Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
RACE REPORT ROW Slavery..‘the Ca LAYS BARE SINS OF COLONIAL PAST ribbean experience’
The report merely says that, in the face of the inhumanity of slavery, African people preserved their humanity and culture
On the Gambia river in west Africa in 1773, slaves on board the New Britannia ship were battling for their freedom. Children who had been snatched from their African homeland had slipped tools to shackled men who cut themselves free from their chains and stormed the vessel’s gun room.
After an hour-long battle with the crew, it became clear the slaves were losing their fight.
In desperation they set fire to the ship’s gunpowder room, causing a massive explosion which killed all 222 captives and 13 crew.
The everyday violence, terror and degradation on the New Britannia and a future life of slavery in the Americas meant death was preferable to living.
On Wednesday, a government report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities featured a controversial foreword by its chairman Tony Sewell.
He said: “There is a new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/britain.” His remarks provoked a storm of criticism.
Halima Begum, boss of race equality think-tank the Runnymede Trust, said: “I’m flabbergasted to see the slave trade apparently redefined as ‘the Caribbean Experience’, as though it’s something Thomas Cook should be selling – a one-way shackled cruise to purgatory.”
Shadow Equalities minister Marsha de Cordova said the report “glorifies the slave trade” and urged the Government to disassociate itself from it.
Dr Sewell, a former teacher who was put in charge of the Commission by Boris Johnson last year after Black Lives Matter protests, hit back.
He said: “The report merely says that, in the face of the inhumanity of slavery, African people preserved their humanity and culture.”
Around 12 million Africans were kidnapped and forced into the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th century. Up to two million of them died on the hellish journeys to European colonies in the Americas.
It was the largest forced migration in history. And Britain was at the centre.
Slavery brought vast wealth to our ports – notably London, Liverpool and Bristol. Between 1662 and 1807, colonial ships transported about 3.4 million Africans, with 2.9 million surviving the Middle Passage to be sold into captivity.
Only Portugal had a bigger Atlantic slave trade empire.
“Slavery is not a Caribbean story, it’s a British story,” said Jean Francois Manicom, lead curator of transatlantic slavery and legacies at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool.
“The port of Liverpool was the door to the UK in terms of the slavery trade.
“Some of the slaves in the Caribbean were branded with the initials DOY – the Duke of York (the Governor of the Royal African Company, later James II).
“This type of brutal fact brings you directly to a global story, with Britain one of the leaders.”
There was a triangular trade route. Ships set off for Africa from Europe laden with goods to be traded for slaves. After a perilous journey across the Atlantic, surviving captives were
Tony Sewell Chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities and author of the report’s foreword
sold for raw materials which were transported back to Europe.
There were two philosophies when it came to loading a slave ship.
A “tight pack” involved cramming as many as possible into the hold, expecting some would die on the voyage.
The hold would possibly be only 5ft high, with a shelf running around the edge to carry even more slaves.
A “loose pack” involved fewer slaves on the ship, giving them more space, in the hope fewer would die.
Many captives had never seen the sea when they were packed into the poorly ventilated jails, secured by leg irons and soon covered in bodily fluids.
Women and girls were routinely raped and the men made to “dance” for the crew to keep their muscles taught and their sale price high. The air in the hold was foul, especially with seasickness common. Suffocating conditions and lack of sanitation meant disease was a constant danger. Epidemics of dysentery and smallpox were frequent.
Captives were fed twice a day. Those refusing to eat were force-fed. Anyone who died was thrown overboard.
The worst punishments were saved for those who rebelled – one captain killed a slave and forced two others to eat his heart and liver.
Records suggest one in five Africans on the vessels died from disease, brutality or suicide until well into the 1750s. In November 1781, over 130 enslaved Africans were killed by the crew of British slave ship Zong.
Navigational errors had meant the ship was low on drinking water. The crew then began throwing the slaves overboard, to claim the insurance on their human cargo.
The ocean journey wasn’t the slaves’ first horror. It was preceded by the First Passage to ports such as Elmina on Africa’s western coast. Some captives
were forced to march hundreds of miles from Africa’s interior. The skeletons of those trying to escape before the Middle Passage were impaled on spikes as a warning. Ottobah Cugoano, born in the 1750s, was one of the first to write about being a slave. He was kidnapped aged 13 in the Gold Coast, the former British crown colony, now part of Ghana. “I was early snatched away from my
It is not a Caribbean story, it’s a British story. It shaped this country. Slave owners were mill owners - this is for everybody
native country, with about 18 or 20 more boys and girls, as we were playing in a field,” he wrote.
He was imprisoned for three days at the coast before continuing, writing: “When a vessel arrived to conduct us to the ship, it was a horrible scene.
“There was nothing to be heard but the rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellow men. Some would not stir from
the ground, when they were lashed and beat in the most horrible manner.” The voyage to the Americas and Caribbean took at least six weeks. Then came the Final Passage – the journey to where they would be put to work. Life expectancy of a working slave was less than 10 years.
Profit was the sole focus – with rum, cotton, tobacco, coffee and sugar among the products coming from slave labour plantations. Paraded on the dockside while being prodded by buyers, a slave would often be branded with a burning iron before being thrown on a cart. Refusal to work meant being whipped; fighting back could mean death. Cugoano was sold to plantation owners in British colony Grenada, describing “dreadful scenes of misery”. He said: “For eating a piece of sugar cane, some were cruelly lashed, or struck over the face, to knock their teeth out.”
Freed slave Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography in 1789 detailed conditions slaves faced in the British colonies of Barbados and Montserrat. “In Montserrat I have seen a Negro man staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly, then his ears cut off bit by bit,” he wrote.
The sugar cane that drove the slave trade throughout the Caribbean was a crop that required constant work.
It was dangerous, too. Slaves were often seriously hurt or even killed during the cultivation. Owners would simply replace them with more people stolen from their homelands.
“I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar or rum?” wrote British poet William Cowper in 1788.