MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 22 August 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Barbadians demanded and got an Emancipation day holiday this year. It would be fair to say that consciousness of Emancipation is increasing in Barbados, despite their Crop-Over or Carnival festival coming at the same time.
It is equally fair to say that consciousness of Emancipation is declining here. It is completely smothered over in “Jam and whine”, a Carnival that has always obliterated any memory of slavery and its abolition. I have emphasised always obliterated, because I do not wish to give the impression that it is either this year or under this administration that this has become so.
Could anyone imagine Jews having any kind of festival which would obliterate all memory of the Holocaust?
Why then have we Blacks, be it in the Caribbean, the USA or Brazil been so unconscious of the worst sufferings ever inflicted on a people, our enslavement in the New World?
Is it because all the world’s great religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism have all justified slavery, and African slavery in particular?
Usually, before or after Carnival, I write a piece relating to Emancipation, and so this year I will try to answer my own question. Is it because Blacks have been so religious, and religion has justified slavery, why we have been so unconscious of our own enslavement. And therefore, our becoming, up from slavery so to speak, has been so weak-kneed, that our people have lost a sense of focus, a sense of mission, or sense of purpose, a sense of overcoming. Then and therefore and so we tarry in the wilderness, trapped in a purgatory or hell of drugs, crime and poverty, accepting our condition as divinely ordained, or pre-ordained by history itself?
And alternately those of us who are not trapped in a cycle of drugs, crime and poverty, as the world’s underclass, strive only to be acceptable by adopting the ways and fitting into the schemes of those who enslaved us. And so the “successful” are no model for the “unsuccessful”. Therefore the division of blacks into an elite who are “successful” and the mass who comprise the under-class driven to crime and delinquency continues apace, despite the affirmation of blackness, which the Black Power Movement brought with its proud assertion that Black is beautiful.
Let us begin the examination of slavery and religion. Before 1440 Christendom had no direct access and no direct role in African slave trade.
For several centuries, however, Islam had acquired slaves from black Africa, and such slaves were numbered throughout the provinces of the Ottoman Empire and in the North African Muslim kingdoms.
While it is true, that the Prophet Muhammed had prominent black aides, not least Bilal Mujahid, the best known and first African convert to Islam; and though the Prophet held that his message could be received by all men, Muslims were permitted to own, buy and sell slaves. There was one important proviso. Namely, that they were infidels, or had been, when they were first enslaved. Consequently, as early as the 10th century there was a firm association between blackness and menial slavery in the Muslim and Arab world. So much so, that the word abd, or black, became synonymous with slave. As early as the year 31, or 652 A.D. of the Christian Calendar, the Christian kingdom of Nubia was forced into a treaty with Arabia, to supply not less than 300 slaves per year to the Caliphate. This was observed for some six centuries!
It will be noted that a Christian black from Nubia was considered an infidel to the Muslim Caliphate. The reverse would also be the case, that a Muslim black would be considered an infidel to the Christian slave holder. Either way, same slavery.
Black slaves were acquired from East Africa in the eighth and ninth centuries to work in the salt marshes, and on sugar, cotton and indigo estates, in lower Iraq. This early and thriving slave system was shaken by the great revolts of Zanj, led by Mohammed Ali in 869–883. So serious were these revolts against the Abasid Caliphate that they discouraged subsequent attempts to resort to large scale black slavery. Hence the historian Popovic wrote that after these early and momentous black revolts against slavery “the normal and preferred labour system in Islamic sugar production was the compulsory labour of indigenous peasants.”
It is to be noted that these ancient black revolts against slavery form no part of the black tradition. They are no part of any festival. So too our more modern revolts against slavery and for freedom, form no part of any of our major festivals. Our history is outside of us. Hence our Carnivals, even at Emancipation time, are in the main vapid. Carnival has to be governed by an aesthetic, an Afro-Caribbean aesthetic. Or it is mere sound and fury, pure jam and whine, in response to a Bum-Bum, a mere bang-bang-Lulu, as an end in itself; or worse yet, degeneration into “One ... two ... and one”, a patent exercise in pointlessness.
Nevertheless the traffic in black slaves from Africa to Muslim kingdoms continued. Many African peoples in order to avoid becoming slaves became Muslims. But this conversion forced or by conviction, did not save them from becoming slaves. Religion bowed to economics.
A King of Bornu, now part of modern and northern Nigeria, in the 14th century wrote to the sultan of Egypt complaining that Arab slave raiders had “devastated all our land, they took free people among us captive, or our kin among Muslims, they have taken our people as merchandise.” Arab Muslim took African Muslim as slaves, contrary to religious doctrine. Islam invoked no sanctions.
This enslavement of African Muslims by Arab Muslims became widespread in Africa. So much so that a great black scholar, himself a Muslim, the great Ahmed Baba of Timbuktu 1556–1627, produced a famous thesis aimed at this indiscriminate slave trading in Africans.
With careful scholarship Ahmed Baba took apart the religious argument “of the fake genealogists” who believed “that the Sudan (that is the children of Ham, son of Noah) were distinguished by black colour because of the curse against Ham from his father Noah, and that the effect of the curse appeared both through colour and through slavery which befell Ham’s descendants.
Ahmed Baba continued “Now the pronouncement of Noah is in the Torah and in it there is no mention of colour. It only mentions that Ham’s children will be slaves to the children of his brothers and nothing else.” Nothing else. But scholars and theologians dictated to by economic demands felt free to add everything else when the pronouncement of Noah meant “nothing else.”
Ahmed Baba, the great black scholar went on to state “That the Muslims among them, like the people of Kano, Katsina, Bornei, Gobir and all of Songhai, are Muslims, who are not to be owned ... If anybody is known to have come from these countries, he should be set free directly, and his freedom acknowledged.”
As always scholarship can interpret and analyse, but it is power which determines and enforces. Though black scholarship could prove that black Muslims ought not to be enslaved, power determined to the contrary, scholarship notwithstanding. Religion it will be noted prevented even the great Ahmed Baba, from condemning black slavery, only black Muslims were to be set free immediately and their freedom acknowledged.
Let me hasten to add, that West Africa shared with other regions where slave trading was common – the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Russian steppe of mediaeval times and pre-Norman England – a high degree of political fragmentation. Conflict between fragmented states, led to warfare, which generated captives, which in turn led to slavery.
In spite of this history, blacks today still persist in fragmentation, forming mini-states, rather than the “regional solidarity which would prevent slavery.” From our very own painful history we have learnt nothing. We are thus condemned to repeat the past.
The other point I wish to make clear, is that by 1440, the constant Arab raids of Africa for slaves laid the path for the more extensive European trade in African slaves under the banner of Christianity. Indeed, the clash of Christianity with Islam, eventually encouraged Christians to follow the Muslim lead in at first, barring the enslavement of fellow believers, only to descend in the same quagmire, of enslaving all blacks, Christian or otherwise. Christianity, like Islam, would provide the religious justification of African slavery. So that neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation attacked the legitimacy of slavery. It is a sorry chapter in so-called western history.
In fact the printing of the Bible in the language of the people, put in wider circulation the myths of Noah’s curse or curses, on which the Christian justification of African slavery would rest. The truth is, Judaism, Islam and Christianity have each in their diverse ways, made a contribution to the moral advance of humanity, but these religious systems of belief, at the beginning of modern history compromised themselves with their acceptance of slaveholding, and the merchandising of men, black men, as a mere commodity, to be bought and sold, to create wealth for others, world without end.
All three religious systems based themselves on the curse of Noah and justified and so pursued slavery with a vengeance. Farrakhan, the well-known black Muslim, in perhaps an attempt to conceal the role of his own religion in slavery has accentuated that of Judaism and Jews. Historical reality shows that that is making a distinction without a difference. All three, Judaism, Islam and Christianity – the latter from Genesis to Paul to the Corinthians justified slavery, and African slavery in particular.
Both Catholics and Protestants, that is Christendom, would find in the Bible and in traditions of biblical interpretation ideas which justified enslavement of Africans. These ideas would assure and reassure the Christian slave-holder or slave-trader whether they were pious, or whether they were not, of the rightness of holding or trading in Africans as slaves.
The notion that African “heathens” or “pagans” would benefit from becoming slaves to Christians, was adopted and accepted by both Catholic and Protestant. Dehumanise by slavery, and then claim this was “a civilising mission.” Blacks themselves, like the great Black scholar, Ahmed Baba, carried away on the wings of religion would come to accept this insidious view of themselves and their world.
They would be paralysed and terrified from celebrating their own incessant revolts against slavery, which contributed to abolition, lest such celebrations annoy whites who now control their economies. That way they would even now perpetuate external control of their economies, claiming it was all part and parcel of the process of globalisation!!!
Blacks then have become active participants in their own domination, in their own universal under-classing. We will yield vast tracts of land, sea, and other resources, in the name of “economic development” to our traditional or non-traditional “Masters”, oblivious of our own past history. We have failed to develop a culture of resistance which our own history mandates. A mindless “jam and whine”, has come in place of a conscious celebration.
Festivals for their own sake, and without point now predominate under the label, believe it or not, of culture. It is, to say the least, a-historical. (Incidentally my King of the Bands, this year was Zucan. I felt I was in the presence of something authentic and creatively authentic.)
But I anticipate myself. In 1618 at the Synod of Dordt, the last united gathering of Protestant Churches, there was a discussion as to whether African slaves born in Protestant households should be baptised and whether or not baptism would free them. This created the difficulty that if Christian baptism freed, then slave-owners would prevent it. The Synod ducked the issue, leaving the discretion to baptise or not to baptise to the head of the household!
Protestantism like Catholicism before it, cleared the way for wholesale enslavement of Africans. And so it came to pass.
Genesis, after all, contains a dramatic story which shows Noah, the primordial “good man”, the exemplar, condemning one of his children to slavery, he, the father being drunk with wine and naked. “Cursed be Ham, the father of Canaan, and a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” The curse was specific, but it was generalised to all blacks especially those in Africa, as an economic imperative upheld by religion.
Later in Leviticus 25 it is written “Both thy bondsmen and bondsmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be the heathen which are round about you, of them all shall ye buy bondsmen and bondsmaids.” It was a sweeping and all inclusive ex-parte injunction against all Africans.
Isaiah would later prophesy that “Ethiopians” would be taken in captivity and slavery, “young and old, naked and barefoot, even with their buttocks uncovered to the shame of Egypt.”
Fairness demands that I point out things which challenged racism in the Bible – I remind racism is a product of European domination, Blacks who reject racism, cannot, repeat, cannot be racist. The absurd claim of Euro-Americans accusing blacks of racism, is their last ditch defence to prevent their current domination from being challenged and buried.
The Bible describes Moses’ wife Zipporah, as a Cushite or black African. When Moses’s sister Miriam objected to the union, Yahweh punished her: “Behold Miriam became leprous, white as snow.”
Unfortunately when the entire black race was being suborned, that Biblical injunction was never invoked. Only Miriam suffered, when others did far worse.
Consequently, mediaeval Christians often equated the colour black with the Devil and sexual licence, and the notion that the heat of the tropic degraded the inhabitants, become widespread, science notwithstanding. Even one so wise as Isaac Newton believed this racist nonsense.
At any rate “the notion that matters to do with slave, were related to Noah’s curse was more widely diffused in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than ever before because of the Bible’s greater availability”, wrote the fine modern scholar Robin Blackburn. African slavery in the New World was at its height, simultaneously. Christianity adjusted to slavery, African slavery, which was many times the size of Islamic enslavement.
Philosopher and merchant, historian and traveller, protestant and catholic, all contributed to a religious and racial ideology which allowed for the pursuit of New World slavery, and the enrichment of Europe and America which resulted. Riches stilled white consciences, from Pope to peasant.
So that in the end as Eugene Genovese was to note:
“Cruel, unjust, explorative slavery bound two peoples together in bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent, that neither could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other. Slavery rested on the principle of property in man – of one man’s appropriation of another’s person, as well as the fruits of his labour. By definition and in essence it was a system of class rule in which some lived off the labour of others.”
It was to reach absurd proportions in the Caribbean, where the criminal, the slave-holder, was compensated for the loss of his slaves. And the victims, the slaves, were not compensated, but consigned to the same conditions of labour and dispossession, only with the proviso that we could not any longer be bought and sold after August 1, 1834. Slaves in America, at least, were promised “40 acres and a mule.” The betrayal, and the resultant black dispossession, still hangs like a pall over American history. Always dispossession, so that we might labour in the vineyard for others.
Religion and law sanctified and enforced that system. In the end, slavery was abolished, but the system of living off the labour of others was imposed on the dispossessed slaves, whose dispossession has persisted making us the world’s underclass, in mini-states, without regional solidarity. It is this consciousness that liberates. It is a consciousness which has not yet seized hold of our people, and so we tarry in the wilderness – half-free, half-slave.
Last updated on 30 May 2022