The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  In the home, Arab fathers could choose whether or not to recognize the children born to them by household slaves – and to make them members of their tribe – and it appears they hesitated to do this if the mother was black, though Arab homes might include many black slaves. Happily, enough Arab fathers did acknowledge their black sons for a school of black Arab poets to develop in the seventh and eighth centuries: they were known as ‘Aghribat al-Arab’ – the ‘Arab crows’. Their attitude to skin colour could be apologetic, anticipating Blake’s poem ‘Little Black Boy’ (‘I am black, but O! my soul is white’): the poet Suhaym (whose name is a diminutive of ‘black’) wrote, ‘though I am black of colour, my nature is white’. Or they may compare themselves with the precious spice musk: ‘If I am jet-black, musk is blacker’, says Nusayb ibn Rabah. He was court poet to the Umayyad caliph ‘Abdel al-Malik, and fortunately had a genius which more than made up for any stigma of skin colour:

  Blackness does not diminish me, as long as I have this tongue and a stout heart, . . .

  How much better is a black, eloquent and keen-minded, than a mute white.

  After the eighth century the poetry of the Arab crows came to an end, as black African converts to Islam came to use Arabic for their scholarship and their own languages for poetry. The Arab slave trade continued, however, and was little affected by Western abolitionism. It was still substantial in the 1950s, and is not dead now.10

  THOUGH THE ENGLISH made a late start in trading slaves across the Atlantic, their slave-fleet expanded, and by the mid-eighteenth century the slave trade was dominated by the English.

  Even before the trade involved England, the English especially had been struck by the foreignness of Africans. It is likely that the first ‘negroes’ appeared in London in 1554, brought there ‘till they could speake the language’ so as ‘to be a helpe to Englishmen’ in trading with ‘negroes’ on the African coast.11 The blackness of these ‘blacke Moores’ was especially problematic because very few Englishmen had ever seen an African. The main supposition (following classical ideas) was that Africans were scorched black by the sun, though it was sometimes argued that tropical heat ‘floated’ black bile to the surface of the body. The new voyages of discovery had however made these arguments more difficult, since peoples were found – in the New World especially – who lived in the same latitudes but were not black. In his essay ‘Of the Blackness of Negroes’, Sir Thomas Browne dismissed the solar argument, since the equatorial sun had not made African animals black: as he pointed out, ‘lions, elephants, camels’ are not black. He also dismissed as ludicrous the classical belief that Africans were scorched when Phaeton stole the chariot of Phoebus, lost control of it and burned the earth. What he had noticed – as an observant physician – is that skin colour is hereditary, so that mixed marriages produce a mixed skin colour. He also speculated on pathology, observing that ‘it is not indisputable whether [black skin] might not proceed from such a cause and the like foundation of Tincture, as doth the black Jaundice’. He dismissed the superstition – first recorded by Herodotus – that the sperm of Africans was itself black, though he did claim that the

  sperm of Negroes . . . being first and in its naturals white . . . upon separation of parts [there arises] a shadow or dark efflorescence in the outside; whereby [their births] are dusky.12

  Browne did not accept that black skin was God’s punishment for the children of Ham – an idea that was mocked by others in the early seventeenth century. The ecclesiastical controversialist Peter Heylyn derided ‘that foolish tale of Cham’. To others this tale seemed less foolish, since it explained both Africans’ blackness and their fitness for servitude. Noah had said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren’, and Jeremy Taylor could preach, in the mid-seventeenth century, that Ham’s dishonouring his parents ‘brought servitude or slavery into the world’. The jurist Sir Edward Coke claimed ‘That Bondage or Servitude was first inflicted for dishonouring of Parents: For Cham [was] punished in his Son Canaan with Bondage.’13

  Undoubtedly because the idea was convenient, Africans were increasingly seen as ‘degenerated and debased below the Dignity of Humane Species’. They were described as living like beasts, and within the growing trade were bought, sometimes branded, penned and flogged off, like cattle. In 1651 the Guinea Company had instructed Bartholomew Howard ‘to buy and put aboard you so many negers as yo’r ship can cary, and for what shalbe wanting to supply with Cattel, as also to furnish you with victualls and provisions for the said negers and Cattel’. As they were increasingly treated as inferiors, so they were judged to be inferior, until their very inferiority became an ‘obstacle’ to their ever being free. As Thomas Jefferson put it, as late as 1787, in his Notes on the State of Virginia,

  I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks . . . are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind . . . This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.14

  Assisted by such views, the slave trade expanded through the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reaching its maximum volume at about 1760. By then British ships were carrying over 40,000 Africans to the Americas each year, in a trading triangle which ferried arms and industrial goods to Africa, slaves from Africa to America and the Caribbean, and the products of slavery (sugar, cotton and tobacco) back to the home ports of Bristol and Liverpool. The conditions of travel are perhaps best recorded by an African American author. In his Interesting Narrative (1789) Olaudah Equiano describes a childhood trip to Barbados:

  The stench of the hold [was] intolerably loathsome . . . The closeness of the place . . . added to the number in the ship . . . brought on a sickness . . . of which many died . . . This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror . . . One day, when we had a smooth sea and moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings and jumped into the sea.15

  The trade was accompanied by criticism, as well as by rationalization. Some Quakers and dissenting groups condemned slavery as un-Christian in the seventeenth century, and in 1688 came Aphra Behn’s protest-romance, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave. Behn was not concerned only with the freedom of Africans: she celebrated also their ‘perfection’ of body and mind, and since the novel became an international bestseller, it shows how far from colour prejudice the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could go, even as the slave trade flourished and expanded. It is true she makes Oroonoko more beautiful than other Africans, in recognition of his status as an aristocrat, adding that ‘his Face was not of that brown rusty Black which most of that Nation are, but a perfect Ebony, or polished Jet’. She also says that the old king of the country has ‘many beautiful Black Wives: for most certainly there are Beauties that can charm of that Colour’. Oroonoko’s beloved is ‘a beautiful Black Venus to our young Mars; as charming in her Person as he, and of delicate Virtues’. So far as I know, this is the first use of the phrase ‘black Venus’.

  The criticism made in the eighteenth century had more intellectual muscle. Adam Smith denounced the ways in which ‘those nations of heroes’ (‘the negroes from the coast of Africa’) were subjected ‘to the refuse of the jails of Europe’. On a visit to Oxford, Dr Johnson proposed a toast ‘to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies’. The poet William Cowper, a friend of William Wilberforce, returned to the attack in poem after poem, playing nature’s ‘black complexion’ against black evil (‘the black-sceptred rulers of Slaves’). Finally, as abolition approached, he imagined a ‘Slave Trader in the Dumps’ (1788) offering at auction the thumbscrews, jaw clamps, padlocks, bolts, ropes (‘supple-jack’)
and chains that accompanied his ‘pretty black cargo of African ware’.16 The same year, the humane artist George Morland, who in his English pictures showed the agricultural poor, depicted the anguish of slavery in a painting called Execrable Human Traffick; or, The Affectionate Slaves. The work later became a popular anti-slavery print, under the title The Slave Trade (illus. 58). Both versions represent the pain of separation of two African brothers, one of whom is taken in slavery by white men in white (one brandishing a cane) while the other is allowed to stay. In another painting, African Hospitality, he shows Africans helping shipwrecked Europeans ashore and giving them comfort, refreshment and directions; we cannot tell whether these Africans have any knowledge of the slave trade.

  It has to be said that a robust opposition to slavery could coexist with a derogatory view of Africans. The philosopher David Hume was ‘disgusted’ with the ‘unbounded dominion’ of slave-owners’, but also found himself ‘apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites’. Others were willing to mock comprehensively the ideas of good and bad skin colours, and of better or worse races. In Germany Johann Gottfried von Herder wrote, ‘The Black has as much right to consider the white a mutant, a born vermin, as the white has to consider him a beast, a black animal.’ The ‘negro’ might say, ‘I, the black, am the original man. I have taken the deepest draughts from the source of life, the Sun.’17

  58 J. R. Smith, The Slave Trade, 1835, hand-coloured engraving, after George Morland’s painting Execrable Human Traffick; or, The Affectionate Slaves (1788).

  Many decades were still to pass before the practice of slavery by the West came, officially, to a close. The photograph shown here of an African American family was taken in 1862 – after the American Civil War had begun (illus. 59). It was titled Five Generations on Smith’s Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina. The plantation owner has a name, but the five generations do not. Evidently the photographer, who was white (he was Timothy H. O’Sullivan), did not try hard get his camera straight, but apart from that the wooden hut leans precariously. The poverty is evident, and so is the solidarity of this ‘nuclear’ family, who plainly spend their small earnings on items that reflect their sense of self-respect and of a right to style, such as a smart waistcoat or blouse – or a family photograph. The older man has not bothered with finery, and we can see that he survives from still harder times.

  Sadly, too, the slow abolition of slavery through the nineteenth century brought only a qualified freedom to Africa itself. It has been argued that, disinterested as abolitionist campaigning had been, abolition had advantages for Britain, which was quicker than its competitors in moving beyond the ‘plantation economy’. The financial interest now lay in the colonizing of Africa itself. As a consequence, the snatching of Africans to sell them elsewhere was succeeded by the acquisition of the lands where they lived. Africans now could work at home, but again for foreign masters.

  59 Five Generations on Smith’s Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862.

  Colonialism too could be seen as iniquitous in the eighteenth century. Dr Johnson had called the colonists in North America ‘European usurpers’ and William Cowper had asked in The Task (in 1785!), ‘Is India free . . . Or do we grind her still?’18 Herder, Johnson and Cowper could speak in these terms because it could still be argued, and on biblical authority, that all men were created equal. The cruel irony for Africans was that, as the nineteenth century and abolitionism progressed together, the idea of ‘equality’ receded, not merely in economic practice, but in the intellectual world. Charles Darwin was to say, in The Descent of Man, in a passage that is perhaps too often quoted, that

  at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.19

  It is important to say that Darwin stood strongly apart from the racisms – and the ‘darwinisms’ – of his time. In his encounters with tribal peoples he was repeatedly struck by ‘how similar their minds were to ours’, and in The Descent of Man itself he argued that the black races had bred themselves black through many millennia of sexual selection because of the beauty that black skin can have. Nonetheless the passage quoted cannot but be taken to mean that for Darwin, in at least some of his thinking, the African ‘negro’ and the Australian aborigine belonged to the earliest surviving stage of human evolution.

  In other ways also, nineteenth-century science was to cooperate with popular prejudice. Before Darwin published his view of evolution, J. J. Virey had argued, in his Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1834), that the genitals of African women were different, larger and more inflammatory than those of European women. A further twist of research associated African women with prostitutes, since prostitutes were said to have a primitive physiology. In 1893 Cesare Lombroso found numerous proofs that ‘phenomena of atavism are more frequent among prostitutes than among ordinary female criminals’. Prehensile feet were unusually common in prostitutes, and ‘the obsessive obesity of prostitutes’ was ‘perhaps of atavistic origin’. He noted that ‘Hottentot, African, and Abyssinian women when rich and idle grow enormously fat, and the reason of the phenomenon is atavistic’. He then argued that the fatty features of Hottentot women, including their buttocks, were a throwback to an earlier, more animal fattiness. In one illustration he juxtaposes an Ethiopian prostitute lethargically holding a tambourine (a) with three views of the buttocks of Hottentot women (b and c, illus. 60). Comparing criminals, he found prostitutes to be less intelligent than premeditating murderers, for ‘to kill in an explosion of bestial rage is compatible with the intelligence of a Hottentot; but to plan poisoning demands a certain ability and astuteness.’20

  60 From Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, La donna deliquente: La prostituta e la donna normale (1893).

  Medical theory was hardly more helpful. In 1799 Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the American Declaration of Independence, published his lecture arguing that ‘the Black Color (as it is called) of the Negroes Is Derived from the Leprosy’. In evidence he claimed that leprosy was the most ‘durable’ of the hereditary diseases, and was ‘accompanied in some instances by a black color of the skin’: in particular, in the form of leprosy known as the ‘black albaras’, ‘the skin becomes black, thick and greasey’. He further noted that many Africans had leprosy; that leprosy could also cause whiteness of skin, and there were albinos in Africa; that negroes, like lepers, were insensible of pain and had ‘strong venereal desires’; and that leprosy could cause swollen lips, depression of the nose and thickly matted hair. It should be said that Rush was a dedicated physician and an ardent abolitionist. He wanted to help, and asked, ‘Is the color of the negroes a disease? Then let science and humanity . . . discover a remedy for it.’ All he could offer, however, were his observations that some lightening of skin could be produced by fear, by bleeding and by the application of ‘oxygenating muriatic acid’ or ‘the juice of unripe peaches’.21

  The ‘science’ of Benjamin Rush did not win wide assent, but it did cooperate with other arguments of the time, for instance that dark skin was related to syphilis, which also was a form of leprosy. For syphilis, like leprosy, sometimes darkens the skin, and depresses the nose, which may again be depressed in a syphilitic birth. It thus came to be argued that syphilis was not brought over from the New World by Christopher Columbus, but had spread to Europe in the later Middle Ages, coming up from Africa, where it had long been ubiquitous – because of the lawless sexual appetite of Africans. Once again a parallel was made between Africa and the brothel.22

  Given such readings, in some of the science of the
time, it is not surprising that the main popular image of Africa was of darkness and blackness, extending beyond skin colour. Darkness becomes a cliché in the titles of books, for instance in Henry Stanley’s In Darkest Africa (1890), Wilson S. Naylor’s Daybreak in the Dark Continent (1905), James Stewart’s Dawn in the Dark Continent; or, Africa and Its Missions (1902) and, of course, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). As James Stewart’s title indicates, the light was that of the Gospel, though this light merged, in broader usage, with that of colonial civilization. When Sir Harry Johnston designed the postage stamp for British Central Africa (now Nyasaland) in the 1890s, he depicted a white cross on a shield which was itself half black, half white (illus. 61). A tiny replica of Britain’s coat of arms sits in its centre, while the heraldic ‘bearers’ are two jet-black Africans – decently clad in long white skirts – one bearing a spade, one a pickaxe. Actually the Africans are drawn quite carefully, with more care than could show when copied on a stamp. But if these Africans are not slave labour, still they are labour and nothing else. The motto on the scroll reads ‘Light in Darkness’ – the light being that of Christian British colonialism, and the darkness that of Africa and Africans, as benighted in soul as they are black in body.

  61 Harry H. Johnston’s design for a postage stamp for British Central Africa, 1890s.

  One might say that darkness is an absurd image for a continent whose sunlight is blinding, with extensive deserts, grasslands and wetlands, and one cannot but suppose that the ‘darkness’ of Africa is ‘coloured’ by the black skin of Africans. Africa itself did have some black features: for instance, the river Niger, which, Mungo Park noted, was ‘remarkably black and deep’, being called by the Mandinka ‘Bafing, or Black River’.23 The illustrations showing Africa, in European books of the nineteenth century, are highly stereotyped. We see the dark depths of jungles, or the deep shade of palm trees, in which the limbs of Africans are hard to separate from the black trunks and branches, so it seems they are black-skinned for reasons of camouflage (illus. 62). Being benighted, they are most active at night – where again their blackness is the perfect camouflage – though they do become visible when dancing wildly, lit by a fire, to the howls of the witch-doctor and the beat of savage drums, while a crouching figure turns the spit which skewers their supper, which may consist of other Africans or the odd lost Christian European.24