This title was taken from a quote by a European observing the slave trade on the Gold Coast: “…Such as are allowed good and sound are set on one side… marked on the breast with a red-hot iron, imprinting the mark of the French, English, or Dutch companies….”
I’m continuing my journey into Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Your comments on the first diary (covering Native Americans in America) were excellent. I think some of the ideas presented by Zinn, and amplified by your commentary, might well fit in with my new interest in community activism. A very nice synchronicity.
Chapter two deals with early slavery in the Americas, and how this institution has shaped race relations. It is told from the perspective of the indigenous African people who were kidnapped, enslaved, and shipped like product (actually, handled far less kindly than any product I am familiar with) to the New World, so that the growing labor demands of the colonies could be satisfied.
In the beginning, Zinn, I think correctly lays out a very prescient focus for this topic, relying on the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois.
There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States. And the problem of “the color line,” as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, is still with us. So it is more than a purely historical question to ask: How does it start?–and an even more urgent question: How might it end? Or, to put it differently: Is it possible for whites and blacks to live together without hatred?
Still with us. Zinn first penned these words prior to the 1980 release of the book. Prior to Rodney King, saying it in layman’s terms. Prior to the Los Angeles riots. Prior to the disenfranchisement of African-American voters in Florida. Prior to Katrina. And it is still with us.
And, how could it not be? Given the history. Again, it begins with our destruction of a noble and advanced civilization.
Was their culture inferior–and so subject to easy destruction? Inferior in military capability, yes–vulnerable to whites with guns and ships. But in no other way–except that cultures that are different are often taken as inferior, especially when such a judgment is practical and profitable. Even militarily, while the Westerners could secure forts on the African coast, they were unable to subdue the interior and had to come to terms with its chiefs.
The African civilization was as advanced in its own way as that of Europe. In certain ways, it was more admirable; but it also included cruelties, hierarchical privilege, and the readiness to sacrifice human lives for religion or profit. It was a civilization of 100 million people, using iron implements and skilled in farming. It had large urban centers and remarkable achievements in weaving, ceramics, sculpture.
European travelers in the sixteenth century were impressed with the African kingdoms of Timbuktu and Mali, already stable and organized at a time when European states were just beginning to develop into the modern nation. In 1563, Ramusio, secretary to the rulers in Venice, wrote to the Italian merchants: “Let them go and do business with the King of Timbuktu and Mali and there is no doubt that they will be well-received there with their ships and their goods and treated well, and granted the favours that they ask….”
A Dutch report, around 1602, on the West African kingdom of Benin, said: “The Towne seemeth to be very great, when you enter it. You go into a great broad street, not paved, which seemeth to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes Street in Amsterdam…. The Houses in this Towne stand in good order, one close and even with the other, as the Houses in Holland stand.”
The inhabitants of the Guinea Coast were described around 1680 as “very civil and good-natured people, easy to be dealt with, condescending to what Europeans require of them in a civil way, and very ready to return double the presents we make them.”
And, as we learned in chapter one, and we know from our own experience, we have a pretty good idea about what advanced Western people are about to do. Right? Help them, right? To become more civilized, I mean, right? After all, they had their own hierarchical system where they were being oppressed, didn’t they?
Africa had a kind of feudalism, like Europe based on agriculture, and with hierarchies of lords and vassals. But African feudalism did not come, as did Europe’s, out of the slave societies of Greece and Rome, which had destroyed ancient tribal life. In Africa, tribal life was still powerful, and some of its better features–a communal spirit, more kindness in law and punishment–still existed. And because the lords did not have the weapons that European lords had, they could not command obedience as easily.
In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law in the Congo in the early sixteenth century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punished brutally. In England, even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life persisted, the idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines of various degrees of servitude. A Congolese leader, told of the Portuguese legal codes, asked a Portuguese once, teasingly: “What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground?”
Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the “slaves” of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe–in other words, like most of the population of Europe. It was a harsh servitude, but they had rights which slaves brought to America did not have, and they were “altogether different from the human cattle of the slave ships and the American plantations.”
* * *
African slavery is hardly to be praised. But it was far different from plantation or mining slavery in the Americas, which was lifelong, morally crippling, destructive of family ties, without hope of any future. African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.
In fact, it was because they came from a settled culture, of tribal customs and family ties, of communal life and traditional ritual that African blacks found themselves especially helpless when removed from this. They were captured in the interior (frequently by blacks caught up in the slave trade themselves), sold on the coast, then shoved into pens with blacks of other tribes, often speaking different languages.
What follows is a brutal account of the subjugation of African peoples. Horrid imprisonment on slave ships. Systematic destruction of any social systems which might allow for solidarity among slaves. Dehumanization of these human beings in law, and in practice. All in the pursuit of labor that was necessary for colonial development. While our civilization is built on the land of the Native Americans, it seems it is built, in large, large part, on the backs of captured Africans.
Given our history, is it any wonder that we end up with race based disasters like Katrina, where tens of thousands of disenfranchised African Americans are left behind, economically, and literally.
Interspersed with the telling of the systematic colonial torture of these people, is a tale of their fighting back in any way they had available to them. Contrary to the images I gleaned from my secondary history texts, of a Southern plantation as a pastoral picture of an orderly system, brave slaves fought against tyranny, sacrificing all in many instances in a quest for freedom and family.
In closing, the chapter reminds me again of what happened most recently in New Orleans. Zinn explains how the power elite of the day much feared a black uprising, especially if the slaves were joined by the disenfranchised white population – basically a peasant class in the south, including indentured servants. In many instances these alliances did form to fight an unjust system. Zinn explains the response by the ruling class:
And so, measures were taken. About the same time that slave codes, involving discipline and punishment, were passed by the Virginia Assembly,
Virginia’s ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them. In 1705 a law was passed requiring masters to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings, and a gun, while women servants were to get 15 bushels of corn and forty shillings. Also, the newly freed servants were to get 50 acres of land.
Morgan concludes: “Once the small planter felt less exploited by taxation and began to prosper a little, he became less turbulent, less dangerous, more respectable. He could begin to see his big neighbor not as an extortionist but as a powerful protector of their common interests.”
And so, Zinn begins to answer the questions he posed at the outset.
How did it start? — With an unimaginably brutal oppression, nurtured by the hand of the ruling class. All in the name of profit. And, then in the name of security against the instruments of that profit, namely the African American slaves who took a large part in building this country.
How might it end? — Three-hundred and fifty-years has not changed so much. Our modern version of this tragedy, you saw most recently in the aftermath of Katrina. A white community, itself denied the advantages of the ruling class, defending the bridge to their community, as poor black evacuees sought a way from the storm’s destruction. At least that is one small glimpse. Can it be any more plain than this simple image? We, as people, all people, face daunting challenges from our environment. Learned scholars say that there are threats to our continued existence. Bird Flu. Peak Oil. Global Warming. The list could literally go on for pages, I think. And, we busy ourselves not uniting to face real and common hurdles which we must overcome as a species. Instead, we turn (or are turned) and battle one another. Quibbles over quotas. Patriots defending borders. It is the height of insanity.
Is it possible for whites and blacks to live together without hatred? — White politicians and commentators still seek to separate poor whites from any solidarity with the black community, fanning the flames of hatred and racism as if in a forge. And without systemic change to end this artificial division, I am not optimistic.
This injustice should not continue to stand. Not when its mechanism are laid bare. Education is a step, albeit a small one. My hat’s off to this book. I think it deserves a more ready place in the Kansas curriculum than the works of pseudo-scientists.
