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.
I’ve got mixed feelings about Femi Oluwole. He appears regularly on debates about race and slavery on GB News and Talk TV, where he strongly gives the impression that he believes Britain is a terribly racist place and owes Blacks reparations because of historical slavery. On one of these occasions he was opposing one of the female Tory MPs, who wanted a monument put up to the British sailors who died battling slavery and the slave trade in the 19th century. He, on the other hand, still felt Britain was deeply stained with guilt, because we shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place. Instead he wanted statues put up to the slaves and their descendants.
I’m afraid I agree with his Tory opponent. It’s true that we shouldn’t have been slaving, but the Tory is right in that we were among the first to ban the slave trade and slavery. The first country to ban it was Denmark. We were the second. And although it’s obvious to us now that slavery is a massive crime against humanity, it was by no means so obvious before it was outlawed in the 19th century. There had been voices raised against it throughout history, but these were mostly just a minority and slavery was widely accepted by cultures across the globe. Those attacking Britain for its role in historic slavery don’t realise that it wasn’t as blindingly obvious then as it is now, and ignore the participation of other cultures. For example, it was African cultures that sold slaves to Europeans, and an examination of the voluminous records of the Dutch overseas trading company, the VOC, shows that in almost all cases it was Black African merchants and slavers who approached the Europeans.
And abolition of the slave trade was certainly not welcomed by the African slaving nations themselves. We went to war with Dahomey over their slaving, as well as against the slaving tribes in what is now Malawi and Zimbabwe. In 1828 West African slavers attacked a British trading post hoping to force us to take up slaving again, and Britain paid compensation and subsidies to some nations in order to prevent them for continuing the trade. This is forgotten, and I’ve never seen it mentioned in the debates over historic slavery. Also, the British naval patrols in west Africa were assisted by indigenous African auxiliaries, such as the Egba. They were eligible for the same compensation for injuries received on the battlefield as British matelots. One of the documents I read at the former Empire and Commonwealth Museum was an inquiry from one naval commander to the admiralty about this question. An Egba seaman serving with us had had a finger shot off. The commander asked whether he could get compensation. The admiralty replied in the affirmative, as this would encourage other indigenous Africans to assist us in extirpating the trade.
And also, if you’re going to put monuments up to the victims of the slave trade, this would have to include the slaves we liberated from other slaving nations, including the Islamic states, as well as the White slaves of the Barbary pirates. And I could imagine this leading to a massive row about racism and islamophobia.
This issue aside, some of the material Femi produces is very good indeed. The Eurosceptic, Reform-leaning right hate him ’cause, apart from the race issue, he’s a critic of Brexit and argues that we should rejoin. Well, even a certain internet non-historian has put out a video now arguing that the EU had nothing to do with mass immigration. This contradicts the claims of the right-wing Brexiteers, like Bojob and Farage. But Mike over on Vox Political and other left-wing critics were pointing out that the EU wasn’t responsible for it at the time, simply by citing the relevant international treaties. The legislation allowing immigrants and asylum seekers to move from one European country to another was the Schengen Agreement, which was separate from the EU treaties and which we weren’t party to. And globally, asylum seekers were covered by the International Treaty on the Refugee, signed in the 1950s, and which the anti-immigrant right are now grumbling about and would like to see Britain leave. Going back to Femi, all the arguments I’ve seen put up by him against Brexit are simply about how its damaged our economy with attacks on the racism of those from the right who argued for it. As it really has seriously damaged Britain’s industry and agriculture, the replies I’ve seen tend to be rants calling him stupid. Which he isn’t.
In this video, Femi tackles the knotty question of Labour’s support for Proportional Representation. The grassroots membership want it, it’s been included in one of the party’s policy documents, but leading Labour MPs don’t want it at all. The video begins with Femi saying he’s been banned from the conference. He runs alongside Wes Streeting trying to tackle him on it. Streeting tells him ‘it’s not a priority’. He gets the same response from Liz Kendall and Lucy Powell. He tries telling them that under the present system the majority of votes cast in this country don’t count, but they ignore him. They’re happy how the First Past the Post System works because it’s thrown up a Labour government with them in it.
Femi ends the video by stating that this attitude is selfish. Most of the votes cast in elections are for left-wing parties, but under the First Past the Post System the winning party is most frequently the Conservatives. They’ve won the majority of elections over the past eighty years with the occasional Labour government. Labour is happy with the system because it has resulted in a Labour government this time, and politicians like Streeting, Kendall and Powell are personally happy because they’re now in government. But it ignores the wishes of the mass of voters and condemns future generation to more Tory governments.
It’s an important video, because Open Britain has been campaigning for reforms to the electoral system to make it more democratic, including introducing Proportional Representation. They’ve set up an All-Party Parliamentary Group for this. But this shows that the ruling Blairite faction definitely don’t want it.
Possibly because they know full well that Labour was only elected with its massive majority with only a narrow percentage of the vote, 30 per cent or so. Which means that from their point of view, introducing PR would, in the words of Sir Humphrey Appleby of fond memory, be
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