Patricia Glinton-Meicholas
The transatlantic slave trade (TST) took root in fertile soil—age-old competition among European states for supremacy, coupled with greed on both sides of the Atlantic. Add the exposure of the wealth of the New World by Christopher Columbus and the conquistadors who followed him. In a corrosive circular intersection, new technologies opened the industrial revolution, bringing unprecedented production efficiency, which eventually birthed rabid consumerism. This fermentation needed one more thing—cheap, ununionized labour. West Africa became the unregulated labour mill and the slave trade added rocket fuel to the industrial revolution.
“It was just good business,” some might say of the slave trade with some justification. Covering four continents and the islands termed ‘Caribbean’, the operations of the enterprise bore many of the hallmarks of today’s multinational companies. Raw materials grown, mined and initially processed in New World colonies were sent to European factories to be turned into finished goods and sold worldwide.
Financiers in The Netherlands bankrolled sugar plantations and the majority of the ships engaged in the trade. Underwriters insured against losses of ships and slaves. Speaking in 2020 of the “systematic and structural racism that has existed in many aspects of society”, the Lloyd’s of London insurance market apologized for its “shameful” role in the Atlantic slave trade.
The slave trade had its CEOs, including certain governors of the Bank of England and those of Britain’s Royal African Company, the first of whom was the future King James II. Royalty, nobles, shipowners, bankers and plantation and factory owners held the preferred shares. Queen Elizabeth I invested in John Hawkins first slaving voyage in 1562. Others profiting were ship outfitters, ship captains, Africans who controlled the interior and factors stationed at the dreaded slave-holding ‘castles’ on the West African coast.
There was franchising. By the Asiento de Negros, the Spanish Crown gave merchants of various nationalities the right to supply Spanish colonies in the Americas with slaves. The Royal African Company offered a seven-year trading deal at a £1,000 a year.
There were corporate takeovers: In 1634 the Dutch wrested Brazil from the Portuguese and became active players in slave trade.
The Atlantean Slave Trade was above all exploitative foreign direct investment, generating wealth for Europe and long-term debilitation of the societies, cultures and economies of sub-Saharan Africa and the New World.
The enterprise was a tragedy that had a 350-year run. The Portuguese rang the opening bell with the first shipment of enslaved from Africa to the New World in 1525. Eventually, approximately 12 million Africans would be transported, tightly packed in filthy cargo holds to maximize profits. Full fathom five lie the bones of 2.5 million, strewn across the infamous Middle Passage. Millions more would suffer as ununionized, brutalized labour, their bondage cemented by slave laws and violence.
The infernal drama rested on commodification and systematic dehumanization of human beings—branding, pricing and exposure on auction blocks to be examined like livestock. Evaluated by medical pseudoscience, such as phrenology, and socially defined criteria—language, mores and behaviour based on European models, Africans were deemed to be uncivilized and incapable of higher reasoning.
So as not to ruffle Europe’ putative Christian sensibilities, misinformation was spread on broadsheets and piously hymned—Africans were being rescued from heathenism. To encourage acceptance and passivity, religionists offered displaced Africans a blessed, new homeland called ‘Zion’.
The second act, centuries long, brought suppression of identity and cultural divorce—Physical removal from homeland, ethnic group and family accompanied by rape of language, religion, names and rights to parenting and family leadership. Africans became Neptunes and Bacchuses, Ciceros and Catos, fictive Greek and Roman gods and aristocrats without power or privilege.
Skin colour, hair texture, nose and eye shapes are environmental tropes, evolved to fit humankind to dominate the globe. Yet, the need to justify African enslavement converted nature’s gift into an impediment to advancement for Africa’s children. A value scale and terminology based on colour gradations determined a slave’s degree of humanity, while conferring white dominance. Forced breeding and deconstruction of the nuclear family, denial of education and the banishment of black achievement from history books falsely validated the fabrications of inferiority.
Today, we celebrate the triumph of the human spirit and the forced African imports’ struggle for freedom, self-definition and an equitable place at the table of humankind. In The Bahamas, this dynamic was manifested by
Various forms of resistance to slavery—Running away, malingering and revolt, inadequately armed
Formation of new lines of kinship
Linguistic bridging for mutual intelligibility via the creation of a creole.
Collective action for fraternal associations and community progress through lodges, asues for encouraging saving and sharing of labour in planting and harvesting.
Importantly, the enslaved preserved many African cultural artefacts: Folklore, storytelling, junkanoo, straw weaving and basketry, foodways and architectural wisdom, creating, over time, unique Bahamian forms reflective of evolving realities in an archipelago. Similarly, Bahamian blacks became master mariners, dominating the beautiful but challenging oceanscape of The Bahamas.
Adaptability helped the Bahamian enslaved to survive and excel against the seemingly the insuperable odds of generations of bondage. This scenario played out across the Caribbean region. While the resultant cultures show much evidence of kinship with the Africa and her Atlantic diaspora, they are each distinct.
We also celebrate the abolitionists who insisted on the brotherhood of humankind. Nevertheless, to the shame of humanity, the lie of racial inferiority, carefully woven by enslavement and its kin continues to wreak havoc on inter and intra-racial harmony across the black Atlantic world, in the former slaveholding European states and beyond. Asia has a $7.5 billion skin whitening market.
Sadly, in 2021, we are forced to acknowledge intransigent racism increasing globally. All is far from well in the United Kingdom, once the leading player in the Atlantic slave trade. The SHF Report reveals that, after several decades of initiatives, inequalities persist but many are now dismissing racism as some kind of distemper on the part of those who claim it. Anti-racism activist Nova Reid has claimed, “We have an unhealthy culture in the UK that calling out racism is more offensive than racism itself.”
Lending credence to Reid’s statement, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has claimed that there are those who wish to “photo shop” British cultural landscape. British actor Laurence Fox, founder of the Reclaim Party, has said that ‘People need immunity from the virus of wokery’.
In the United States, pluribus has not become unum. Dangerously active, right-leaning groups are fomenting hatred of minorities, using guns and bullets to underscore the seriousness of their intent to create an all-white America, as underscored by the raid on the US Capitol. A CNN report noted:
Federal authorities are piecing together a chilling picture of the 6 January 2021 insurrection that reveals major security and intelligence failures, underscores profound fissures in American society and hints at the political challenges ahead. (Nicolette Gaoutte. 16 January 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/16/politics/insurrection-investigation-washington-lockdown/index.html)
In 2019, the New York Times reported 1000 such factions. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, this alarming rise is owed to “a toxic combination of political polarization, anti-immigrant sentiment and technologies that help spread propaganda online. The same article noted the Anti-Defamation League’s report of a surge of right-wing violence that killed at least 50 people in 2018.
Racial profiling continues to spread its insidious web in the economic, political and social realm, denying job promotions, equitable housing, adequate access to quality health care and financing for business development. More fearful still, it stokes police brutality against people of colour. Consider the killing of George Floyd as well as the random mass shootings of Asians in March 2021.
Just as concerning, history has marked the rise of colorism: intra-race hierarchies and prejudices, out of which has sprung the politics of blackness. Africa-descended activists engage internecine warfare. As self-appointed arbiters of racial citizenship, they judge fitness to belong by degree of adherence to African religions, dress and hair treatment, while repudiating ‘mixedness’. Does this not suggest that European genetic and cultural inputs are pollutants? Is this not another brand of racism? How can one erase Europe without fracturing self and our multicoloured and multitextured families, which prevail across the region? Do we stop using English or do we ditch Christ in favour of Papa Legba and to what avail? It is not our very conch-salad-ness, our genetic and experiential concrete, which has built the nation?
Wouldn’t justice and equal rights be better served by developing our education and skill-building systems, so that more of our people know that we have much of which to be proud and can achieve undeniable competence on a global scale?
Let us begin by teaching our children that inferiority in not inborn. Tell them about peoples of African descent who have achieved excellence in fields where bigotry and planned exclusion said Africa’s offspring could not advance for lack of higher reasoning. Let our youth know that Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan, NASA’s human computers have not been the only mathematically and scientifically gifted African-American women and men. There were Evelyn Granville Boyd, Marie Maynard Daly, Carolyn Parker and Marguerite Williams as well as George Washington Carver, Edward Alexander Bouchet, Walter Lincoln Hawkins, Emmet Chapelle and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who have defied the racist dicta.
Then there are the Bahamian “hidden figures”. These limestone rocks of ours have nurtured many gifted men and women, who have excelled across the range of human intellect and endeavour.
We must do more to stop this brutish carnival of rupture and death that is humanity’s tragedy. We must top the hypocrisy of denial and covert apartheid. High on our awareness and action agenda must be truth and acknowledgement of our personal biases. Let us call out micro aggressions among family, friends and colleagues and the macros of bigotry that erupt in election season.
Black Lives Matter—All lives matter. All can contribute to effecting greater interpersonal and transnational concord to save our distressed planet. We must care about the ethnic cleansing that has put the Rohingya of Myanmar in danger of genocide. We must care about the widespread economic and political instability that causes nationals of countries worldwide who engage dangerous journeys to flee their homelands. We must own all our parts, all our colours, all our heritages and the kinship of all human beings.
Swedish singer Isak Danielson’s 2021 song “I Can’t Lose You” points out hauntingly humanity’s immutable chain of being:
I don't know what it's like to be fighting for my life
But if you do, I'll be fighting too
When you're feeling weak, I'll be the words if you can't speak
And if you lose, I'll be losing too
And I can't lose you.
References
Faulconbridge, Guy and Kate Holton Update: Lloyd’s of London Apologizes for Its ‘Shameful’ Role in Atlantic Slave Trade.
By Guy Faulconbridge and Kate Holton | June 18, 2020 https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2020/06/18/
Stack, Liam. Over 1,000 Hate Groups Are Now Active in United States, Civil Rights Group Says. Feb. 20, 2019
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/06/europe/britain-racism-cnn-poll-gbr-intl/
