SLAVERY

SLAVERY

NIEWOLNICTWO

Tippu Tip - a slave hunter from Zanzibar, Tanzania, owner of 10 000 slaves (source)

155 years ago, on June 19, 1865 soldiers of the Union, led by Major General Gordon Granger, arrived at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. The day became known as Juneteenth, a blend of sounds of two words in the form of a new word, which signifies the emancipation of those who had been enslaved. It became the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. 

I am presenting a short history of modern age slavery in my translation of a text published originally in June 2016 by Polish author Wojciech Lada in ciekawostkihistpryczne.pl | The Polish speaking readers may access the original text here.

***

155 lat temu, 19 czerwca 1865 roku żołnierze Unii, pod dowództwem generała majora Gordona Grangera, przybyli do Galveston w Teksasie z wiadomością, że wojna się skończyła, i że zniewoleni są teraz wolni. Dzień ten stał się znany jako Juneteenth, mieszanka dźwięków dwóch słów w postaci nowego słowa, które stało się synonimem emancypacji niewolników w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Juneteenth jest jest obchodzone jako jednodniowy, słabo upowszechniony festiwal w USA, ale obecnie trwa dyskusja nad ewentualnym ustanowieniem tego dnia świętem federalnym.
Oryginalny tekst w języku polskim jest do przeczytania tutaj.

The Uncomfortable Secret of Slavery. 

Negroes were Selling Negroes!

Contrary to popular belief, it was not Europeans who hunted for black slaves in Africa. They were only driving the demand. Africans were captured and sold ... by their neighbors and brothers. When fabulous fortune loomed on the horizon, no one cared about human dignity.

Sir John Hawkins had many virtues. For one, he developed a completely new model of a warship that not only improved navigation and provided the British fleet with an advantage at sea, but also completely changed the strategy of naval warfare. Furthermore, he was a very efficient agent of the British crown and outstanding navigator who, among others marked out, a roundabout trade route across the Atlantic. All these qualities gave him the rank of admiral and considerable influence at court.

It was an entirely different talent however, which brought him his fortune; a talent which revealed itself in the early 1660s. Namely, he was able to provoke tribal wars in Africa like no other man. For effective brokerage and cooperation in obtaining slaves, he later accepted some of them as payment.

If during his first African expedition in 1562, he did not shun using force and managed to capture three hundred slaves - as he wrote - with the help of a sword and partly by other means, then come four years time there was no more mention nor need of a sword.

On the coast of Sierra Leone, by inciting tribal wars of one African ruler against another, he nearly doubled his inventory of “black merchandise,” all for the glory of England and conveniently his own purse. This simple system of acquiring free labor for the plantations of the Americas became the most common method of doing so, until the end of the of 19th century.

Monopoly on "black goods"

Slavery wasn’t anything special in Africa. As in all other parts of the world, slavery could have been the result of losing a war, debt or due to a serious crime. But this was not slavery in the sense that planters in the United States developed later - it was more like serfdom in feudal Europe rather, than chains and a whip in Alabama.

There was also nothing peculiar in transatlantic slave trade with Arab and European countries. Europeans began this process as early as the fifteenth century, and the Portuguese being its initiators, remained monopolists for almost a century.

Similarly to what Hawkins did later, they also began with using force, namely by abducting in a pirate style the people of the Gold Coast in the Gulf of Guinea, where the modern Ghana is and the so-called Slave Coast existed (today's Nigeria, Benin and Togo).

Further exploration deep into the continent was prevented, however, by relatively strong countries of the region - flourishing then kingdoms of Songhaj, Mali and the highly developed Congo. The rulers of these countries were not concerned by the mere kidnapping of members of the smaller tribes, but they were troubled by the fact that they did not gain anything from it.

Their armed resistance and the commercial sense of the Portuguese led very quickly to creation of a proficiently functioning human trafficking, in which the role of suppliers provided highly specialized trading companies of dark-skinned merchants, some smaller groups of hunters greedy for quick profit, and the African kingdoms themselves.

We have no data for this period, but the proportions look interesting. Even though the customers changed in the eighteenth century, the mechanics of the market remained the same. For example, out of six hundred slaves delivered to the Slave Coast, as much as seventy percent were provided by large sale organizations, twenty percent by smaller hunters, and only the remaining ten percent officially by the state.

As a result of that strategic change, on the west coast of Africa existed for several centuries organizations exclusively for dealing in the business of capturing and selling the local people into slavery. Besides that, the word "coast" does not fully reflect the scale of penetration of the African interior. If, in the 17th century, in the region around Senegal, the average distance that slaves had to walk to the European ships, anchored in harbors, was sixty miles, then a century later, it was often three hundred fifty miles or more.

Of course, they could not function without the permission of the local rulers, what the Europeans understood very well. Congo, the most Europeanized of these monarchies, has even made an official alliance with Portugal. Nzinga, the ruling there ‘mani’ - as his official title was called - became even baptized and ruled later under the name of Alfonso.

Then, a bishopric was established in Congo, and the sons of the local elite were often sent to Portugal to study and obtain there their formal education. After returning to the country they served as intermediaries, guides and translators. The new state on the map of the Christian world did not forget about its benefactors. In 1520s, in the port of Kabinda, two thousand slaves waited for them every year at the mouth of the Zaire River, and a decade later the amount even doubled.

For beads and weapons

It was a common belief that one African was worth four Indians writes Adam Węgłowski in his book "Living Dead". - In addition, the use of already Christianized Indian tribes was opposed Jesuits at that time. Black Africans, > pagans < (animists, Muslims, etc.) when bought from slave traders, could not count on similar considerations.

The profitability of trade with Europeans caused a sort of race for monopoly in human trafficking of the local population. The people of Hueda, Allada, Oyo, Dahomey and Akwamu kingdoms were particularly active. When the latter conquered the important port of Accra in 1681, merchants were officially banned from operating inside the country to prevent them from hunting for slaves; the goal of the law was to ensure the exclusive right of the state in this regard.

The rulers of Dahomey did the same by establishing a monopoly on their territories and selling from twelve to twenty thousand slaves a year. Slightly more to the east of the continent – within the zones of Arabic influence, whose methods were absolutely no different from those of European powers - we can find the roots of today’s bloody and ongoing conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes.

Slave hunts have become increasingly violent over the years. The political destabilization of the continent has reached the level of anarchy. This was, of course, very convenient for European powers - they fueled this process by increasing the demand for "live commodities" from year to year. Not only that, however. Henryk Zins wrote:

In the slave trade between African intermediaries and European buyers, the means of payment were iron bars, which became a form of money from Senegal to Ivory Coast. In a region around Ghana, the same role was played by bracelets, Indian cloth, shells, beads, and gold sand.
Along with the development of business, however, more and more often guns and gunpowder would become the money, which in time brutalized the primitive war tactics of African countries. Much has also changed on the European side.

Until the end of the 16th century, Portugal was a monopolist in the trade of African slaves - reselling them to America, but also willingly using them in their own estates. It was there, specifically on Portugal island of Madeira, that the experiment with the plantation system based on slave labor was developed and used for the first time - a precursor to what later became widely used in the USA.

However, at the beginning of the 17th century, the Netherlands entered the slave trade and quickly gained the advantage. Amsterdam became the largest "transshipment" port of captured Africans. This situation lasted approximately until the middle of the century, when the huge profitability of this business draws in other European countries - not only England and France, which since then constantly fight for the first place on the podium, but also Sweden, Denmark and even Brandenburg-Prussia.

The scale of the phenomenon is so serious that in both France and England special African Companies are established, which are granted a monopoly in the trade of black slaves. The crowned heads of these countries and a large part of aristocracy participate in them. A bit of piquancy adds here the fact that a great advocate of freedom, the philosopher John Locke, also had shares in the Royal African Company.

It is not known how many Africans were taken captive. Extreme estimates range between ten and one hundred million, with the latter figure seemingly too exaggerated. For the African continent, the case was so catastrophic that all participating states formally abolished slavery at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Of course, one should not assume the excessive humanitarianism of the European elites – that was more or less when the era of African colonialism began. Nobody needed depopulated colonies. Regardless of the formal acts, the business was too good to be stopped with one document.

In practice, black slaves were traded several dozen years longer, until the end of the 19th century. Only the suppliers changed - they were not, as for four hundred years, African countries, but the largest European powers. However undoubtedly, they used the help of local "businessmen".