Slaving Away
While I am no archeologist or anthropologist, I think it’s agreed that man as we know him (homo sapiens) has existed for some 300,000 years. If we conservatively consider a generation as lasting an average of thirty years, that means there have been 10,000 generations of humans. If I stretch Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of expertise using the 10,000 Hour Rule, one might suggest that the human species should have learned a thing or two by now and be “experts” at being human. If I asked you when you thought legalized slavery ceased to exist anywhere in the world, what would you say? It surprised me to learn that it only ended in 2007 in Mauritania in the sense that it formally became a crime to own slaves. Despite that, the human rights advocates estimate that as many as 500,000 people may still live in slavery in that country. That feels decidedly sub-human.
That seems like a horrible and exceptional situation with 10% of the population of Mauritania in forced bondage. The more amazing statistic is that 40 million people in the world (0.5% of world population) are subject to some form of what is called “modern slavery”. This can range from outright sex trafficking ala Taken, all the way to debt bondage, child soldiers, forced marriage and even aspects of the caste systems that exist. Pretty much every culture since humankind began has lowered itself to endorse or at least condone slavery. It’s most often inflicted on some subgroup of foreign or ethic variation, but the reasons are consistent. Its derivations are almost always economic.
When I was on the Board of CARE, the international relief and development NGO, we took a Board trip to Benin in West Africa. Benin is listed as one of the ten most impoverished countries in the world. Benin and Togo are wedged between the much larger and more prosperous Ghana and Nigeria. We stayed in Cotonou, the capital, which is a stone’s throw west of the infamous Nigerian city of Lagos, the commercial center of West Africa. We would travel upcountry to village projects, but we also had some time in Cotonou to see the local sights. It turns out that the biggest sights in Cotonou happen to revolve around slavery. The African slave trade had been going on within Africa and with export to Europe, the Middle East and Asia for centuries, but the transatlantic trade took the trade to a whole new level starting with the Portuguese taking slaves to Brazil in the early sixteenth century. Benin became one of the two main hubs in this lucrative trade.
The most fascinating thing I learned at the slave trade museum in Cotonou (which understandably allowed no photography) was that the transatlantic slave trade was driven by the tribal chiefs of Benin. The African slave trade before 1500 was concentrated on trafficking to Europe across the Sahara and to the the Muslim world across the Red Sea. There was no slave trade from West Africa, but there was slavery of the local tribal variety. The Portuguese traders who were trading for other goods along the African coast found themselves across from the tribal chiefs of Benin (the five major contemporary ones of which we met with in Cotonou during our visit) just when they ran out of hard goods with which to trade. Rather than have these nice Portuguese boys go home empty-handed, the chiefs encouraged them to take some local slaves they had on hand. The Portuguese resisted, not being slave traders and not knowing where the market would be for a boatload of African flesh.
Some desperate Portuguese trader finally took the deal and then figured out that maybe their colonies in the new and wild lands of Brazil, where plantations of all sorts of crops badly needed labor supply, might be takers. It worked out well for them. Traders take no time at all to adapt to new market opportunities, so my comments in no way vindicate the slave traders. Very quickly the demand for slave labor in Latin America, the Caribbean and the expanding footprint in the agricultural southern colonies of America drove the trade more than the greed of African chiefs seeking salable product or to eradicate local tribal enemies forever. The point is that the lust for dominance over other human beings, however specifically motivated, is an age-old and ubiquitous tendency that is simply too human, even though the darker side of human. African population lost 35% of its souls to slavery, a full 5% of estimated worldwide population of the time. Not a little thing.
It is easy for us to think that slavery is a thing of the past. It was abolished in the United States (and I use that term loosely) 155 years ago. It took almost 100 of those years to legitimize the civil rights those enslaved people and I doubt that I must convince anyone that we still have a long way to go in this country and this world to create true racial equality.
That is why I was anxious to see the new movie called Harriet about the life of Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad during the pre-Civil War era and the only woman to ever command a full military unit into battle during the Civil War. She led a group of 150 black soldiers against Confederate gunboats in South Carolina. The movie is an inspiring story about a great American woman. She is the woman who is supposed to grace the front of our $20 bill, replacing the controversial slave-owning Andrew Jackson, one of Donald Trump’s favorite presidents. The always sycophantic Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has decided that such a bill change is simply not a priority and has tabled the conversion. After seeing the movie, I strongly agree that Harriet deserves a place in the daily lives of Americans. We must remind ourselves daily of what we cannot ever allow to happen again. I fear that our baser human instincts are never far from regressing, so reminders might be essential to this goal for righteousness.
I am inspired by the life and times of Harriet Tubman, but I am depressed and troubled by the research for this piece that informs me of the fragility of humanity and how prone we are as a species to dropping back into such an abusive and horrific reality that slavery represents. So, let us all slave away to remove an administration that seems more likely to slip us back into that direction.