David Aaronovitch
THE LONDON INDEPENDENT

05 September 2001
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Internal links
Hostilities increase at racism summit over 'declaration of war
Leading article: The UN can still rescue something from the shambles in
Durban
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A couple of years back, there was a brief fashion for historical
hypotheticals. Authors speculated on how the entire course of human history
might have been changed if, say, a haemorrhoid-plagued Napoleon hadn't sent
Marshal Grouchy off on a cross-country chase after the Prussians just before
Waterloo. Or, had Hitler concentrated on Moscow in 1942, might we not all
now be celebrating his birthday in April, rather than the Queen's? And what
if Stonewall Jackson had not died at Chancellorsville; would he have won at
Gettysburg and would there now be two USAs?
I find this kind of speculation strangely tedious. It relies on extracting
and changing a single decision among the billions available. You cannot
easily unpick the past in that way, for all the efforts of national and
racial myth-makers and political rewriters to persuade us to do so. This is
the reason why there can be no useful attempt to make financial reparations
for the slave trade, as suggested by some groups at this week's UN
anti-racism conference in Durban.
Even so, I have been bemused by the lengths to which even some ordinary
British liberals have gone in denying any real historic responsibility for
slavery. Correspondents have written to their favourite newspapers arguing
that "we" were not entirely at fault. What about the African kings who sold
the captives in the first place? Or the Arab traders who had been about the
business for centuries before we took it up (and for some years after we'd
put it down again)? What about William Wilberforce? Wasn't Britain one of
the first countries to abolish slavery and to enforce abolition on others?
Some of these arguments sent me back to Hugh Thomas's excellent history, The
Slave Trade, published four years ago. How big was the business? Who
undertook it? And how did they justify it to themselves? And, above all, how
might we look at this were we ourselves the descendants of slaves (or, as
they are usually known, blacks)?
Not good. As a half-Jew, my view of William Cobbett, the 19th century
radical, has been transformed by an aspect of his ideology that my
schoolmasters never mentioned: his virulent anti-semitism. So what might a
black person make of those slave-holding champions of liberty, Thomas
Jefferson and George Washington or slave-holding Quakers such as George Fox
and William Penn (the Quakers were later to become the leading force in the
campaign for abolition)? Or of those slave-trading philanthropists, who
bequeathed upon the poor of their own race, charities amassed at the expense
of the liberty of hundreds of thousands of Africans?
Slave trading, as carried out by white Europeans after the middle of the
17th century, was conducted on what we'd now call an "industrial" scale. A
million slaves were transported between 1650 and 1700, and many more in each
of the next two half- centuries. Several times as many black people were
forcibly shipped to America between Columbus and the Alamo, as white people
who went voluntarily. In their millions we chained them, sold them, divided
their families without compunction and killed them for trying to be free.
And few benefited from it, as did the British. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713
awarded Britain the contract to run the slave trade to the Americas. This
the government sold off to the South Sea Company for an incredible £7.5m,
allowing the settlement of most of the national debt. The first Governor of
the Company was also the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shareholders in this
company included heroes such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. By the
1780s the French and British were each shipping some 40,000 slaves per year,
and running up incredible profits.
The drive for these profits transformed the economies of western Africa.
Contemporary sources quoted by Hugh Thomas relate how tribes that once
hunted for gold now fought to enslave one another. One area became known as
the Slave Coast (not a place that ever issued stamps).
Yet there was a problem. For most of that time our forebears did not think
that enslaving human beings was a good thing. It had been largely abandoned
in Christendom after the beginning of the 12th century, and was yet another
vice ascribed to the lustful, barbarous Turk.
What was the thing, after all, that Britons from the 18th century on - in
the words of that stirring anthem - never, never, never will be? And what
were we simultaneously turning millions of Africans into? How could it be
immoral to enslave one person and not another? Race. You had to argue that
Africans were insufficiently developed or human for enslavement to be the
horror to them that it would be for free-born Englishmen. Then you could go
on and make your money. True, there were other voices. The female dramatist
Aphra Behn, various popes going as far back as 1639, a puritan or two. But
liberators were few. How long, after all, would slavery have persisted in
the southern states of the USA had they not made the cardinal error of
seceding from the Union in 1861?
So look at us from the point of view of those descended from slaves, and who
then faced racism and discrimination from the descendants of the societies
who had actually shipped them. This forced migration was, if anything was, a
great historical crime. Yet there has been no Nuremberg for slave-traders.
There has been no court in which black judges and prosecutors could make the
case out against the white men who did these unspeakable things. There have
been no gallows, no portly merchants crunching on cyanide pellets to cheat
the hangman. There has been no "closure", to use the modern phrase.
Europeans (for the most part) ran the slave trade, colonised what was left
behind, killed off the native populations of North, Central and South
America and of Australia (question: what is the Aboriginal view of whether
white Australians should allow asylum-seeking Afghans into their country?)
and have got away with it.
Still, reparations are impossible. They are a pedant's delight. Should
Liverpudlians pay more? But many of them are great-grandchildren of catholic
Irish forced into emigration after the end of the slave trade. Should the
inhabitants of Toxteth shell out (via the government) for Colin Powell? And
who in Africa may be regarded as the successors of those kingdoms who
profited from slave-trading? It's playing the "what-if?" game again, except
with real money and genuine animosity. It cannot help.
There is a good case, however, for apology. You want to celebrate VE Day?
Fine, but that's history, too. You want the Japanese to apologise for the
Burma Railroad? OK, but what about the blood in our old bricks? There ought
to be a recognition of what was done and who did it.
And then we move on, because the question is not who's the victim, but how
easily any of us can become the victimiser. It's about how we can see the
world and ourselves through the eyes of others. It sticks in my craw to
watch the republican bigots of the Ardoyne claim the mantle of Martin Luther
King when fighting their turf wars with the Protestant bigots of the
Ardoyne. The civil rights movement didn't mark its territory with tribal
tricolours. Or to listen to pundits and politicians failing to ask even
elementary questions about why any Afghan who could, would want to escape,
preferably to an English-speaking country, no matter what the cost.
Despite the protestations of the Chief Rabbi, no-one, not even Jews, is
magically inoculated against prejudice. Nor are Palestinians. Nor are
Hampstead liberals. Racism and bigotry are about denying others the humanity
that we claim for ourselves. Imagination is the only antidote.