Sunday March 25, 2007
The day that changed the world 200 years ago
It\’s commonly claimed that the world changed September 11, 2001, when hijackers plunged two airliners into the World Trade Center.
Or on August 6, 1945, when a B29 dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Or on September 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland.
All of those were dramatic events, I agree. But they didn\’t change anything. Mostly, they confirmed the existing order, or lack of it.
For a date that really changed the world, try March 25, 1807. On that date, the Abolition of Slave Trade Act became British law.
For 16 years, William Wilberforce had relentlessly introduced his bills against slavery. And for 15 years, each one failed. Finally, in February 1807, parliament passed his motion. One month later, 200 years ago today, the Queen granted royal assent.
Wilberforce\’s Act didn\’t actually end slavery. Britons could, and did, own slaves. It merely ended the trans-Atlantic trade.
But it began an irresistible momentum.
All slaves in the British Empire were officially freed 26 years later, by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.
Slavery still persists
Not that slavery was eliminated – not even today.
Mauritania, some sources claim, still has active slave markets. In Ghana, children are still sold to fishermen as slave labour. An estimated 15,000 boys work in Ivory Coast cocoa plantations as virtual slaves. UNICEF says that about 700,000 children and women are trafficked around the world annually.
Canadian churches have raised funds to redeem slaves snared by the civil war in Sudan. Whether they will stay free is doubtful – their captors are not the kind of people who honour agreements with far-off patrons.
Slavery has existed at least as long as prostitution, the so-called “oldest profession.”
Ancient civilizations depended on slave labour. In Jesus\’ time, half the population of the Roman Empire were slaves; in the noble city of Athens, three-quarters were slaves.
Some societies treated slaves reasonably well. The Hebrew scriptures contained a “Bill of Rights” for slaves that defined how they could be treated and when they must be set free.
Others treated their slaves the way some people today treat their dogs. Or worse.
As late as the 18th3\”> century, an Ethiopian ruler put out the eyes of a dozen slaves as after-dinner entertainment.
In the western world, we hear mainly of slavery in the American context. In fact, probably less than ten per cent of slaves came to continental America. The vast majority went to Portuguese Brazil or French Caribbean.
The Portuguese started shipping slaves from Mozambique and Angola as early as 1530. The British weren\’t far behind; Sir John Hawkins ran the first slave cargo in 1562.
The French imported slaves to their Caribbean colonies. Ironically, a slave rebellion in Haiti enabled the fledgling United States to acquire Louisiana.
Limited survival
Slaves were shipped across the Atlantic stacked like cordwood. They had no exercise, no sanitation, no escape – except death.
Insurance companies paid nothing for slaves who died en route. But they reimbursed owners if cargo had to be jettisoned to save the ship. Dead, dying, and sick slaves often went over the side, still chained together.
On the British ship Zong, Captain Luke Collingwood had 133 men and women, weakened by transit, thrown overboard.
One out of five slaves perished on the voyage across the Atlantic. But the voyage was only one of their hardships. Of every five slaves seized inland, two or more died on forced marches to the coast. Captives herded across the Sahara to North African markets had death rates as high was 80 per cent.
Of those who lived long enough to be bought, half died in their first year of labour.
In other words, four out of five slaves perished before spending the rest of their lives as someone\’s property.
We can\’t blame the slave trade entirely on what Michael Moore calls “stupid white men.” Arab dhows conducted slave raids into Africa from the second century on.
White traders rarely ranged far inland. The slave trade depended on Arab intermediaries and African despots who sold their enemies, or their own people, for personal gain.
Ancient castles dot the spectacular coast of Ghana in West Africa. Somewhere over 10 million slaves passed through those castles. Because dead slaves were worthless, they were fed just enough to keep them alive until a ship picked them up. In dungeons like sewers, emaciated slaves scratched deep grooves into the wall with their fingernails.
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Explorer David Livingstone personally witnesses the massacre of several hundred Africans by Arab slave traders on the Lualaba River, a tributary of the mighty Congo. His letters of outrage fuelled anti-slavery sentiment in England.
Back home, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson amassed abundant evidence of these atrocities and inhumanities.
They were, of course, countered by those who argued that slavery had biblical authority.
The Oxford Companion to the Bible lists 16 passages that supported slavery, in both Old and New Testaments. Jesus, as far as we know, never condemned slavery. The apostle Paul describes himself as “a slave for Christ”; several of his letters treat slavery as normal.
Against those views, Samuel Wesley and George Whitefield (the founders of Methodism), Quakers, and evangelical Anglicans quoted their own verses opposing slavery. From the beginning, they argued, Christian churches freed slaves. Paul\’s letters instructed the churches in Galatia and Colossae that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ…”
The debate, says the Oxford Companion, provoked “the hitherto unthinkable idea that the Bible could be divided against itself.”
The abolition of slavery was the opening movement of a symphony of change that is still going on. Its vision led directly to the civil rights marches of the 1960, the Vietnam protests of the 1970s, liberation and feminist theology…
The world has never been the same since March 25, 1807. And it can never again return to what it once was.
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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