International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition

 

Every year on 23 August, the world observes the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. The day is marked to “inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of all peoples,” according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

The legacy of the transatlantic slave trade still lives on. It began in the 15th century and only ended in the 19th. Even today, the descendants of slaves deal with horrific racism. This led to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. Nothing in human history compares with the slave trade’s magnitude, cruelty or sustained brutality.

Slavery was not a new institution in the 15th century. It was invented even before the Middle Ages. In ancient times, the losing side in war was often enslaved and made to pay for its misfortune with servitude. Slavery was common in the Roman world. In the 10th century, the Vikings captured men and women in their raids and then sold them off in the slave markets along the Volga River and the Caspian Sea.  

The colonial empires of Western Europe were the main benefiters from the transatlantic slave trade. The trade transported people, mainly from Africa, in inhuman conditions to work as slaves in the colonial settlements in Haiti, Caribbean, and other parts of the world.

As the slave trade developed, Europeans created a racist ideology which could be used to justify the trade. Africans were thought to be sub-human, uncivilised, and inferior to Europeans in every way. And as they were ˜not one of us, they could be bought and sold. The development of racism is linked to the slave trade. The slave trade could not have continued without this ideology to justify it. Racism cannot be ignored in any study of the slave trade.

The English had equated blackness with death and evil centuries before they met any black people. Thus the first reaction to people with black skin was to assume that they were some form of devil or monster. From this, and from travellers tales, arose the stereotype of the African, as barbarous, prone to excessive sexual desire, lazy, untrustworthy and even cannibalistic. There were few who challenged this prejudiced view. Richard Ligon, in his book A true & exact history of the Island of Barbados, published in 1657, wrote against the popular view. He believed ‘that there are as honest, faithfull, and conscionable people amongst them, as amongst those of Europe

From about 1600, with the development of science in Europe, racism could be˜proved  scientifically. Scientists and philosophers like David Hume could state that Africans were˜naturally inferior to the whites It was widely believed that Africans and Europeans had developed separately. Many, like Sir Thomas Herbert, writing in 1634, believed that Africans must be descended from apes and were part of a separate and inferior race. This was long before Charles Darwin theory of evolution, which showed that all humans are part of the same species.

In the era of joint-stock companies, the transatlantic slave trade exploded. The United Kingdom’s National Archives tell us that “Britain transported 3.1 million Africans (of whom 2.7 million arrived) to the British colonies in the Caribbean, North and South America and to other countries” between 1640 and 1807. An estimated 7 million slaves were transported from Africa to America in the 18th century. This figure for the period between the 16th to the 19th century is estimated at 10 to 12 million. 

Human beings were forcibly removed from their African families and communities and loaded onto ships owned and fitted out by Liverpool, Bristol and West Country merchants, to endure the horrific Middle Passage from Africa to the New World. Only 466,000 reached their destination, and 99,000 died on route, and their bodies most likely flung overboard to be eaten by sharks.

For those who managed to survive, they were then sold at auction into the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of the Caribbean and the southern states of America.

The majority, some 414,000, ended up as field slaves on Jamaica, the Leeward and Windward islands. Here their daily task was working the cane fields, harvesting the stalks and processing them in the crushing and boiling houses and

 Mortality rates were extremely high and the slaves were accommodated in primitive conditions with only the most basic food. For much of the period they could be tortured, murdered and raped with impunity. Those that did survive could only expect to live another 2 to 4 years, so bad were the working conditions in the plantations. Many slaves tried to escape or rebel, and even suicides were a daily occurrence.

Meanwhile the  merchants become exceptionally rich on this human misery.The fabulous wealth generated by slavery and the trading system which thrived around it provided the capital for the development of industry and commerce, which laid the foundations for the birth of modern capitalism. The fact was that the wealth of the Western countries was built on the backs of Black slave labor is a point many historians seem to conveniently forget or ignore.

In the 18th and 19th century, many white people were horrified by the brutality  of  the slave trade and wanted for freedom for the slaves. But this led the people who supported it to develop theories to justify what they were doing. They claimed that some slaves had caught a rapidly spreading disease, the symptoms of which made the slaves run away! Blacks were naturally lazy, people were told, which is why they hated working on the plantation. Defenders of the slave trade also said that blacks were less intelligent than whites; they were “sub-human” and had tails. These ideas were backed by church leaders, writers and academics and soon a large number of myths about black people were spread about Europe. “The African slave in America was happier than in his own civilisation”— slavery supporter quoted in CLR James “The Black Jacobins”

Also the belief in the superiority of the British and European races fed the expansion of the empire. The British empire grew from the idea ˜that the British were the best race to rule the world  a view expressed by Cecil Rhodes, the colonial administrator who founded the British colony of Rhodesia, in
Central Africa (now Zimbabwe).

 During the lengthy reign of King George III, from 1760 to 1820, Atlantic slave uprisings and a multiracial coalition of abolitionists transformed the British public’s view of the slave trade at the same time the Crown supported its continuation. 

The night of 22-23 August 1791 saw the beginning of an uprising in Santo Domingo, in modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic. The uprising in the French colony inspired the Haitian Revolution. It also played a major role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.The uprising conveyed a universal demand for freedom that transcends all limits of time and space. It speaks to humanity as a whole, without distinction of origin or religion, and continues to resonate now with undiminished force.

Therefore, the United Nations (UN) decided to commemorate this day as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.

 Although the Slave Trade Act of 1807 had made it illegal for British subjects to buy or sell African captives, demand for slaves remained high in the Caribbean, Brazil, the Spanish colonies, and the United States. After 1808, as the illegal slave trade flourished, European enslavers transported millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas, many in ships built, financed, or outfitted in Britain.

 In the decades after the abolition of the British slave trade, enslaved and free people of African descent petitioned the Crown repeatedly, seeking royal intervention on their behalf in their quest for liberty and civil rights. These petitions largely fell on deaf ears. Even after Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which ended slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape Colony (South Africa), enslaved people did not immediately receive their freedom. The negotiated settlement required enslaved men and women to continue to labor for their former masters as unpaid “apprentices” and also granted 20million pounds in compensation to Britons with financial interests in slavery. Formerly enslaved people and their descendants received nothing, other than recognition of their status as free subjects of the British sovereign.

However the pro-slavery views of the king and his sons bolstered the efforts of the London Society of West India Planters and Merchants to delay the abolition of the British slave trade for nearly two decades. George’s third son, Prince William (the future King William IV), served in the Royal Navy as a teenager and was the first member of the royal family to visit Britain’s North American and Caribbean colonies. While stationed in Jamaica, William witnessed colonial slavery firsthand and approved of what he saw. In 1799, William, now the Duke of Clarence, delivered his maiden speech in the House of Lords against the abolition of the slave trade. Printed by the pro-slavery lobby and widely circulated, his speech was viewed by many Britons as representative of the attitudes of the royal family.

It was only after 1838, with both slavery and the apprenticeship system at an end in Britain’s Atlantic empire, the British monarchy publicly supported the anti-slavery cause for the first time.

International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its AbolitionThe day is marked to remember and honour the victims of the slave trade and the systemic racism they endured. It also hopes to foster critical analyses of such practices that might transform into modern forms of exploitation and slavery.

 The UN hoped that the day would be an opportunity for collective reconsideration of the historical causes, consequences, and methods of the tragedy.

 UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that while the transatlantic slave trade was abolished more than two centuries ago, the world continues “to live in its shadows of racial injustice”. He called upon the need to combat racism, dismantle racist structures, and reform institutions.

 Officially acknowledging that the royal family both fostered and profited from the enslavement of millions, and affirming a commitment to reparatory justice as the Caribbean Community has urged the governments of Britain and Europe to do, is the very least the present-day British monarchy owes to the descendants of enslaved people.

The Crown’s act of willful forgetting demonstrates how easy it was to overlook,then and now,the pivotal role played by the royal family in accelerating England’s involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the development of an Atlantic empire built on the backs and blood of African and Indigenous people.

On 23 August this year, we honour the memory of the men and women who, in Saint- Domingue in 1791, revolted and paved the way for the end of slavery and dehumanization. We honour their memory and that of all the other victims of the slave trade and slavery, for whom they stand..

We pay tribute to all those who campaigned, black and white, to abolish the trafficking of enslaved labour, particularly the enslaved African men and women themselves.  Once and for all, it is time to abolish human exploitation and to recognize the equal and unconditional dignity of each and every individual on Earth. Today, let us remember the victims and freedom fighters of the past so that they may inspire future generations to build just societies while continuing to oppose all forms of modern slavery, and remembering that ending Slavery's legacy of racism is  a global imperative for justice.

As we pause to remember the horrors of the past, we are driven by the acts of defiance and the relentless efforts that abolished slavery. Yet, amidst our progress, we're confronted with the unsettling truth that millions of people globally are still exploited in modern slavery, including over 100,000 in the UK alone.