Shivery timbers: pirates on how best to govern
• From Madagascar to the world, pirates and the enlightenment, David Graeber’s historical speculation defiantly takes on academic convention
David Graeber, the charismatic American academic and activist who died unexpectedly in Venice in 2020, has written some physically imposing books. Debt: The First 5000 Years, published in 2011, came in at 534 pages. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which he co-wrote with David Wengrow, weighed in at 692 pages.
The Dawn of Everything was published in the year after Graeber’s death, and he now has a second posthumous book:
Pirate Enlightenment or the Real Libertalia. This one is a mere 175 pages, but its ambition is on the same scale as the much larger books.
Debt, written in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and published in the year of the Occupy Movement and escalating concern about student debt in the US, was written right into a politically intense moment. It captured the imagination of many of the growing ranks of overeducated and underemployed young activists in North America and Europe.
STAGIST
The Dawn of Everything, which aimed to toss a Molotov cocktail into received wisdom about the deep history of humanity, was a global and best-selling sensation. The standard view is that humanity began its long journey into the present in small groups of largely egalitarian and democratic hunter-gatherers but that as agriculture and cities developed new forms of rule — more authoritarian modes of rule with greater degrees of inequality — became necessary features of human sociality.
Writing against this common-sense Graeber and Wengrow show, via a dazzling kaleidoscope of examples drawn from across the planet, that human beings have lived in an abundantly diverse and often dynamic set of social orders, before, during and after the development of agriculture and urban life, and that the latter is not always consequent to the former.
The Dawn of Everything is, at its heart, an argument against the “stagist” view of history that sees successive modes of life, production and habitation necessarily giving way to others in a linear progression that requires equality to be surrendered for progress.
Of course, this stagist view of history was useful as a legitimating ideology for the Enlightenment intellectuals in Europe who invented it. They used it to claim that the people, polities and civilisations that the European powers were crushing had been locked in an ancient motionless past and were now being brought into the future.
The stagist view of history also carries the idea that people understood to be in but not of the contemporary moment do not share the same capacity for reason and intelligence as those of us understood to be in and of the present. The Dawn of Everything mounts a sustained argument against this view which legitimates the idea that some must think for others. It remains part of the “common sense” of much of Europe and its offshoots, whether expressed via the paternalism of many states, NGOs, forms of academic engagement or Western-backed coups against elected leaders, such as the US-backed coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2004.
In an earlier essay, published in 2007, and titled “There Never Was a West: Or, Democracy Emerges from the Spaces in Between”, Graeber had noted that it was widely assumed that democracy was a Western concept, with its roots in ancient Athens, with the result that, “Democracy is thus seen as something whose natural habitat is Western Europe and its English- or French-speaking settler colonies.”
Against this he argued that democratic processes, processes of “egalitarian decision-making”, occur “pretty much anywhere” across space and time. This point retains its charge in contemporary SA where elites across the political spectrum frequently struggle to grasp that democratic practices are sometimes present in the social and political practices of impoverished and workingclass people.
In the Dawn of Everything Graeber and Wengrow make an additional point, arguing that ideas generated outside Europe, from people often seen as “backward” and on the far periphery of the centres of “real thought”, shaped thinking in Europe, including the Enlightenment.
This point is primarily made via a discussion of Kandiaronk, a leader of the Wendat people in the land between the lakes now known as Huron and Michigan. In the latter years of the 17th century he engaged in a series of philosophical discussions with Jesuit priests, who held his intellect and skills in rhetoric and debate in high regard. Kandiaronk was sharply critical of various European social and political practices including monarchy, inequality, and systems of punishment. The Jesuits transcribed his arguments and took them back to Europe where, Graeber and Wengrow argue, they became part of the inspiration for Enlightenment thought.
One line of possible critique of The Dawn of Everything is that Africa is largely relegated to the margins in a book aiming to take places, people and practices rendered marginal seriously. Graeber’s new book is centrally concerned with Africa. Weaving different modes of analysis — including considerable speculation — into a new story, it explores the politics of the communities that emerged from the encounter between Malagasy people and pirates. Their descendants, the Zana-Malata, remain a distinct group today. Graeber makes his intensions clear at the outset declaring that “existing history is not just deeply flawed and Eurocentric, it’s also unnecessarily tedious and boring”.
During the golden age of piracy (1716 to 1726) the journey from Europe to West Africa, around what is now SA with, on occasion, stops in the bay around which Durban now sits, and up to India was known as the Pirate Round. It brought pirates with crew from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, into the Indian Ocean. Madagascar became an import node in a string of sites beginning in West Africa and reaching round to the Caribbean where pirates could settle after acquiring wealth.
In 1980, the English historian Christopher Hill argued that pirates had brought radical ideas from the English revolution onto their ships, and the lands where they settled. This, he argued, including influences from the Ranters, a movement of common people that, perceiving the spark of divinity in all people, rejected the authority of the state and the church, affirmed a radical egalitarianism and, amid much blaspheming and merry-making, preferred to meet in taverns. Hill suggested that pirates had named Ranters Bay in Madagascar — a name it still carries — with deliberate political intentions.
Radical historians who have followed Hill, most notably the Americans Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, have expanded the study of dissident currents and practices among the pirates of the Golden Age.
They have shown that after having often been forced onto ships via enslavement or the press gang, and then subjected to brutal conditions on ships as enslaved people or workers labouring under the lash, the men (and occasionally women) who became pirates were deeply opposed to the existing social order. When they mutinied, ran up a black flag and “resolved to stand by one another” they elected their captains, shared their takings and, outside battle, engaged in democratic decision-making.
Pirates often attacked slave ships. One slave trader testified that pirates freed and armed his captives immediately after taking his ship. They also attacked slavers’ forts along the west coast of Africa. Even when their motivations for these attacks were driven by the desire to appropriate wealth and ships, the result was huge disruption to the slave trade.
Of course, there was also excessive drunkenness and plenty of brutal behaviour, including gratuitous murder, torture and rape. And not all pirates opposed the trade in enslaved people. Some participated in it.
In making these kinds of points, Graeber is not breaking new ground. But where his book does innovate is in a detailed and, as he notes, often speculative study of how the encounter between pirates and Malagasy people produced new social forms, drawing on the culture and agency of both parties. Crucially, he argues that the pirates in Madagascar ended up “effectively defending the coast against the [slave] trade”.
The new social forms developed from this encounter were highly cosmopolitan. Madagascar’s previous history of waves of migration had included people from Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Middle East — some identifying as Muslims and others as Jews. A pirate crew could include “Englishmen, Swedes, escaped African slaves, Caribbean Creoles, Native Americans, and Arabs”.
Graeber’s central focus is on the Betsimisaraka Confederation, formed in 1712 along a 700km strip of the northeastern coast of Madagascar after a long war led by Ratsimilaho, the son of a Malagasy woman and an English pirate. Graeber argues that the confederation developed in opposition to the centralising and authoritarian power of the Merina Kingdom against which it developed a lose affiliation with a high degree of local autonomy and a relatively egalitarian social system developed from “a creative synthesis of pirate governance and some of the more egalitarian elements in traditional Malagasy political culture”.
He asserts, with an implicit sense of defiance of academic convention, that he intends to “proceed from the position that this was, in fact, a great historical achievement, and that those who put together the Betsimisaraka Confederation ... were mature, thoughtful adults with a knowledge of a wide variety of political possibilities, not just from Madagascar but Europe and across the Indian Ocean as well”. The Betsimisaraka still exist today, and are, Graeber writes, “considered one of Madagascar’s most stubbornly egalitarian peoples”.
Graeber also reprises some of the logic of his argument about Kandiaronk’s influence on the Enlightenment via a look at the influence of A General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724 under the name of Captain Johnson, which he thinks was probably a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe. It included an account of Libertalia, a democratic and egalitarian pirate commune in which “all things were shared in common”.
Libertalia was almost certainly fictional, but it drew on reports of real pirate settlements, and the success of the book influenced thinking in Europe, including among the philosophers of the Enlightenment, which Graeber describes as a “creation of conversations, arguments, and social experiments that crisscrossed the world”.
Graeber does not tackle the clear resonances between the story of Libertalia and older European forms of utopianinflected revolt, and the possibility that these could have influenced European projections onto the idea of Libertalia.
Among many other examples there is Thomas Müntzer, a leader in the German Peasants’ War which raged from 1524 to 1525, who turned the biblical phrase Omnia sunt communia (everything in common) into a political slogan, and the 1649 declaration by Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the True Levellers, a radical movement in England, that the earth must be “a Common Treasury for all”.
What could this book offer us in a period of profound crisis, and degeneration not just of emancipatory hopes but even hopes for a society that functions at a basic level? Pirates have been the stuff of fantasy, of escape, for a few hundred years now and some respite from potholes, blackouts, murder, rat-infested hospitals and a sometimes viciously predatory political class is one answer. That’s fair enough, though Graeber’s latest and presumably last book is quite dense in parts, and not as enthralling as The ManyHeaded Hydra by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, first published in 2000.
That book tells an extraordinary story of a “motley crew” of labourers, enslaved people, sailors, pirates, servants, and market women in revolt on ships and ports across the Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries — running from the wreck of the Sea-Venture in 1609, which inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest the following year, to William Blake’s opposition to slavery, and the composition of Tyger Tyger in 1794.
But Graeber’s book offers more than escape from the grim realities of the present, a present in which it is often assumed that politics is, or should be, a matter of contestation between elites. Graeber gives careful attention to often unrecognised histories of emancipatory forms of social and political organisation and insists that all people should be recognised as having the same capacity for reason, imagination, and political innovation.
This democratic approach carries strong resonances with the best of the experiments in popular democracy that were developed in SA in the 1970s and 1980s. From the Durban strikes in 1973 through to the United Democratic Front formed 10 years later, ordinary women and men seized the political initiative and built democratic forms of popular power in workplaces and communities.
ASSASSINATED
HE INSISTS THAT ALL PEOPLE HAVE THE CAPACITY FOR REASON, IMAGINATION, AND POLITICAL INNOVATION
A more democratic view of the world matters because the battles for our future are not just waged on the elite terrain — in parliament, the courts, the media and so on. They are also being waged, and at times intensely so, in the zones of impoverishment. In the eKhenana Commune in the shacklands of Durban young people have consciously staked and given their lives to a commitment to building an egalitarian, democratic and selfmanaged community.
Last year, three of them were assassinated. If Graeber were still alive he would have immediately recognised these young people as political actors, ones taking their place in a long and global history of attempts to build democracy from below.
On the rare occasions when this sort of popular political creativity and commitment is recognised in the circuits of thought that traverse the elite public sphere, it is often mediated by the sort of inane human rights language — such as the phrase “human rights defender ”— that obscures far more than it reveals.
Every writer that grinds a new lens to enable clearer vision, a more universal apprehension of the political capacities of human beings, is doing valuable work.
● Pithouse is the executive director of The Forge, a space for exhibitions, performance and public discussion in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.