Dear Editor,
This year, during heritage week, we will celebrate our heroes and heroine. One of the main themes during these celebrations is the opposition that some of these people, like Sam Sharpe and Nanny, exercised to slavery — that supposed greatest evil to ever have befallen our race. However, I would like us to use this heritage week to understand what slavery really was, and to move on.
One of the more popular arguments during any heritage week celebrations is that slavery was a crime. We are yet to understand that, while this may be so today, right up to around the mid-1700s, very few people, including the slaves themselves, actually saw slavery as such. Therefore, for us today to brand slavery as a crime is not only wrong; we would be doing the people who lived at that time a great injustice.
In fact, those who continue to peddle this claim have yet to point to a single court case in the colonies, before the end of the 1700s, that branded slavery a crime.
Also, during heritage week celebrations, we are always presented with a picture of Africans being the defenceless victims of slavery. Now, while there may be some truth to this, in the majority of cases, this was not the case. In fact, our African ancestors were very much willing partners in this supposed crime.
We only have to look at that trade treaty that the African Kingdom of Benin signed with the Portuguese to supply slaves, or how the Ashanti built one of Africa’s strongest states, almost exclusively on the export of slaves to the West. Indeed, as Benin’s former ambassador to the United States, Cyril Oguin, confessed some years ago — to paraphrase his own words: “If it weren’t for our (that is, African’s) willing participation in the slave trade, slavery as we know it today would never have happened.”
We must come to the realisation that slavery was first and foremost an economic institution. Race, and morality, had very little to do with it. Indeed, a case can be made that the Africans, unlike the Europeans, did not make the most out of the institution, for reasons that are not yet fully understood.
Let us use these heritage week celebrations to think, not like the typical person of today, but like the typical person of that time and accept the rightness of the institution of slavery. Only then can we begin to fully understand what slavery really was.
As such, we today must learn from the past. We should not be like our African ancestors, who did not maximise on all the opportunities that economic institutions, like slavery was at the time, presented. Also, after learning from and understanding slavery, we should not be tied down by it, by always seeking pity, but move on.
Michael A Dingwall
michael_a_dingwall@hotmail.com
This year, during heritage week, we will celebrate our heroes and heroine. One of the main themes during these celebrations is the opposition that some of these people, like Sam Sharpe and Nanny, exercised to slavery — that supposed greatest evil to ever have befallen our race. However, I would like us to use this heritage week to understand what slavery really was, and to move on.
One of the more popular arguments during any heritage week celebrations is that slavery was a crime. We are yet to understand that, while this may be so today, right up to around the mid-1700s, very few people, including the slaves themselves, actually saw slavery as such. Therefore, for us today to brand slavery as a crime is not only wrong; we would be doing the people who lived at that time a great injustice.
In fact, those who continue to peddle this claim have yet to point to a single court case in the colonies, before the end of the 1700s, that branded slavery a crime.
Also, during heritage week celebrations, we are always presented with a picture of Africans being the defenceless victims of slavery. Now, while there may be some truth to this, in the majority of cases, this was not the case. In fact, our African ancestors were very much willing partners in this supposed crime.
We only have to look at that trade treaty that the African Kingdom of Benin signed with the Portuguese to supply slaves, or how the Ashanti built one of Africa’s strongest states, almost exclusively on the export of slaves to the West. Indeed, as Benin’s former ambassador to the United States, Cyril Oguin, confessed some years ago — to paraphrase his own words: “If it weren’t for our (that is, African’s) willing participation in the slave trade, slavery as we know it today would never have happened.”
We must come to the realisation that slavery was first and foremost an economic institution. Race, and morality, had very little to do with it. Indeed, a case can be made that the Africans, unlike the Europeans, did not make the most out of the institution, for reasons that are not yet fully understood.
Let us use these heritage week celebrations to think, not like the typical person of today, but like the typical person of that time and accept the rightness of the institution of slavery. Only then can we begin to fully understand what slavery really was.
As such, we today must learn from the past. We should not be like our African ancestors, who did not maximise on all the opportunities that economic institutions, like slavery was at the time, presented. Also, after learning from and understanding slavery, we should not be tied down by it, by always seeking pity, but move on.
Michael A Dingwall
michael_a_dingwall@hotmail.com