Preface: The Silence People Keeping
Rent from DeepDyveWhen you wake up early in the morning
And you work like devils in the sun
Time slips away without warning
But freedom-day will come.
Tra-la-la-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la-la-la-la
Soul captives are free.—Bob Marley, "Soul Captives are Free"
The day 25 March 2007 marked two hundred years since the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was passed in the British Parliament, bringing the transatlantic trade in African slaves in the British Empire to a formal end. After many passionate speeches and much lobbying by Grenville and Fox and above all Wilberforce, so we are told, the trade was found morally and legally insupportable: in the House of Commons, the bill was carried by 114 votes to 15, in the House of Lords by a narrower margin of 41 to 20. It had been just over two hundred and forty years before (in 1562) that John Hawkins of Plymouth, the fabled commander and mastermind of the refurbished Elizabethan navy, and relative of Francis Drake, had pioneered Britain's involvement in the traffic in Africans. Hawkins subsequently formed a lucrative partnership with Queen Elizabeth I (the ship she underwrote for his second slaving voyage in 1564, remember, was the old but capacious Jesus of Lubeck). It would of course be another generation before the larger system of which the slave trade was a part—New World plantation slavery—was ruled illegal and brought to an end.
The bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade has provided an opportunity for the British government (mired in a demoralizing and dismally failing effort in Iraq to restore an aura of imperial presence) to congratulate itself on the width and perspicuity of its humanity. The tone and content of the official pronouncements, their rhetoric of evasion and disavowal, [End Page v] are unfortunately not unfamiliar; and we would much rather have been spared their self-serving hubris.1 For in what sense can one say that, two centuries on, Britain has properly accepted historical responsibility for that brutal past? In what sense can one say that there is evidence of a serious commitment to righting at last that historical wrong?
"The transatlantic slave trade," Prime Minister Tony Blair announced magnanimously in a statement in the New Nation in March, "stands as one of the most inhuman enterprises in history." But for Mr. Blair the British state (its royal Head, its executive and legislative branches, and the juridical practices by which it constitutes its international personality and regulates its international economy) is exempt from implication in this past—in spite of Vice-admiral Hawkins and his Queen, not to mention the later Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa.2 "At a time," Blair says, "when the capitals of Europe and America championed the Enlightenment of man, their merchants were enslaving a continent." The merchants at the ports acting as private citizens, not the statesmen in the capitals representing their sovereigns, they are the ones who were driven by racism and greed. In the much-repeated shibboleth of liberal humanism, what counts for Mr. Blair is that in the end Britain redeemed itself. "Thankfully," he says (managing to acknowledge a debt to Olaudah Equiano alongside William Wilberforce), "Britain was the first country to abolish the trade." Mr. Blair publicly acknowledges that Britain's rise to global ascendancy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries owes to its "active role" in the transatlantic slave trade. He is obliged to acknowledge that British industrial development was "intimately intertwined" with the profits of colonial slave labor. And, in admittedly cautious, qualifying language, he acknowledges that the slave trade constituted "what would now be" a "crime against humanity." But all he has to offer in respect of this crime are his regrets, and an expression of "deep sorrow that it ever happened." Happened . . . ? In any case, in his view we should now move on and "rejoice at the different and...
