Civitas Blog

For what the government has chosen to do in the official literature it has produced about the bicentenary is to focus solely on the British transatlantic slave trade that ended on 25 March 1807 by being made illegal. It presents that trade as a prime case of racism on the part of whites towards blacks, going out of its way to minimise the role white British Christians had in ending the slave trade. It also passes by the fact that what those who campaigned for its end were really focussed on was ending slavery as such, only stopping the trade in slaves as a first politically obtainable goal. The government also fails to mention how, after defeating Napoleon, who had reintroduced slavery into the French colonies after its abolition some years earlier there, Britain secured agreement from all the major European powers and also the USA to end all transatlantic slave trafficking within their own jurisdictions. And it omits, if not exactly to mention then to make much of, how, finally, in 1833, the true goal of William Wilberforce and of the other members of the Clapham sect was achieved -- namely ending slavery in the West Indies. This was made possible, by the way, courtesy of a £20 million loan to the British government from Baron de Rothschild which enabled it to pay compensation to the slave-owners in the West Indies for what they had lost and without which slavery would not have ended then. This is a detail of which too I have heard little mention in the propaganda about the event and its significance coming from the government.

For, as mentioned, that on which it has chosen to dwell is ‘the racism’ of the British in having used and transported slaves, and in having got rich at their expense and, allegedly thereby, at the expense of the continent from which they were taken. The government’s take on Sunday’s bicentenary is divisive, as is its new programme of more affirmative action on behalf of Britain’s less well-off minorities that it has linked to the slave-trade by suggesting such action is licensed by the need to remedy the legacy of slavery.

You may think I am exaggerating in the distorted spin I have accused the government of putting on the anniversary, but to show that I haven’t, I merely refer you some of the websites on which their propaganda can be found.

For example, in a speech he gave last November about this coming Sunday’s anniversary and the government’s approach towards celebrating it, Tony Blair began by saying: ‘The transatlantic slave trade stands as one of the most inhuman enterprises in history... Racism… drove the horrors of the triangular trade. Some 12 million were transported. Some three million died.’

The same sentiments as the Prime Minister’s find an echo in the document published on the website of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, in the names of David Lammy, Minister for Culture, and Paul Coggins, Minister for Communities and Race Equality. The document is entitled, ‘Reflecting the past and looking to the future: The 2007 Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire’. It states:

‘There is a strong view held by many people that the repercussions of the slave trade and slavery resonate down through the centuries – in Africa, the United States, the Caribbean and South America and here in the United Kingdom. It is argued that some of these effects, … [which] include racism, poverty, and conflict … continue to echo today in streets workplaces and homes in this country.’

This was a missed opportunity by the government. What it could and should have said about the event being commemorated, something that would have fostered social cohesion rather than resentment and feelings of victimhood, was just how ubiquitous slavery was in Africa at the time it became opened up to Europeans in the early sixteenth century; also how deeply implicated both Africans and Arabs were in its practice in Africa; and just how crucial and instrumental was the role Britain played in putting an end to slavery on that continent, in so far as an end to it has been put there, which, sadly, is less than complete.

To have dwelt on these aspects of the event whose anniversary is being commemorated would have made, or could, have been used to make, all Britain’s citizens appreciate just what a great country they are citizens of and how glad and appreciative they should feel to be citizens of it. Instead, what we have got is the white British being portrayed as villains, or beneficiaries of villainy, and black and other least well-off ethnic minorities here being portrayed as victims, or as suffering from the legacy of slavery, which is a divisive distortion of the truth.

To correct the balance, I should like to end by quoting two present-day black American authors whose ancestors were slaves, but who seem to have a far better understanding of slavery than that which our government is encouraging the British populace to have.

The first author is the George Mason University economist Walter Williams. The remarks I quote form part of his response to a resolution recently passed by the General Assembly of Virginia which ranked government-sanctioned slavery ‘as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation’s history’. Williams writes:

‘Isn’t that nice? I agree that slavery is an abomination, but I’m going to be even more generous than Virginia’s General Assembly. I regret the murder of an estimated 61 million people whom the former USSR executed, starved beat or tortured to death. I also regret the Chinese government’s slaughter of 45 million Chinese; Hitler’s slaughter of 6 million Jews; the Khmer Rouge’s murder of 2 million Cambodians; the half a million Ugandans murdered by Idi Amin’s death squads; the million Hutus and Tutsis murdered in Rwanda’s genocidal bloodbath; and slavery that still exists in Sudan and Mauritania’.

This puts into some kind of context, and shows how deeply tendentious is, Blair’s assertion that: ‘The transatlantic slave trade stands as one of the most inhuman enterprises in history.’

Something which does so even more is the following passage from Keith Richburg’s book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. In this book, he recounts all the depredations of war, corruption, and oppression that he saw there, and what he felt about them, when he worked there as bureau chief for the Washington Post between 1991 and 1994. Richburg writes:

‘ A feeling that I was really unable to express out loud until the end, as I was packing my bags to leave… [and] that pained me to admit … haunts me; I’ve been too embarrassed to say it. So let me drop the charade and put it simply as I know how: There but for the grace of God go I. You see, I was seeing all of this horror a bit differently because of the colour of my skin. I am … a black man, a descendant of slaves brought from Africa. When I see these nameless, face-less, anonymous bodies washing over a waterfall or piled up on the back of trucks, what I see most is that they look like me.

‘Sometime, maybe four hundred or so years ago, one of my ancestors was taken from his village, probably by a local chieftain. He was shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding pen … and then he was put in the crowded filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World…. Generations on down the line, one of his descendants was taken to south Carolina. Finally, a more recent descendant, my father, moved to Detroit to find a job in an auto plant during the Second World War.

‘ And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and that thirty five years later, [as] a black man born in white America, I was in Africa, birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge of a river … watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that’s when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them – or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes…, and so I thank God my ancestors survived that voyage...

‘Condemning slavery should not inhibit us from recognising mankind’s ability to make something good arise in the aftermath of the most horrible evil… So excuse me if I sound cynical [and] jaded. I’m beaten down, and I’ll admit it… It’s Africa that made me this way… I still recoil in horror whenever I see yet another television picture of another tribal slaughter, another refugee crisis. But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them. In short, Thank God I am an American.’

Rightly presented Sunday’s anniversary could have served as an occasion to make every British citizen thank God (fate, or whatever) that they are British. Sadly, it was an opportunity that the government squandered from a combination of political correctness and the misguided hyper-activism that has marked and marred its entire term in office.