This post, authored by Tim Sargent ,was republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic
Since I’m a cheerful unbeliever, like most people in Britain now, there’s no reason why I should be more than marginally interested in the C of E’s expensive guilt-trip for its historic links to the slave trade. Except that I have a fondness for ancient architecture and language that, as with Richard Dawkins, includes old churches, old liturgies and the music that goes with them.
I contributed to the renovation of the bells of the fine Norman church in my village because I like the sound they make. Like the liturgy, it’s an important facet of British history and the church’s bells are actually much more prominent in village life than its church services.
For several years, they have only happened when a peripatetic vicar can include us in his rounds every few weeks. As to the slavery issue, the villagers, who only enter the church in large numbers for services at Christmas, Easter and harvest-time, seem to feel much less guilty than the new Archbishop of Canterbury.
I agree with them for a reason that hasn’t been mentioned in the recent beating of ecclesiastical breasts or even in newspapers and journals that are unhappy with the idea of compensating the descendants of slaves and the governments of the present-day countries where the slaves were captured.
Many people have pointed out that Europeans didn’t invent African slavery. Though rarely conceded by the grievance industry and the campaigners for compensation, slavery was an ancient and widespread African custom, established many centuries before Portuguese and Spanish sailors hesitantly began to explore the coasts of West Africa.
If the locals weren’t actively hostile, trade was likely and what the local traders were keen to exchange for European products were other Africans who had been enslaved. Some of the sailors may have had doubts about the morality of the exchanges.
Not so the African traders, or the tribal chiefs who pocketed much of the proceeds. The slaves mostly came from tribes living several hundred miles inland. The sailors never penetrated beyond the coasts, partly because they didn’t know what lay beyond it and partly because anyone who tried to make his way through the thick forests quickly returned, if they returned at all, suffering from tropical diseases or spear-wounds.
One of the first Europeans who did go far inland and returned to report his findings was Mungo Park, a young Scotsman sponsored by The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa. European ignorance about those “Interior Parts” was almost total and Park’s mission was to find the source of the River Niger.
It was successful but he was very lucky to survive disease, robbery, kidnapping, imprisonment and injuries. His diaries, freely available at Project Gutenberg, contain many observations and reflections on the local slave-trade, including that Islamic traders from north of the Sahara were more feared than local captors because their methods were even more brutal.
However, two of his observations really surprised me. One was the sheer scale of the enslavement of Africans by other Africans. I had assumed it might run to 10 or at most 20% of the population but Park reckoned it was nearer two thirds.
As in America, slave-owners ranged from the relatively kind to the vicious and slave status was inherited. Some Africans sold themselves into slavery to pay off debts but most slaves were captured in tribal wars. Freedom could sometimes be bought but Park noted that a few ceased being slaves when their owners ate or sacrificed them.
The second and most surprising feature and the one most closely related to the C of E’s guilt-trip was that slaves became more expensive the further from home they were at the time of purchase.
That was because being unable to speak the languages of the intervening tribes and empires, they were less likely to escape and more easily identified and recaptured if they did.
Naturally, when European traders offered to take slaves even further away from their homes and across an ocean, the traders were doubly pleased. It is that feature that has had little attention on both sides of the debate, though it is discussed in some recent academic books about African slavery.
On the whole, Europeans had stopped enslaving other Europeans for several centuries by the time they came across the African trade. The English system of villeinage wasn’t as ruthless or all-embracing and largely stopped after the Black Death. Russian serfdom was the main persisting exception and might have lasted beyond its abolition in 1861 had not Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War revealed the deficiencies of Czarist Russia’s social structures.
If Africans thought it acceptable to capture and sell other Africans, was it surprising if 16th century Europeans agreed with them? The equivalence is not exact, of course. When warlike tribes such as the Mongols and Zulus invaded their neighbours, it was often customary to kill all adult males of fighting age.
Most women and their young children would be enslaved but there were important exceptions. Some women would end up as the wives or concubines of their captors. Those of the highest rank might be formally married off to the conquering chieftains as part of a peace treaty.
That sort of arrangement is much more likely when the defeated tribes are not very different in appearance and customs to their neighbouring conquerors. It is much less likely when the invaders arrive not on horses but on boats after journeys of several thousand miles and therefore looked and sounded very unlike their captives. That, in turn, made it easier for the captors to ‘other’ their slaves and regard them as not quite human.
Some American slaves became important and influential members of slave-owning households, rather like the eunuchs at Ottoman courts. Some, when freed, even became slave-owners themselves, but the differences I’ve just described made that sort of role-reversal and social advancement much rarer in America than it was in Africa.
The large numbers involved in Trans-Atlantic slavery are often cited as evidence of its unique wickedness, yet while it persisted for about four centuries, the proportions of the African population enslaved by other Africans as well as by Muslim traders from the north and east may well have been significantly larger than the toll taken by European and American traders during their comparatively briefer period of activity. Britain was also, of course, foremost among European and American nations – North and South – in opposing and actively suppressing the trade.
My fellow-villagers should not be monstered by the press or social media if they want more church money to go to preserving their architectural heritage than to nebulous programmes apparently dreamed up by office-bound church bureaucrats. Especially when one of those programmes means using church money to line the pockets of the descendants of African slave traders.
Tim Sargent is a pseudonym.
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