Five Thousand Years of Slavery

by Marjorie Gann

  Bit by bit, news of what was happening in the Congo leaked out. Black American journalist George Washington Williams witnessed the atrocities firsthand, and boldly accused Leopold of sponsoring slavery. “The labor force at the stations of your Majesty’s Government in the Upper River is composed of slaves of all ages and both sexes,” he wrote. By 1908, Leopold was in disgrace. He turned over his personal state to the Belgian government. Belgium continued to control the rubber industry. Although it put an end to the mutilations and hostage-taking, and even prohibited slavery, it kept the workers in slavelike conditions for decades to come.

  Colonization

  At first Europeans were drawn to Africa for the riches it could supply, but by the second half of the nineteenth century they began to move in. The age of colonization had begun. Though their countryfolk back in Europe were against slavery, many colonists were afraid to upset local people by tampering with their traditional way of life, which relied on slaves and slave trading. The colonists and their African allies sometimes joined forces. For example, in 1848 France abolished slavery, meaning that the slaves in France’s island colonies of St-Louis and Gorée, in today’s Senegal, were freed. But rather than helping the ex-slaves build a new life, French authorities in those colonies expelled them to the mainland as “vagabonds.”

  Today, although slavery is no longer legal in Africa, far too many people can still tell their own stories of being slaves. The final chapter of the long saga of African slavery has not been written.

  THE TALE OF MELI

  Meli was just five years old when warriors captured her in what is now Zambia. She and other captives were forced to march for miles, carrying chickens, cooking pots, and other loot from their devastated village. If a mother collapsed, too exhausted to keep carrying the heavy loads and her baby, the marauders tied the baby up into a bundle and hung the child from a tree to starve. To them, chickens and cooking pots were worth more than children.

  Years later, Meli told the story of her terrible experience to her son. “Hunger said, ‘[I’ll be] wherever you go!’ ” she told him.

  Our captors wondered how to feed such a large crowd. Their leader said, “Roast maize for them to chew.” They roasted the maize and beans but gave us only beans. You should have heard the sounds that we made: kukutu, kukutu, kukutu. We sounded like goats chewing maize. After we finished eating our beans, thirst also said, “[I’ll be] wherever you go!” We asked for water. They said, “Where have you seen water? You may as well drink your own urine.” We spent the night with dry throats.

  Meli’s first owner was a man who put her to work drying harvested grain by the fire. Chilled by the damp cold, she threw extra wood on the fire. A spark set the hut ablaze:

  I shouted, “Help! The hut is on fire!”

  The man and his wife were furious and they scolded me very strongly. The husband, mad with rage, seized me and almost threw me into the fire. But, thank God, the woman objected strongly, saying, “Do not bring evil upon us. Don’t you know that this person belongs to a chief’s family?”

  The man said, “You have been saved! But from now on you will eat only wild things you find yourself.”

  Meli became too sick to work, so her owner threw her into a pit to die. She was saved from starvation by a little boy who brought her bits of pumpkin to eat. She recovered, only to be sold again and again until she ended up in a strange village.

  There she heard a rumor that white men had ordered an end to slave trading. But before she could learn whether that was true, she became sick again and was sold to Arab traders who marched her away with their other slaves. As they traveled, one brave man offered to show the Arabs a route that would let them avoid the white men, who were on the lookout for slave traders. The Arabs gave him permission to survey the route. He went straight to white officials and told them everything, and they set a trap for the slavers.

  Early the next morning the horn sounded telling us to tie up our bundles. The second horn sounded, signifying departure time.… After a short while we heard gunshots. Everybody was scared and jumped and scattered into the bush. What confusion! … I went to the anthill where I found a little boy, hidden. He said, “Hide your head in the elephant grass. Get down. Don’t let them see us.” As I was stooping, another child joined us.

  The children remained hidden, not realizing that the shots were aimed at the Arabs. When the shooting stopped, they had no idea where they were or whom to trust. All they knew was that they were hungry. Eventually they made their way to a white Christian mission at a nearby village, where they saw a woman sitting and sewing.

  We went up to her, greeted her, and sat nearby.… She said, “… we are very happy that you have arrived safely.” As she talked to us I noticed that she had no toes. I drew Maci’s attention and said, “Oh, look, she has no toes! Her foot is all smooth and round.” My friend said, “Yes! Even those who sent us here had similar feet.” Shortly after, the husband came and greeted us; he, too, had no toes! We then wondered how these people were made. Of course we realized later that they wore shoes.

  Though Meli was reunited with her family, she stayed in the missionary world for the rest of her life.

  CHAPTER 6

  EXPLORERS, LABORERS, WARRIORS, CHIEFS: THE AMERICAS

  Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492 to find a westerly route by sea to the “Indies” in the East, the source of precious spices, gold, and boundless riches. Instead, he landed in the Bahamas, not far from Florida. He’d stumbled upon a place most Europeans did not know existed.

  Columbus called the natives Indians because he thought he was in the Indies. This artist imagines him meeting them and offering them cheap trinkets.

  Photo Credit 6.1

  When Columbus and his crew came ashore, both the Europeans and the native people were amazed by what they saw. Columbus described his impressions in his journal. We will never know if he interpreted the North Americans’ behavior correctly, but he wrote that the Europeans looked otherworldly to the natives because they had never before seen white people, not to mention people wearing pantaloons and doublets. And though the Spaniards came on ships, the native people thought they had descended from the heavens. Columbus can’t have understood their language, but he claimed that they shouted, “Come! Come! See the people from the sky!”

  The natives looked equally exotic to the Europeans. Columbus wrote, “They went naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover one place only with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton which they make for that.” He described them as generous and hospitable and said they had all greeted the Europeans “so that not one, big or little, remained behind, and all brought something to eat and drink, which they gave with marvelous love.”

  Columbus may have admired the American natives, but everywhere he traveled – from as far north as the Bahamas, through the Caribbean, and into Honduras and Panama – he looked on every person he met as a potential slave. Although they vastly outnumbered the Europeans, he knew that he could capture them easily. He and his crew had guns and steel knives and swords. The natives did not.

  In 1494 Columbus wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, “Whenever Your Highnesses may command, all of them [natives] can be taken to Castile or held captive in this same island; because with 50 men all of them could be held in subjection and can be made to do whatever one might wish.” The royal couple told Columbus not to resort to slavery, but he had found no other valuables to send to Spain. In 1495 he captured about 1,600 Taino people in Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti). Of them, 500 men and women were loaded onto ships for sale in Spain. He let the Spaniards who were staying behind choose slaves for themselves from among the remaining Tainos.

  The kidnapped natives suffered terribly on the voyage. By the time they reached Spain, only three hundred were still alive, and half of those were ill. The survivors were sold in Seville, but most of them died soon after they landed.

  Columbus
took slaves, but he did not bring the idea of slavery to the Americas. It was already there. The “Indians,” as he called them, were not one single people. From the northernmost points of North America to the southernmost points of South America, and east to west across the continents, lived people with different languages, religions, physical characteristics, and ways of life. For hundreds of years before and after Columbus’s arrival, they captured one another for use as slaves.

  DEFEATING THROUGH DISEASE

  Far more native people were killed by the Europeans’ diseases than by their weapons. Smallpox was common in Europe at that time, and people who did not die from it developed immunity to it. The disease was unknown in the Americas until the Spaniards arrived. Many historians believe that smallpox killed most of the Tainos of Hispaniola between 1494 and 1496. No one knows exactly how many Tainos there were when Columbus first arrived – perhaps as many as five hundred thousand. By the year 1540, only five hundred remained. Smallpox and other diseases, such as typhus and influenza, had ravaged the native population throughout North and South America. Smallpox had killed about half the Aztec population in Mexico, for example, and wiped out many of the Incas of South America.

  The Tupinamba of Brazil

  The Tupinamba people, who lived in what is now Brazil, practiced both slavery and human sacrifice. Their huge thatched houses, built around a central plaza, could accommodate two hundred people, with special areas for the heads of families, their relatives, and slaves they’d captured in war. Although the slaves lived in their masters’ homes, the Tupinamba always considered them outsiders. Even though some slaves lived with their masters for years, every slave knew what was coming: death in a horrible religious ritual.

  Until that day, the Tupinamba tried to keep their slaves healthy and happy, and at times even found wives for the men. But they could also be very cruel: they tied ropes around their slaves’ necks, decorated with one bead for each month the slaves had left to live.

  The sacrifice ritual lasted several days. First, they teased the slave by letting him or her try to escape. When they caught the victim, which they always did, they performed an elaborate ritual that included dancing and singing. They decorated the slave and chose one Tupinamba to club the slave to death. Afterward, the body was dismembered and roasted, and the victim’s flesh was eaten. The heads of the victims were displayed on poles.

  The Aztecs

  The Aztecs had a powerful, complex empire that controlled central and southern Mexico from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. People were divided into three classes – noble, commoner, and slave – and slaves were bought and sold in a marketplace near today’s Mexico City. Slavery was not hereditary, and often it was not even permanent. Children of slaves were born free.

  Aztecs had strict rules about slaves who sold themselves to pay debts. An owner who was dissatisfied with a slave and wanted to sell the person to someone else had to ask the slave’s permission. But the owner could sell the slave if he had witnesses who had seen him scold the slave for bad behavior, and if the scolding had not changed the slave’s behavior. If a slave had been sold three times, the last owner could sell him for sacrifice.

  The Aztecs’ most important god was Huitzilopochtli, a sun god. They believed that he needed sacrificial blood to rise in the morning. Slaves who were sacrificed were usually men, and were often debtor slaves or slaves from foreign lands.

  At the top of a massive stepped pyramid, this Aztec priest is cutting out the heart of a living person, most likely a slave, as a sacrifice to the god Huitzilopochtli.

  Photo Credit 6.2

  The People of the Totem Pole

  The northwest coast of North America, from Alaska to northern California, was home to several nations that were often at war with one another. The Tlingit of southeast Alaska and the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands raided one another for women and children. The Nootka encouraged the nations who lived around what is now Vancouver to fight one another so they could buy up the survivors. Only Nootka kings and chiefs could own slaves. Europeans asked one chief if he would like to go to England. He said no. “I have slaves who hunt for me, paddle me in my canoe, and have my wife to attend me. Why should I care to leave?” In England he would have to work.

  Throughout the northwest owners traded their slaves, so that many ended up far from home. A slave’s relative could buy the person back, but ransom was expensive. Besides, there was such shame attached to being a slave that family members usually did not want their relative returned.

  Slaves, male and female, often lived in their owners’ homes and did the same tasks that free people did. They fetched water, collected firewood, made cloth and cleaned pelts, built and paddled canoes, and hunted and fished. But the fear of being sacrificed must have been ever present.

  A PERILOUS ADVENTURE

  An Englishman who wanted adventure was sure to find it by working on a sailing ship. John R. Jewitt got more excitement than he had bargained for as a twenty-year-old blacksmith on the trading ship Boston. In 1803, when the ship anchored in Nootka Sound, near Vancouver Island, Jewitt saw native people for the first time. For several days the Nootka and their king, Maquina, came on board, bringing salmon and other supplies for the sailors and leaving with small gifts. Everything seemed to go well until the tenth day, when the Nootka attacked the ship, killing all the crew except Jewitt and John Thompson, a sailmaker. Jewitt later wrote:

  But what a terrific spectacle met my eyes; six naked savages, standing in a circle around me, covered with the blood of my murdered comrades, with their daggers uplifted in their hands, prepared to strike. I now thought my last moment had come, and recommended my soul to my Maker.

  Maquina proposed a deal. He would spare Jewitt’s life if the Englishman agreed to be his slave, fight for him in his battles, repair his muskets, and make daggers and knives for him. Jewitt readily agreed. Thompson had hidden during the attack, and when the Nootka discovered him hours later, Jewitt convinced Maquina to spare his life by claiming that the sailmaker was his father. The pair joined more than fifty male and female slaves Maquina owned. The slaves lived in the same house as the master, and –

  are usually kindly treated, eat of the same food, and live as well as their masters. They are compelled however at times to labour severely, as not only all the menial offices are performed by them, such as bringing water, cutting wood and a variety of others, but they are obliged to make the canoes, to assist in building and repairing the houses, to supply their masters with fish and to attend them to war and to fight for them.… The females are employed principally in manufacturing cloth, in cooking, collecting berries, &c. and with regard to food and living in general have not a much harder lot than their mistresses.

  The main difference was that the king could force the women to have children with any men he chose.

  Jewitt protected himself by acting kindly toward his captors. He adopted their customs, remained cheerful, made ornaments for the women and fishhooks for the men, and learned their language. One of the more surprising duties Maquina gave him and Thompson was to guard him at night with guns and cutlasses, “being apparently afraid to trust any of his own men.” More than two years after their capture, another American vessel came to Nootka Sound, and Jewitt and Thompson escaped.

  Sacrifices were sometimes part of elaborate ceremonies called potlatches. The word potlatch means “giving” – a chief displayed his power and wealth to another chief by giving away his possessions. Potlatches were held to mark important occasions like births, deaths, marriages, or victories over enemies. A chief could become impoverished by his potlatch, but he would expect to get rich again from the next one he attended as a guest.

  Guests arrived at potlatches in decorated canoes, wearing their best clothes. Hosts served a sumptuous feast, and sometimes there was dancing and singing, but the main focus was gift-giving. Records show that chiefs might offer as many as 54 dressed elk skins, 8 canoes, 2,000 silver bracelets, 7,000 brass brace
lets, 33,000 blankets, and 6 slaves. The slaves who were given away as gifts were fortunate, because occasionally a slave was felled by the chief with a special club called a “slave killer,” as a way for the chief to show off his power.

  The Iroquois

  The Iroquois were a confederation of five nations – the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca – that banded together in the sixteenth century. The Tuscarora joined the confederacy around 1720, and by that time Iroquois territory reached from the Carolinas into Canada along the east coast. Their confederation has been called the world’s oldest democracy, with a council made up of elected chiefs from each nation.

  The Iroquois were skilled fighters in both large-scale wars and smaller skirmishes. Slavery rarely followed the large wars; instead, defeated enemies were massacred, tortured, or sacrificed. The Iroquois more commonly captured slaves in their “mourning” wars, small attacks aimed at seizing people to replace members of their own community who had died. Captives were stripped of their original names, and much worse. “As soon as they have taken a prisoner, they cut off his fingers; they tear his shoulders and his back with a knife; they bind him with very tight binds,” wrote a Jesuit priest who witnessed an Iroquois attack in the seventeenth century. The Iroquois killed the most badly mutilated captives, and kept the others as slaves to tend fields and carry heavy packs, including the warriors’ food.