Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  2.5 G. Durand, “Under the Portuguese Flag. Slavery in the Portuguese districts of South-east Africa. From a sketch by Sir John Willoughby.” The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper (London), vol. 45 (1892). Copy in Princeton University Library.

  5

  Still, one has to account for the relation of the slave to the new edifice of culture even if this involves conjecture and unverified reconstruction, for as I argued in the introduction, the imaginary can help us resuscitate what is but a bare fragment in the archive of empire. Let us assume for a moment that Nealee did not die in the heat of the Sahel. Let us suppose that she survived the West African wilderness on that fateful night of April 25, 1797. Let us imagine that she woke up in the morning and was found by another group of slave traders, who nursed her body back to health in the hope of making a good sale on the slave markets of the Atlantic coast. What would the world of Enlightenment, of culture and taste, of freedom and progress mean to her as she stood on the threshold of modernity?

  2.6 William Henry Lane, a.k.a. “Master Juba,” from The Illustrated London News, August 5, 1848. From Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy.

  For a start, Nealee would be recruited into another slave coffle and put back in chains and bolts. These metal fetters would be notable for two things: they most probably would have been manufactured in the emerging centers of British industry—at Bristol and Liverpool, for example—and they would have a decorative character that, on the surface, was at odds with their utilitarian function, or rather was one indicator of how enslavement had acquired an aesthetic character. Another instance of how the slave trade had transformed cultural value and semantics was the ironic fact that slave chains and bolts were often cast in the same factories as the manila bars that were used as currency on the West African coast.85 Still another index of semantic transformations was the use of the word coffle to denote a procession of slaves. The word coffle, John Thornton informs us, “derives from an Arabic term for caravan.”86 In normal circumstances, trade caravans would constitute communities of traders traveling together for security and support; in the world of slavery, however, this term had come to refer to enforced journeys into bondage.

  2.7 The Donkor Nsuo (Slave River) at Assin Manso, Ghana. Photograph by the author.

  2.8 The pond at Assin Manso, Ghana. Photograph by the author.

  If she were part of a coffle heading south, Nealee would be marched for days through the elaborate slave routes of West Africa, crossing the desert, into the savanna, and then into the rain forest. After a long journey along the slave routes, the coffle would arrive at a major slave market, such as Salaga in northern Ghana, and then be dispatched on the final voyage to the coast. But before the encounter with the waters that divided Africa from Europe and America, the slaves would make a final stop at Assin Manso in what is now the central region of Ghana. Here, at the Donkor Nsuo (Slave River) and ponds (figs. 2.7 and 2.8), Nealee and other slaves would be allowed to take a final ritual bath before being sold off to another group of native traders, the agents who would escort them to the edge of the ocean deep.

  In spite of these long journeys, however, Nealee's entry into modernity proper had not yet begun. So far, the transactions and modes of exchange to which she had been subjected retained a feudal character; her captivity was within the same cultural region, part of what Raymond Williams might call a knowable community.87 Her captors and sellers were, like her, all black, Muslim, or animist. Neither race nor religion seemed to make much difference as to who was bought or sold, or who did the buying and selling. At the slave markets witnessed by Park, the slave trader could be Wolof, Bambara, or Fulani, and the victims would belong to whatever ethnicity found itself on the losing side of local wars. The modes of slavery that Nealee had known up to this point retained their old, feudal character, regulated by ancient codes of honor, including the ones that determined the disposal of slaves according to social rank, kinship ties, and the mastery of the Koran. The bathing rituals at Assin Manso would suggest that the slavers were still attached to older rituals of purity, which the slave had to pass through before he or she was forced out of the human community and turned into a commodity.

  In contrast to the cleansing wells, the slave castles that Nealee would encounter at the slave coast would signify the modernization of slavery itself. Indeed, these castles, which have come to be seen as physical signs of the long European struggle to dominate the West African coast, would have stood out, in those months in the 1790s, as emblems of the modernity of Europe and how it projected itself into the outside world. In other words, the slave enclosures were not just fortifications; like medieval castles, they were valued as much for their utilitarian value—the command of the coast—as for their imposing, symbolic presence. The architecture of the slave castle signaled, for both slavers and enslaved, the shift from the older feudal forms of trade at the slave markets of the African interior, mediated by rituals of barter and its compulsory obligations, to modern slavery, which had reduced the slave into a pure object of exchange. Since slave castles were the visible signs of modernity in the landscape of enslavement, their architecture and semiotics provide a fascinating example of how the culture of taste was entangled in the slave trade.

  The architecture of Elmina, the oldest fort on the Gold Coast, is a percipient example of the relationship between slavery, modernity, and the built environment. Originally built by the Portuguese in 1482, Elmina was subsequently captured by the Dutch in August 1637 and by the British in 1872. In an age of European political and economic rivalry, played out against what Christopher Decorse calls “a backdrop of shifting alliances, wars, and political intrigue,” whichever nation controlled Elmina was the superpower on the Gold and slave coasts.88

  And each period of control demanded a different architecture, a new aesthetic, to match the growth of power and the control of trade. For example, in their major rehabilitation of Elmina in the early eighteenth century, the Dutch reconstructed the façade of the main courtyard and added iron balustrades and a “monumental gate” in the wall leading to the drawbridge (fig. 2.9).89 Albert van Dantzig reports that one of the Dutch governor generals of Elmina had the sundial of Elmina constructed to look “like the one in the Amsterdam Admiralty House.”90 Successive renovations of the castle were prompted by both functional and aesthetic demands. From a functional point of view, the castle needed to be updated to account for the increasing volume of slaves, but the architecture of reconstruction was intended to master and display changing aesthetic forms in Europe.

  In his elaborate descriptions of the castle in his account of the Gold Coast, A New and Accurate Description of Guinea, William Bosman, the Dutch slave agent at Cape Coast, obviously considered Elmina valuable because of its strategic location and strength, but he also constantly called attention to the beauty of the castle: “It is built square with very high walls, four good batteries within and another on the outwork of the castle; on the side toward the land it is adorned with two canals cut in the rocks on which it stands, which are always furnished with rain and fresh water sufficient for the use of our garrison and ships.”91 Bosman also had a keen sense of the relation between utility and ornamentation. The tower in the middle of the castle, he noted, was not only an adornment to the building, “but from the top affords a most beautiful prospect of the circumjacent land and ocean, as well as usefully serves to discover ships seven or eight miles distant at sea.”92

  2.9 Entrance to Elmina Castle, Ghana. Photograph by the author.

  There is another dimension to the relation between the architecture of the slave castle and the culture of taste: over the long history of the Gold Coast, European governors were attuned to specific national styles in Europe. For example, the rebuilding of Cape Coast Castle between the middle of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth century was carried out according to what was conceived to be the fashionable architectural style in England. In the two decades between the 1770s a
nd 1790s, when the castle was rebuilt several times, it adopted the Palladian architecture that had been popular in England in the first half of the seventeenth century. This explains why the front façade of this infamous dungeon (fig. 2.10) is uncannily similar to the entrances of great English houses such as Houghton Hall, designed by Colen Campbell and James Gibb around 1729 for Sir Horace Walpole, the prime minister (fig. 2.11). What are we to make of this concordance between the architectural taste of slave agents and the Whig aristocracy?

  Deep affiliations and anxieties explain aesthetic relations of this kind, but also at play is an ironic mode of recognition, for like their Whig counterparts, slave agents were conscious of the transformations that were taking place in European architecture and its informing doctrines of taste. And in order to understand this relationship, one must reject the claim that slave agents operated on the margins of their cultures and insist, as I do in the next two chapters, that slave traders and plantation masters studiously held on to, and jealously guarded, their identity as modern European subjects; that they used architecture and art to assert their location in the mainstream of European fashion; and that the cultivation of taste was an important counterpoint to the barbarism of slavery, which always had the potential to engulf their claims to be modern, rational subjects.

  2.10 Cape Coast Castle, Ghana. Photograph by the author.

  2.11 Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, drawing for the façade of Houghton Hall. From Colen Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus.

  Arriving at Elmina or Cape Coast, then, a slave like Nealee would be encountering the insignias of a self-conscious modernity and its institutions for the first time. Deprived of freedom, she would become a mere object of trade in the first truly global business enterprise.93 Here Nealee would encounter people who had probably moved in the same circles as Anna Larpent. And this encounter would be a radical transformation of her prior understanding of the integers of time and space, for while they were providing the bodies that were transforming capitalism, the men who had hitherto owned or traded Nealee were not conscious of modernity, its meaning and reach. They belonged to another epoch, an African “middle ages” defined by powerful attachments to religion and the rule of nature; still holding on to ancient notions of space and time located in the realm of tribe or Islam, they had not heard of, nor cared about, Enlightenment.

  For a young African like Nealee, enslavement would become the radical gesture of modern identity. At the first site of exchange, the slave would be reduced to an object of barter, but in the process, being sold would forcefully and paradoxically insert her into the domain of the modern. Now her transition would be signaled by the complexity of trade transactions, which had moved from the simple barter that Park had observed at Kamalia to an intricate mode of exchange in which money, the sign of the modern fetish, would be exchanged for the body of the enslaved.

  A sense of the complexities of exchange can be gleaned from an entry in a log left by Captain Thomas Phillips, aboard the slaving frigate Hannibal in the year 1693, in the early days of the age of Enlightenment:

  The best goods to purchase slaves here are cowries, the smaller the more esteemed; for they pay them all by tale, the smallest being as valuable as the biggest, but take them from us by measure or weight, of which about 100 pounds for a good man-slave. The next in demand are brass neptunes or basons, very large, thin, and flat; for after they have bought them they cut them in pieces to make anilias or bracelets, and collars for their arms, legs and necks. The other preferable goods are blue paper sletias, cambricks or lawns, caddy chints, broad ditto, coral, large, smooth, and of a deep red, rangoes large and red, iron bars, powder and brandy.94

  In barter the interchangeability of slaves with cowries would seem to nullify any claims to the latter's human identity or any sense of the supremacy of the cultured subject over nature, the claim that was taken for granted by subjects of taste.

  6

  The intertwined stories of cultured subjects and African slaves that opened my discussion suggest a new way of rethinking the history of centers and margins and the necessity of a contrapuntal reading of slavery and the culture of taste. A contrapuntal analysis will show that even when the lives of enslaved Africans were located at the opposite pole of modern identity and when their objectification was at odds with the triumphant subjectivism of modernity, slaves were intimately connected to the political and moral economy of the modern world. It was difficult to imagine a modern identity that was totally detached from the Africans' subjection. By the same token, the existence of slavery at the center of modern commerce made modern subjectivity valuable. Surrounded by a mass of slaves in ships, markets, and plantations, Europeans involved in various facets of the slave trade were conscious of, and sensitive about, their modern identity as a mark of their distinctiveness. Evidence suggests that the more they became entangled in the business of transforming black bodies into objects of trade, the more the slavers sought to secure or cultivate their own identity as cultured subjects, to affirm their virtue in the midst of a commercial activity whose moral character was rarely settled.

  Consider, for example, the now famous case of John Newton, the slave captain later turned abolitionist. In the summer of 1751, aboard his slave ship, the Duke of Argyle, on the way to transport his human cargo to Antigua, Newton was preoccupied with the usual, everyday worries of a slave captain: rumors of a plot by slaves to poison the water, weather so humid that not even the slaves could stand to be on deck, and the nasty and hasty business of burying two slaves who had died of flux. Still, in the midst of all these mundane concerns, Newton had the time to catch up on some taste, reading Gilbert Burnet's biography of Sir Matthew Hale, Oliver Cromwell's chief jurist, while wistfully thinking about the London cultural scene, which embodied refinement and taste.95

  For Newton, the thought of culture contemplated in absentia was a source of both longing and consolation. On July 23 Newton wrote to his wife expressing some thoughts about the music of Handel and on David Garrick playing Hamlet, most likely at the Theater Royal, Drury Lane: “You will perceive by the date that this is one of the days which I pass, as much as I can, in retirement and reflection.”96 Clearly, any thoughts of Garrick playing Hamlet, a cultural event that was worthy of commemoration in a painting by Hogarth, was an important act of affiliation with the culture of taste. In the confused scene of his slave ship, Newton turned to God for guidance but also acted out the role of a man of taste, using his Sundays to reflect, read, and converse through correspondence with learned writers and artists back in London. In the slave ship under his command, Newton could hallow a space of culture and taste identical to that of Anna Larpent back in London.

  But did he ever reflect on the disparity between his yearning for the culture of taste and the practice of slavery? Did he wonder how he, a modern subject, could be in the inhumane business of buying, packaging, and retailing other human beings? Newton's reflections on the African slave trade, written after he had renounced slavery and become an ardent abolitionist, were paradoxical:

  During the time I was engaged in the slave trade, I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness. I was upon the whole satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had worked out for me; yet it was, in many respects, far from eligible. It is, indeed, accounted a genteel employment and is usually very profitable, though to me it did not prove so, the Lord, seeing that a large increase of wealth would not be good for me. However, I considered myself a sort of goaler or turn-key and I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was perpetually conversant with chains, bolts and shackles.97

  From a legal, moral, and commercial perspective, Newton had no qualms about the justifiability of the slave trade—it was lawful, providential, and profitable. Even in the midst of slavery, he remained a devout Christian, leading his crew in prayer twice a day; it is reported that he wrote one of his hymns, “Amazing Grace,” on the slave coast of Africa as he waited to load human cargo on his ship.98 Still, Newton did worr
y that his participation in the slave trade had turned him into a jailer and arrested his development as a modern subject, or at least retarded his aspiration to achieve the ideals of civic virtue that defined the life of a gentleman.