I am not surprised with how African governments are run, am not astonished why there is a lot of suppression in most African companies but don’t get it wrong; never am I amused by all atrocities our continent is facing. Not trying to get an excuse, believe me I have strong indicators that it’s all about the ‘genes’ of slavery that still haunts the mother continent.
On the eve of the American Revolution, slavery was recognised and accepted throughout the New World. All of the major European powers at one time or another entered the Atlantic slave trade, just as most of them possessed slave colonies.
Yet it was the British who came to dominate the Atlantic slave system. British Empire ships carried more African captives than any nation (an estimated three million); Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean and mainland North America produced vast quantities of tropical goods (sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo) for the home market; and the country as a whole grew rich on the profits of enslaved African labour.
Within two decades, however, Britain (1807) and the United States (1808) had acted decisively to abandon the transatlantic slave trade. In fact, ‘abolition’ was to emerge as one of the most important reform movements of the 18th and 19th centuries.
How and why this came about are questions that continue to puzzle historians. By and large, interpretations of abolition tend to fall into two camps. The first, popularised during the 19th century, tends to explain abolition in terms of a moral or humanitarian movement.
The second, which can be traced back to the publication of Eric Williams’s book Capitalism and Slavery, in 1944, places much greater emphasis on economic factors. Controversially, Williams argued that abolition coincided with periods of general economic decline in the British Caribbean.
Abolition, in other words, was motivated purely by economic self-interest. Williams’s “decline thesis” remains a subject of ongoing historical inquiry. But if many of his arguments have been questioned, Williams was surely right in drawing attention to the connection between abolition and capitalism.
This is not to suggest that the spread of abolitionist ideas had to rest on the growth of the factory system and free-labour ideology, but that there was a link of some sort, perhaps a transformation of consciousness, evident in the desire on both sides of the Atlantic to dignify and honour labour, now seems indisputable. Abolition is perhaps best understood as the confluence of a number of different factors, some of them moral, some of them economic, and some of them ideological.
Properly speaking, the early abolitionist movement dates from the late 18th century. But there were attacks on slavery and the slave trade before this period. Enlightenment figures, such as French philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu, both expressed their disapproval of the Atlantic slave system, as did writers like Aphra Behn, the author of Oroonoko (1688), the story of an African enslaved in Suriname.
For the most part, these early critics focused on the inhumanity, cruelty, and immorality of the slave trade, themes that would be picked up by abolitionists in the 1780s. The case against colonial slavery was also greatly strengthened by political economists such as the Scottish Adam Smith, who argued that slave labour was costly and inefficient, certainly when compared to free wage labour.
Others went further, condemning slavery on the grounds that it was harmful to personal industry, profitable economy, and family life. Slavery was increasingly viewed by many eighteenth-century Britons (and Americans, too) as part of a “system” that appeared outmoded and in urgent need of repair.
An important lead also came from the Religious Society of Friends, known as Quakers. Convinced of the utter sinfulness of physical coercion, American Quaker activists, following Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, succeeded in making abolition a test of religious truth. In 1758, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting made involvement in the slave trade a disciplinary offence, leading to exclusion from all its business meetings.
Two years later Quakers in New England similarly changed their policy relating to slave merchants. Interestingly, there was an international or transatlantic dimension to this reform activity.
In 1761 the London Yearly Meeting also announced that any of its members found guilty of involvement in the slave trade would merit disownment. Underpinned by an intricate web of family connections and business contacts, international Quakerism would prove to be one of the most dynamic and enduring factors in the campaign against both slavery and the slave trade.
Important as these initiatives were, however, they did not yet constitute an organised movement. Here, an important catalyst came in the shape of the American Revolution. At an ideological level, the fate of Britain’s North American colonies unleashed a heated debate about political representation that was quite often framed in terms of slavery (disfranchisement) and freedom (the vote).
The revolutionaries’ commitment to freedom and equality necessarily led to growing unease over the legitimacy of slavery, as did the valour of the African Americans who enlisted in the Patriot cause. As physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush put it, “It would be useless for us to denounce the servitude to which the Parliament of Great Britain wishes to reduce us, while we continue to keep our fellow creatures in slavery just because their colour is different.”
Significantly, the Revolution witnessed the emergence of the first broad-based abolitionist organisations, in the shape of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (organized in 1775, reorganised in 1784) and the New York Manumission Society (1784). Soon, other groups appeared in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island and, for a short time, in Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky. Moreover, in 1794 an American Convention of Abolition Societies was formed in an unsuccessful effort to give the early abolitionist movement national scope.
The progress of abolition in America was initially swift. By 1788 no fewer than six states had legislated for the immediate abolition of the slave trade and two more, South Carolina and Delaware, had suspended it temporarily. Others, like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, had also gone further and made some provision for the gradual or immediate abolition of slavery itself. This was state action, however.
At the federal level there was no getting away from the fact that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had agreed to leave the slave trade intact until 1808. How this proposal had come to be adopted, first at Philadelphia and later by the ratifying conventions, bewildered many abolitionists, but nevertheless it was part of the Constitution, as was the clause recognizing slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation in the House of Representatives.
Of course, there was an obvious irony here. If the Revolution stimulated interest in abolition, the truth was that there were evident limits to the American conception of freedom, particularly where enslaved Africans were concerned. It was one thing to attack slavery in New England or the Middle Atlantic states, where it had been of only marginal significance, quite another to attack it in Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, or the Carolinas.
Here, American ideals of freedom and equality came into conflict with a southern plantocracy that jealously protected its economic and political interests; indeed, many of the principal revolutionaries, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were themselves slaveholders, and showed little inclination to abolish the institution of slavery. Instead, the Founding Fathers agreed to disagree over slavery, as part of a series of compromises that underpinned the adoption of the Constitution in 1787.
American abolitionists sought to circumvent the Constitution by appealing directly to the U.S. Congress. On February 11, 1790, two Quaker delegations from New York and Philadelphia presented petitions to the House of Representatives calling for an immediate end to the international slave trade.
This was followed the next day by a petition from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, signed and endorsed by Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, this time urging Congress to adopt measures against slavery as well as the slave trade.
The ensuing debate determined the broad lines of Congressional action for the next eighteen years. On March 23, the House of Representatives affirmed that it could neither abolish the slave trade, at least not before 1808, nor take any action affecting the emancipation of slaves. The Constitution, in other words, meant exactly what it said, a point made forcefully by figures like future president James Madison, who feared that any concessions to abolitionists might only invite the disunion of the infant American republic.
Nevertheless, the House of Representatives did go on to reserve its right to regulate the trade. In 1794, for instance, following intense pressure from abolitionists, Congress prohibited United States citizens from supplying slaves to foreigners. Similar commitments were also made regarding the “humane” treatment of Africans during the Middle Passage.
But Africa has not yet conquered slavery mentality. If you observe how African leaders treat their subjects, it’s a confirmation that most of them belong to the slavery world- they want to treat their people using an iron fist; they want to make decisions without considering consequences that may befall; they want to use the rare resources their countries have at their own will.
Many African companies do not even consider human resource as the most valuable resource; when employees request for better working conditions, they are either suspended or dismissed. Most Africans live a ‘robot’ life; they are controlled by an external force. Is it not that IMF, World Bank, United Nations that are controlling Africa?
Slave trade might have been abolished on paper but Africans are still battling it and this war must be won.
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