This photo from 1868 came up on Monday on my Google news feed, and I’ve been meaning to put it up here since. But alas, I haven’t got round to it until now. The current controversy and debate over White European and American complicity in the slave trade and the demand for reparations has overshadowed the fact that, after Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, it acted as the world’s policeman against the abominable trade. It signed a series of treaties with different countries, such as France and, in the Indian Ocean, the Imaum of Muscat banning the trade. These treaties gave the signatories the reciprocal right of search to board and examine any vessel they suspected of carrying slaves. Suspected slaving ships were seized and taken to Sierra Leone, where a mixed court with representatives from Britain and the ship’s nation would judge it’s case. If found guilty, the ship would be seized and the crew of the capturing naval ship awarded its prize money, and the slaves aboard it would be freed. These could stay in Sierra Leone, originally founded by the British Anti-Slavery Society as a colony for freed slaves, or transported to the West Indies as ‘liberated Africans’. They were officially registered to show that they were legally taken there, rather than illegally imported slaves, and apprenticed to masters and employers, who would teach them a trade. The officers in charge of the ships patrolling the seas and oceans against the slave trade were largely evangelical Anglican Christians.
This photo shows the grim reality of the trade. In contrast to the myth of White sailors violently taking Black Africans, the slaves were captured by Black Africans themselves in raids termed razzias. They were then transported to the coast, where they were then sold to European and American slavers. Before the Scramble for Africa and the expansion of European conquest and colonization in the 19th century, powerful African coastal states prevented European penetration of the continent. Resident European slavers were kept isolated in their own ghettoes in the West African city states. Examination of the copious ledger and documents compiled by the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, shows that in the overwhelming majority of cases it was the African slavers who approached Europeans to sell their slaves, rather than Europeans approaching Africans.
The families of the boys in this picture were almost certainly killed by the slave raiders, although the registers of incoming freed slaves in the West Indies do record women with their children and the separation of mothers from their children was not allowed. It6 is to this country’s great credit that after its involvement in the trade that it turned so resolutely against it, patrolling the seas from the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 