Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - The Sunday Times Bestseller

by Akala

  Slavery in the ‘Islamic world’ then, perhaps more than any other region, meant many and vastly differing states of exploitation. In the classical Islamic societies, this included conditions ranging from the Devshirme of the Ottomans – who were European Christian slaves educated for administrative service, some of whom rose through the ranks of Ottoman society to be grand viziers – to widespread use of military slaves, household servants, women of the harem, eunuchs and, at the very bottom, black plantation slaves, such as in the Egyptian cotton boom of the 1860s, the clove plantations of Oman in the nineteenth century or the salt flats of Basra in the ninth century, where the famous revolt of the Zanj (blacks) occurred.

  Many of the early Islamic world’s greatest thinkers – Ibn Khaldun, Al Idrisi, Ibn Sina, to name but a few – can be found exhibiting a similar kind of anti-black prejudice that we would see in European Christendom and the Enlightenment. Ibn Khaldun, for example, opined that ‘Blacks are dumb animals naturally suited to slavery’.

  It must also be said that in the Greco-Roman world and in early Islamic societies, black people can be seen occupying all kinds of social and professional roles, and the Ancient Greeks – Aristotle, Herodotus, Diodorus etc. – seemed to think that the Ancient Egyptians, who they saw with their own eyes, were black people. Within early Europe we see images of famous black saints like Maurice, and even black Madonnas. In the ‘Islamic world’ there were black scholars, revered generals and even powerful dynasties in northern Africa and Muslim Spain. And of course several West African societies and empires adopted and ‘Africanised’ Islam. Yet from the second century onwards, ‘Ethiopians’ (a generic term for black people that has no relationship to the country that today bears the name) fairly consistently came to be represented as living in ‘the dark’, as in sin, and as representative of evil demons and even the devil itself. In the fifteenth century, Mediterranean and Iberian slavery was still common and, while slavery in the Iberian peninsula of the fifteenth century was not of the exclusively racial type, we find in Seville in the 1470s the ‘Casa Negra’ – the house of the Blacks – which appears to be a kind of charity set up by black people to buy the freedom of their enslaved ‘kinsmen’.5 I use quote marks in this way because there is no reason to assume that they all came from the same ethnic group, but their shared sense of ‘blackness’, as expressed by their ‘charities’ title and the common experience of slavery, had bound them together, much as it would for other black people in the new world over the coming centuries, yet it would seem that black people were still a minority of the enslaved population in southern Spain at this time.

  As the states of Iberian Europe, and particularly Portugal, started to trade down the West African coast from the mid fifteenth century, Europeans did not find entirely backward or savage cultures that they were universally revolted by; in fact, some observers compared African towns and cities of the period with those of Europe, and explicitly thought their African business partners to be civilized and cultured.6 Prejudice, stereotype and a sense of difference there certainly was, but systemic racism was not even possible before the technological gap between Africa and Europe – and the slavery, massacres and domination that technology gap made possible – became a chasm.

  Meanwhile, in the Americas, the Curse of Ham was applied and linked to a philosophy based on Plato and Aristotle’s ideas about ‘natural slaves’ to inform the largest and most intense experiments with industrial-scale slavery in human history. After the indigenous people of the Caribbean had been all but wiped out by Spanish brutality and European diseases, Africans began to be brought in as slaves. The earliest black people brought to labour in the Caribbean actually came from Spain, reflecting the earlier Mediterranean and trans-Saharan slave routes, and the earliest plantation labour in the Caribbean and America was, for a brief period at least, multi-racial. But for a whole host of reasons, such as a reluctance to enslave ‘Indians’ on their own land (decimation would do just fine), Ottoman suzerainty in the Mediterranean cutting off the supply of white Slavs to the Iberian peninsula, the strength of state formations in western Europe eradicating the possibility of enslaving the populations of rival European nations, the comparative military and economic weaknesses of West African states and of course hatred and fear of black people, slavery in the Americas came to be an exclusively ‘black’ affair. The European prejudices about blackness and evil were by no means fixed or without contradiction, but by now they were over a millennium old and could be redeployed to serve a purpose, in the process clearly violating a professed Christian ethic of universal brotherhood.

  Black slavery in the Americas, then, was by no means inevitable. Indeed, the first Spanish governor of Hispaniola, a man named Ovando, requested that his king outlaw the enslavement of blacks, as they were apparently too troublesome and caused white indentured servants and the natives to rebel, and it seems for a brief while that the Spanish monarchs obliged.7 The myth of the docile African, as you will see in later chapters, has no basis in history, and ‘African’ resistance both in Africa and across the Americas limited the scale of the traffic significantly, just as ‘African’ collaborators and slave traders fed it.

  Once slavery in the Americas was exclusively reserved for humans of African origin, black skin became a signal of merchandise rather than humanity, property rather than personhood and thus anti-blackness became one of the bedrocks of the emergent capitalist economies of western Europe and North America. The decimation of indigenous Americans and the theft of their land, combined with the literal working to death of millions of Africans and access to New World metals, are no small part in the history of Western development, however much committed ideologues may try to pretend otherwise. Cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee – the primary commodities of their days – were produced by human commodities with black skin, under what Sven Beckert rightly calls ‘war capitalism’.8 It wasn’t free trade or open markets, but military rule, forced servitude, national monopolies and absolutely no semblance of democracy that helped modern Europe and America to develop. Racism gave slave owners the justification for an unprecedented experiment in the denial of liberty and forced servitude and thus racism, far from being marginal or just a side effect, has been absolutely central to developing Euro-American prosperity.

  An estimated 12 million Africans at the very least were transported in floating dungeons across the Atlantic from the mid-fifteenth to nineteenth centuries; countless numbers of them died en route to the African coast, and also during the horrendous middle passage. The idea that black Africans were savage heathens, and thus slavery was a good and necessary stage in preparing them for civilisation, became so embedded in Euro-Christian thought that even some abolitionists accepted and parroted the idea. However, even as late as the mid-eighteenth century, it was still rare for a European observer, even those heavily involved with slavery on the African coast, to assert that black people were not human.9 Inferior perhaps, heathens for sure, but up until this point the humanity of Africans had rarely been questioned. This may seem strange given the inhumane treatment intrinsic to enslavement, but again we must realise that inhumane treatment of the lower orders was the norm in Europe at this time; in Britain, for example, poor people were still regularly hanged for small property theft, or transported to Australia in horrendous conditions and violently ejected from their lands so that those lands could be enclosed in a manner that would be repeated in the settler colonies of the future. Though, of course, the dehumanisation of anti-black racism gave transatlantic chattel slavery a particular sadism. The turning point towards a ‘scientific’ and systematic racism came when writers like Edward Long, a British-Jamaican slave owner, started to justify the plantation regime on the grounds that black people were not just inferior but that they were not even human.10

  ‘An orangutan husband would not disgrace a negro woman,’ Long opined, an early example of the obsession with comparing black Africans to monkeys. Mr Long’s work would seem so silly to any rational person toda
y that it is hard to believe that some of the brightest minds of the eighteenth century took it extremely seriously, but they did, and an entire corpus of supposedly scientific racism was spawned that sorted humanity into gradations of race and even excluded some groups from the ranks of humanity altogether. These theories could be used to justify what we would now call genocide,11 with the dehumanisation made legally explicit in Britain with cases such as that of the infamous slave ship Zong, where 133 Africans were thrown overboard when the ship got into difficulty. Disposing of the enslaved people in this way meant that their ‘owners’ could claim insurance on their property, but the insurance company refused to pay up, solely on the grounds that the goods had been discarded deliberately. Only when the legal dispute rumbled on did abolitionists argue that the crew should be charged with murder, but both cases were fought on the grounds that the drowned peoples represented goods, not humans, and the judge concluded that ‘so far from the guilt of anything like a murderous act, so far from any show or suggestion of cruelty, there was not even a surmise of impropriety and that to bring a charge of murder would argue nothing less than madness.’12

  In all fairness to those who investigated race ‘scientifically’, they were not all of Mr Long’s level of bigotry (or Kant’s or Hume’s or Voltaire’s, for that matter) and they certainly were not all slave owners, and the process by which ‘fully racist’ ideas – if I can call them that – caught on was long and complex. For example, in 1813 Dr James Cowles Prichard, perhaps the top British student of race science at the time, could be found saying quite the opposite of Mr Long:

  On the whole it appears that we may with a high degree of probability draw the inference, that all the different races into which the human species is divided originated from one family.

  Dr Prichard was part of a school of scientists known as monogenesists, who were guided by Christian ideas about the brotherhood of man and concluded that all humanity descended from Adam, and thus were branches of the same family. But later in the nineteenth century, ironically in the years following the abolition of slavery, ideas like Mr Long’s, ideas that some groups of people, particularly black people, were not really human, started to hold sway.13 These ideas were generally promoted by the polygenesists, who believed in several separate origins for the different races of man.14 The legacy of ‘scientific’ thinking about race included the human zoos in Paris, London, New York and Brussels, that still existed in some form as late as the 1950s, as well as the banana skins and monkey chants for black football players that I grew up watching.

  While some scholars have taken to locating the origins of anti-black racism in the plantation economies of the Americas or as a simple by-product of capitalist greed, it seems more accurate to say that the prejudices that made New World slavery’s exclusively anti-black nature possible had much deeper roots in European history and culture, and had long precedents in other regions of the world, most notably the Middle East and North Africa.15 As slavery continues in northern Africa today and as barely disguised semi-slavery continues in the prisons of the United States, the legacies of the invention of blackness are all too apparent and alive, from the Brazilian favela to the Johannesburg slum.

  The collection of prejudices attached to black people invariably involved a fear of the supposed hyper-potency and special sexual endowment of black men, rather ironic given their alleged inferiority, and the variants of these ideas applied to black women. Even though the obsession with Linford’s Lunchbox, eugenics-based slavery-sprint films and the odd relationship between white audiences and black heavyweight champions may seem rather unconnected, a study of the history of scientific racism quickly reveals the glue that binds these episodes and issues.

  But blackness also had another trajectory, an alternative origin and a very different set of definitions. Prior to colonialism, black Africans seem to have found their blackness perfectly beautiful and normal, unsurprisingly.16 But also, by making whiteness the colour of oppression, the colour that defined a person’s right to own other human beings, to rape and kill and steal with impunity, white supremacists had paradoxically opened up the way for blackness to become the colour of freedom, of revolution and of humanity.17 This is why it’s absurd to compare black nationalism and white nationalism; not because black people are inherently moral, but because the projects of the two nationalisms were entirely different. This difference is why the black nationalist Muhammad Ali could still risk his life, give up the prime years of his career and lose millions of dollars in solidarity with the non-black, non-American people of Vietnam. It’s also why Ali could show as much sympathy as he did to the white people of Ireland in their quarrels with Britain, despite him saying, somewhat rhetorically, that ‘the white man is the devil’.

  The most dramatic example of the revolutionary human capacities of black nationalism comes very early in its history in Haiti where, after the only successful slave revolution in human history, the independent black government made the white Polish and Germans who aided the revolution legally ‘black’ in 1804.18 The revolutionary and oppositional nature of black identity is also part of why so many millions of people racialised as white are inspired by the black culture, music and art in spite of all racist propaganda that they have been exposed to asserting that these people – and thus their culture – are inferior. It’s why John Lennon – great as he was – can never be a symbol of freedom for black people in the way that Bob Marley, Nina Simone or Muhammad Ali are for so many white people.

  These visions and understanding of blackness are why, in spite of living in a world indelibly shaped by white supremacy, the most recognised icons of freedom in the English speaking world in the twentieth century (Ali, Malcolm, Marley, Martin) were disproportionately black, apart from Che Guevara. Indeed the two most famous black nationalists of all time – Bob Marley and Muhammad Ali – are loved by countless millions of people of all ethnicities all over the world. The fact that such outspoken uncompromisingly anti-white supremacist political figures as Ali and Marley are also global humanist icons shows quite clearly the innate difference between black nationalism and white nationalism as political imperatives. For mainstream white society to deal with this obvious fact journalists, media and fans would have to acknowledge that white supremacy is an obviously anti-human idea, so instead Marley is more often reduced to little more than a weed-smoking hippy whose only song and political sentiment was apparently ‘One Love’. But the idea that different nationalisms are different in intent and content depending on their historical origins is not a difficult concept to understand. For example the SNP and the BNP whilst both made up of ‘white British’ people could not be more different; whilst there are plenty of bigots in Scotland, Scottish nationalism in our times is rooted in a rejection of English superiority and a refusal to be dictated to by Westminster rather than in the same racist imperial fantasies that nourish so much British nationalism. Whilst I have a million criticisms of the SNP, if I lived in Scotland I might well vote for them; I could obviously never vote for the BNP. Anyway, I digress.

  Blackness continues to represent traditions of resistance and rebellion such that even today, when young people in Britain who are not black wish to participate in an oppositional culture they flock to hip hop and grime, and before that Reggae, in a way that black youngsters never did and never will to punk or grunge – much as we may personally like both genres. The culture and music of African-Caribbean migrants to Britain and our American cousins has invariably been the one culture that has brought young people of all walks of life together; blackness is both despised and highly valued. It’s rarely acknowledged by any of the parties involved that the roots of this contradiction are both the prison whiteness has created for its adherents and the revolutionary power of blackness. However, the almost universal failure of white music artists, apart from Eminem, to even attempt to address the contradictions of white identity, alongside black artists’ constant willingness to put blackness front and centre, suggests that
all parties understand the racial dynamics at play much better than they seem willing to admit.

  5 – Empire and Slavery in the British Memory

  ‘I think he would be very proud of the continuing legacy of Britain in those places around the world, and particularly I think he would be amazed at India, the world’s largest democracy – a stark contrast, of course, with other less fortunate countries that haven’t had the benefit of British rule. If I can say this on the record – why not? It’s true, it’s true.’

  Boris Johnson of Winston Churchill, on whom he has just finished writing a book

  ‘I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.’

  ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’

  Winston Churchill

  ‘Come over here, Kingslee,’ my teacher’s Canadian voice called excitedly, as she beckoned me towards her. She was never usually nice to me, so I was a bit suspicious about her calling me over with such enthusiasm. When I got close enough, she put her hand on the shoulder of my seven-year-old self with just the right weight of touch to communicate the monumental solemnity of the occasion.

  Pointing to the painting on the wall, she said, ‘Kingslee,’ and then drew in a dramatic breath to add power to the punchline, ‘this man stopped slavery.’ She managed to pull her eyes away from the picture and turned them in my direction, her gaze instructing me to be thankful.