub-Saharan Africa. At that stage, we were all black but divided into a very large number of tribes (or nations or ethnic groups or races or whatever you want to call them).
It seems highly likely that slavery arose in this time, with one black group enslaving another. About 60 000 years ago (again the date keeps changing) a small group, probably of about a hundred individuals, from one tribe, crossed at Suez into the Middle East, and then radiated around the world, becoming Aboriginals, Indians, Chinese, Europeans, Arabs, and Native Americans. Since non-blacks all evolved from the same tribe, there is little genetic variation between them: President Biden of the USA and Paramount Leader Xi Jinping of China are closer genetically than two central African villagers living a few hundred kilometres apart. All these non-African countries had slavery, but Africans had it long before they did, probably long before they existed.
Slave trading
Slave trading of Africans across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea goes back at least 4 000 years. Trans-Saharan slave trading has a similar antiquity but peaked from the 7th Century AD to the 20th, when it is estimated that over 6 million black African slaves were driven across the Sahara Desert by Mudslim slave masters, Arab and Persian, to work in Egypt and the Middle East. The male slaves were castrated and did domestic work rather than plantation work. Reparation cannot be paid to their descendants, since they didn’t have any. Without testicles, a man cannot have children.
The Atlantic slave trade, which occurred between the 16th and the 19th Century, was different – hideous but different. It is estimated that about 12 million black slaves were shipped from West and Central Africa to the Americas by Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French slave traders. The male slaves mostly did hard manual work on the farms. They were not castrated but kept whole, to marry and have children. They have hundreds of millions of descendants in South and North America. Various European historians, missionaries, and novelists, who saw the full horror in slavery in Africa, have given vivid accounts of it. Joseph Conrad’s descriptions of it in “The Heart of Darkness” are famous but perhaps an even more cold-blooded view of it is given in his grim, ironic short story, “An Outpost of Progress”. David Livingstone, of course, struggled with it all his life. But I have seen in stone a more dramatic monument to slavery than anything I have seen on paper.
Great Zimbabwe
I have been to Great Zimbabwe several times, and each time I find them more haunting and evocative than the time before. (“Zimbabwe” is a Shona word for “stone building”.) They are full of mystery. When were they built? Stone, unlike wood, is difficult to date, but the best guess is about the 11th Century. What happened to them? Why was this place, obviously once a thriving business centre with strange and majestic buildings abandoned? No one knows. They form a complicated complex of buildings set in a complicated landscape. On a hill, commanding them all, is “The Hill Fortress”, where some royal family lived and ruled. A long way away, about six hundred metres, is the spectacular “Great Enclosure”, as far as I know unique in Africa in its size. It is an almost circular stone wall, about 75 metres in diameter by about 10 metres high at its highest point. Apparently there is no doubt that it is African, built by Africans, although probably influenced by building designs from India. What was it for?
I wondered about this for years until I read a book by Professor Wilfred Mallows, a town planning expert, and then it became so obvious I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. Mallows looked at the ruins with the eyes of a town planner, who looks first for the purpose of buildings. He described his feelings the first time he stood inside the Great Enclosure – which were exactly the same as mine, although I know nothing about architecture. He said he felt locked in. The walls gave the powerful impression that they were to keep people in, like a prison, not to keep people out, like a fort. But who would Africans want to keep in? There is no tradition in Africa for imprisonment as a punishment; Africans regard it as too cruel. So, whom did they wish to keep in? Slaves, of course. The Great Enclosure was a holding prison for black African slaves, to be sold to Arab slave dealers coming up a local river from the Indian Ocean. In “The Mystery of the Great Zimbabwe”, Mallows, with immense scholarship, develops this theme in a wholly convincing way.
Here is a telling thing. The book shocked woke whites, who tried to ignore it. They seemed to be horrified that black men could be every bit as ingenious in the evil trade of slavery as white men. A definitive feature of wokeness is to deny that whites and blacks have exactly the same capacity for sin.
Ending slavery
Britain become the first country in all history to end slavery, which she did in 1834. It simply does not seem to have occurred to any nation or people anywhere before that that slavery was not part of the normal lot of mankind, something occasionally unpleasant, perhaps, like disease, but hardly something to be banned. Britain’s reasons were moral not economic. Slavery had been, and still was, highly lucrative. When the Civil War finally ended slavery in the USA in 1865, slaves were fetching record prices. Without prohibition by force of law, slavery would have continued in the Southern States for decades, raking in huge profits for the slave-owners, mainly in cotton growing. (The capitalist, industrial Northern States preferred free labour, which was more efficient for them.) Their Christian faith spurred philanthropists such as William Wilberforce to end slavery.
Christianity itself seems to have begun as a slave religion in the early centuries AD. In the 4th Century it became the official religion of Rome, and the church elders became part of a ruling establishment and accepted slavery as part of the natural order and did nothing for over a thousand years to end it. Now, thanks to Christians, British warships intercepted slave ships and forced them by the barrels of cannons to return the slaves to their homes in Africa. African merchants and businessmen, who had become very rich by trading with black slaves, were horrified. They sent delegates to London to protest.
In South Africa, the Dutch settlers at the Cape in the 17th Century began immediately, with Jan van Riebeek, to use slaves in their farms and towns. They got them from Batavia (Jakarta), Madagascar, Angola, Mozambique, Ceylon, India, and Guinea. Slavery in the Cape sounds even more brutal than slavery in the US southern states. The beautiful and gracious Cape Dutch farmhouses have dark histories. In 1795 Britain invaded the Cape and soon took over completely from the Dutch. In 1807 Britain passed the Slave Trade Act, which outlawed the import of slaves. In 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act abolished slavery with the British Empire and its colonies. At the time there were about 38 000 slaves in South Africa, not a big number. The British government paid reparations (which it called “compensation”) to the slave-owners, although this was very difficult for them ever to get. This was one of the reasons for the Great Trek of the Boers away from the Cape towards unknown lands in the north and the east.
Now what? Slavery continues in parts of Africa and Asia, and about 40 million people today could be classified as slaves. But since there are none in Western countries, the wokes have no interest in them. As far as the wokes are concerned, there is no morality unless white people are involved; they believe black people themselves occupy a moral void. In 2020, “anti-racism” demonstrators in Bristol tore down the statue of Edward Colston, who made a fortune from trading slaves in the 17th Century, and then gave a part of his fortune for good works in the city. (The ports of Bristol and Liverpool benefitted enormously from the slave trade.) Fair enough, I suppose, to tear down his statue since he was responsible for much evil.
But where do you draw the line? If a statue of Hitler is forbidden, why allow statues of Lenin, who killed several million people in his short rule and caused mass starvation and mass terror? Why allow a statue of King Shaka, who killed more innocent black people than any other man in South African history? The statue-toppling mania got out of hand in the USA, when it seemed any historical white figure was likely to have his statue torn down. In 2020, in Portland USA, a statue of Abraham Lincoln was torn down.
Who pays whom?
Back to reparations. Who pays whom? In the USA, the black people there, descended from slaves, are now far better off than most black people in the African countries from which they came. Black Americans do not want to live in Africa; many black Africans do want to live in America. Should the American government now give money, taken from taxpayers, including black taxpayers, to the black governments, almost certainly descended from black slave merchants, of the countries from which the slaves came?
Since Britain grew rich off the slave trade, should the British taxpayer now hand over large sums of money to African governments such as Angola, one of the most corrupt countries on Earth where the recently deposed Isabel dos Santos was said to be the richest woman in Africa? Should the British government take money from British taxpayers, many rather humble, many black, and hand it over to extremely rich politicians in Nigeria and Guinea, and say to them, “Listen chaps, here is a lot of money for reparations for slavery. Please do not put it straight into a Swiss bank account or use it to send your sons to Eton and Sandhurst or use it to buy more Rolls-Royces. Please give it to the desperately hungry working-class people in your countries.” Does that sound plausible? Foreign aid is said to be the transfer of wealth from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. I fear reparations would be the same.
In South Africa the position is clearer. European colonisation had some horrible consequences. The indigenous people, the Bushmen, were driven out of their ancestral lands. Slavery in the Cape left an awful legacy. I once heard an academic historian, coloured herself, say that the dislocation by slavery of families and communities around Cape Town might have led to the terrible gang warfare today in the Cape Flats, which wrecks coloured society there and makes parts of the Cape Flats perhaps the most dangerous places on Earth outside of war zones.
Should the South African government now pay reparations for slavery to the coloured community. To whom? Gang leaders? Or should only whites have to pay? If so, which whites, and to whom do they send their money? What if the ancestors of these whites had nothing to do with slavery or indeed arrived in South Africa long after slavery had ended? Yes, but many in South Africa benefited from slavery even if they themselves had nothing to do with it, and so all those now prosperous in South Africa should give money for reparations. OK, let’s start with Cyril Ramaphosa, who is said to be worth over R6 000 000 000.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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