CONTEXT PAPER
1807-2007

By Sandra Gift & Verene Shepherd

Preamble:
The forced relocation of Africans to the Americas and the productive output of such Africans and their descendants, helped to transform the Atlantic into a complex trading area, turning it into the centre of the international economy. Franklin Knight has observed that “without [enslaved] Africans and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the potential economic value of the Americas could never have been achieved”(1991, p. 72); and Eric Williams has long shown the impact that commodities from Africa and the Americas had on British industrial development (1944). But the economic transformation of Britain and other European countries that resulted from their exploitation of the Americas and Africa, took its toll on the enslaved populations and on the continent of Africa itself. Briefly, the sequence was as follows: in 1804 the House of Commons passed the TST abolition Bill but it was thrown out by the House of Lords; in 1805, the British Prime Minister, William Pitt, secured an Order-in-Council indicating that as of 1806, certain Crown Colonies in the BWI (Berbice, Demerara, Essequibo & Trinidad) would no longer be allowed to import Africans (especially to start new plantations). Thus Trinidad (and no doubt Guyana) plans to use 2006 to begin its commemorative activities, with others opting for 2007-08. In January 1806, Charles Fox, Pitt’s successor, moved a resolution for the immediate and total abolition of the TST but no Bill was passed in that year. The Slave Trade Abolition Bill was eventually passed in the British House of Lords by 41 votes to 20 on 25th March 1807.  In the House of Commons it had been carried by 114 to 15; and it became law in May 1807 to be effected by 1st Jany 1808 except for particular cases.

No doubt these and other relevant dates in the abolition of the TST struggle will be observed by Britain. It should be stressed, however, that the struggle to end the TST to the BWI was a long-drawn out affair. It involved the enslaved themselves; British humanitarians (since the late 18th century); and Haitian anti-slavery rulers after 1804. Also, while the TST was officially abolished in the Danish and British Caribbean by 1808, it continued officially for much longer in other parts of the Caribbean, for example the French, Spanish and Dutch Caribbean; and even after all governments had sanctioned its abolition, the TST continued in the hands of illegal traders for a much longer time. The years 2006-08 will provide a space for the Caribbean to reflect on and explore openly its historical relationship to the TST and slavery- that brutal form of human bondage.

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General Overview of the Phenomenon of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans

Scholars in the Caribbean and beyond have been examining the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans as a phenomenon in world history for over 100 years. Walter Rodney (1972) makes the point that from the 15th century, and continuing for four and a half centuries, the conduct of this Trade contributed to the development of Western Europe to the same degree that it contributed to the underdevelopment of Africa. Robin Blackburn (1999) holds the Trade responsible for one of the largest systems of slavery in human history, given the businesslike principles governing its conduct, its scale and its destructiveness. Although, as Ivan van Sertima argues, there were some free Africans in the Americas before the 15th century, it was primarily under the tragic and inhumane conditions of colonialism and the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans that an African diaspora was established in the Caribbean and in the Americas.

The process leading up to a phased abolition, as well as those moments in history which deemed the Trade officially abolished by the British (its illegal continuation thereafter notwithstanding), deserve to be observed and commemorated by the descendants of its victims everywhere. We owe it to our forebears, to our own children and to future generations. If we who are in positions of power and influence; if we who are privileged to know and understand this history and its continuing legacies fail to observe this period in history for the benefit our own, who then will do it? Failure to act will be to embrace the shame and silence still characteristic of the relationship with this history elsewhere.

 The Director General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, in a message observing the United Nations International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition in 2004, described the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans and slavery as constituting one of the darkest chapters in the history of the world, given its duration, its extensiveness, and its consequences. He further made the plea that the history of this Trade be given a mandatory place in education worldwide. UNESCO estimates that while the trans-Saharan trade in enslaved Africans transported about 12 million people, the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans deported between 15 and 18 million enslaved Africans in a shorter time. Randall Robinson, African American writer and activist, referring to the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans as the Black holocaust, states: “It is a human rights crime without parallel in the modern world. For it produces its victims ad infinitum, long after the active stage of the crime has ended.”(2000: p.216) 

Legacies of Slavery in the Anglophone Caribbean
Human development
The enduring legacies of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans are such that they continue to have a negative impact upon human development. Human development is a consistently articulated priority of Caribbean governments and indeed of international agencies supportive of the development agenda. Education systems are designed to pursue human development in the context of national, regional and international development imperatives. In the Anglophone Caribbean there have been commendable efforts, through the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), to address the relevance of  knowledge of  the history of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans to the  development of young Caribbean citizens. These efforts fall short however, if only because in many schools Social Studies has replaced history; not all students study history at the level of the CXC examinations and indeed increasingly fewer students are opting to study history at all. The consequence of these factors, therefore, is that many students may be completing their formal secondary education without an understanding of the ways in which the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans has shaped the Caribbean socio-economic and cultural landscape, and thus without a complete appreciation of some of the very fundamental issues surrounding some of the pressing questions confronting Caribbean educators and thinkers as they relate to the human development of Caribbean youths.

Several writers underscore the importance of Caribbean societies confronting the legacies of slavery at the levels of society and the state. While poets, novelists, academics, and painters, for example, have all addressed the slavery past, there remains a need, as Harry Goulbourne notes, to confront squarely what this means for "…present patterns of ownership, social integration and control of social, economic and political power…in terms of policy and public discussion.” (2001: p.129). The continued display of the legacies of African slavery in western modernity; issues of low self-esteem; perceptions of a weak Caribbean identity; African-Caribbean self-disparagement; the internalization of the myth of Black inferiority and White superiority have been identified by scholars such as Hilary Beckles (2001), Richard Goodridge (1998) and Verene Shepherd (2000) as being among the legacies of slavery to be confronted in the contemporary Caribbean. Patricia Mohammed, (2004), suggests that there has been inadequate transparency and accessibility of the study of Africa and slavery to most people of African descent and that further, such study should not be limited to African descended peoples, just as people of all ethnic groups should also have access to studies of Indians, Chinese and Jews. Lloyd Best (2003) recognizes a need to examine the features of Caribbean civilization as a whole to understand where it has reached and the facts which have contributed to it being where it is.  Such an examination he views as being indispensable, if only for the reason of the diabolical dynamics of the legacies of the history of enslavement.

Commemorate and Educate for Sustainable Human Development
The United Nations Decade for Education for Sustainable Development (2004-2014), with UNESCO as the lead agency, was launched on the Mona Campus of The UWI by the Honourable Maxine Henry Wilson on October 18, 2005. The Caribbean Conference launching the Decade identified as a priority, inter alia, the need to change the mindset of Caribbean people in terms of cultural identity and a sense of self. The commemoration, on the part of Caribbean governments, of the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans to the Caribbean provides CARICOM governments with an invaluable opportunity to mount a campaign of public education to address these and related legacies of this Trade, in the context of Quality Education and the  Decade for Education for Sustainable Human Development.

The understanding of relevance in the context of education echoes the concept of human development presented in Learning: The Treasure Within, the Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, published in 1996. This Report acknowledges that every part of education contributes to human development and that development should ensure “… the full flowering of the human being and not as a means of production.” (p.79) It states further that people’s understanding of themselves and others must form part of responsible development, so that they are able to participate in collective societal undertakings. This proposal acknowledges that quality education is a prerequisite for education for sustainable development, the domains of which include: (i) reorienting existing education programmes at all levels to address sustainable development; (ii) providing training and (iii) involving higher education.

Jamaica’s Response:
As a former colony of Britain, Jamaica was affected by the sordid episode of the TST. Indeed, whether we wish to focus on it or not, it is a fact that the Caribbean was a primordial site of slavery. The debate over the numbers forcefully extracted from Africa and shipped across the Middle Passage to the Caribbean still rages; but recent quantitative data estimate that the region accounted for 42%, of the estimated 15 million Africans forcefully removed from Africa from the 15th to the 19th century. Among the British colonized Caribbean territories, Jamaica accounted for the majority of the total imported. Estimates indicate that within what was then the British Caribbean, Jamaica and Barbados received the majority of captives.  David Eltis has shown that for the period 1519-1867, Jamaica and Barbados received 11.2% and 5.1% of the trade respectively, compared to 4.2% for the Guianas and 3.2% for the British Windward Islands and Trinidad combined.

Slavery took its toll on the enslaved population. The brutality combined with other factors led to a demographic disaster. Jamaica, for example, imported close to 1 million enslaved Africans, yet at Emancipation had just around 300,000 enslaved people.  This demographic trend, if Thomas Fowell Buxton is to be believed, went against the laws of nature. Buxton, influenced by Malthusian population theory, argued that it was only misery that prevented what is a law of nature (the increase of populations) from occurring; that only the luxurious rich tended to be barren.
 
Preparations for the commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of the TST will give Jamaicans and the Caribbean as a whole a great opportunity to 1) revisit the history of Africa, 2) study the details of the Middle Passage 3) examine the impact of slavery and the TST on the region and 4) conduct research that will provide the evidence that the region needs to advance its case for reparation from Britain. Those who participated in slavery in the Caribbean and in the Americas generally long after the institution was declared illegal in their own countries, (and long reminded of its inhumanity by philosophers), should adopt reparation if only as an act of reconciliation. The slave trade and slavery were crimes against humanity (as defined by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal) and as recognized a century earlier by anti-slavery activists. William Pitt’s anti-slavery appeal in the English Parliament referred to slavery as the “greatest practical evil that has ever been inflicted on the human race”; “the severest and most extensive calamity recorded in the history of the world”.

We surely should be keen to remember the momentous ending of such a system, even if we are not 100% satisfied with our progress as Black people 200 years after the event. While not ignoring the complex and multidimensional struggle for abolition, especially on the part of British humanitarians, the aim of the various educational institutions and cultural agencies in the country should be to reinforce the agency on the part of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the ending of the TST. Haiti’s role in patrolling the seas to seize slavers and in harbouring those who fled to its shores to escape slavery should also be taught. We should observe certain official dates in the history of the phased abolition of the trade, but ensure that the events planned for such dates do not celebrate British humanitarianism and the “Queen Victoria set us free” myth. The messages to be communicated to the Caribbean citizenry are messages that empower, uplift and enlighten; messages that can give hope to those who despair and convey a sense of self-worth to those who may feel worthless.

All sectors of the society, not just Government agencies and educational institutions, [for this should not be a top down affair even though the government must lead by example) are invited to become active participants in this project to establish for all Caribbean people the tangible interconnections between the past, the present and the future, and through this effort to seek to construct, in the minds of all of our people, a future imbued with understandings conducive to pride and self-assurance, even as we embrace the unknown and the uncertain.

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References

Beckles, H. (2001). Emancipation in the British Caribbean. In G. Oostindie (Ed.), Facing up to the past: Perspectives on the commemoration of slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe (pp.90-94). Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers.

Best, L. (2003, June, 14).  The Afro-Saxon heritage.  Trinidad Express, p. 11.  

Blackburn, R. (1999). The making of new world slavery: From the baroque to the modern 1492-1800. London: Verso

Curtin, P (1969) The slave trade: A census . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press

Eltis, D (2000), The rise of African slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Gift, Sandra (2005). PhD Dissertation on the pedagogical aspects of the TST. UWI, St. Augustine Campus. 

Goodridge, R. A. (1998).  The teaching of African history in Barbadian schools.  The Journal of Education and Development in the Caribbean.  2 (2), 93-108.

Knight, F (1991) “Slavery and Lagging Capitalism in the Spanish and Portuguese American Empire”, in B. Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 72

Matsuura, K. (2004.). Message from the Director-General of UNESCO on the occasion of the International Year to commemorate the struggle against slavery and its abolition (2004). . In Struggles against Slavery. International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition (pp 42-43). Paris: UNESCO.

Mohammed, P. (2003). Beyond the colonised boundaries of ethnicity in Trinidad. CLR James Journal, 9 (1), 172-190.

Robinson, R. (2000). The Debt: What America owes to Blacks. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc.

Rodney, W. (2000). How Europe became the dominant section of a world-wide trade system. In V. Shepherd & H. M. Beckles (Eds.), Caribbean slavery in the Atlantic world: A student reader (pp.1-10). Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers .

Shepherd, V. A. & Beckles, H. (2005). UWI and the Bicentenary of the Passing of the “British Slave Trade Abolition Act” [1807-2007]

Shepherd, V. A. (2005). Plans to Commemorate the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans to the Caribbean

Shepherd, A. (2000).  Image representation and the project of emancipation: History and identity in the commonwealth Caribbean.  In. K. Hall, & D. Benn, (Eds.), Contending with destiny: The Caribbean in the 21st century (pp.53-57).  Kingston, Jamaica:  Ian Randle Publishers. 

UNESCO. (1996). Learning: The treasure within, the Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century. Paris: UNESCO

Williams, Eric (1944). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

Van Sertima, I. (1976). They came before Columbus .New York: Random House

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