Slavery

The ambience of a dungeon is somewhat lacking without the stench of communal excrement and the occasional wail of despair. One must turn a blind eye to the fundamentals of human decency in order to operate a dungeon efficiently. The administrators of this particular venue had no such moral barrier between them and their profits. For the guests of the dank cells, the good news was that their average stay would be a short one; the bad news was that the only exit was aboard a ship to the New World. The coastal slave forts of West Africa brought wealth and misery in equal measure.

Slavery, as the saying goes, gets shit done. One look at the world’s largest economy demonstrates the benefits of free labour. Consider that most of the authors of the American Constitution owned their own slaves; men celebrated as some of the most progressive in history. Consider that when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1861, that almost one in five Americans were owned by someone else. Consider that the slave trade was officially banned over thirty years earlier. Letting go of slaves is tough.

To be fair, we cannot hold the USA responsible for slavery; it worked equally well for the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Chinese, Romans and Arabs. Without slavery, we may not have had the Pyramids, the Parthenon or the Coliseum. In fact, most civilisations the world over had slaves, including native American and African cultures. Slaves were a sign of wealth and luxury, often prisoners or spoils of war. Feudal peasants were not entirely slaves, freedom of movement and employment were extremely limited, especially for the serfs in Russia. It was not until after Portuguese landed in West Africa in the 1460s did the slave trade really take off.

Europeans didn’t just show up in Africa and take over, trading slaves was common amongst existing empires through the Sahara to North Africa along with gold and ivory. In their efforts to outdo their Muslim rivals, the Portuguese sailed to modern day Ghana to tap into the wealth of the gold trade. As time passed, they saw the profits to be made in trading human cargo, especially to their freshly decimated and labour-lacking colonies in the Americas. Before long, the English, French, Swedes and Danes were in on the act, dotting the sub-Saharan coast with fortresses. While slavery was an African tradition, it took Europeans to make it a global business.

The heartless profiteering of the slave traders is hard to ignore, however it takes two to tango. The slave trade saw the rise of the Ashanti Empire, a warlike people who conquered neighbouring tribes to seize captives and sell them to the slave traders for horses and guns – which in turn were used to make more wars of human plunder. The prime of West African men were polished with oil and sold in American slave yards, older men had their heads shaved to appear younger, while pregnant women and the sick were disposed of overboard during the journey. From the Bahamas to Brazil, slaves were traded for sugar, tobacco and cotton as their owners returned to Europe to reap the rewards.

Britain tabled the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. The European powers saw the error of their ways and instead decided to divide the African continent up between them in a wave of colonial fervour. A few nations still see the benefits of slavery. Mauritania’s slaves were only officially freed in the mid-80s, newly made citizens still struggle to make the change from slave to employee. Only the sex industry continues a regular trade in slaves worldwide, making effective use of the illiterate and disadvantaged. The shrewd US, on the other hand, still makes the most of slave labour, with over 2.5 million people incarcerated who are put to work across a variety of industries.

Khufu was a powerful Egyptian Pharaoh of the Old Kingdom. In the ancient world’s greatest cock-measuring contest, he ordered the construction of the largest slave-built structure ever known.* Today, most people don’t know the name of the man buried in the Great Pyramid of Giza any more than they know the names of the slaves that built it. Owning a fellow human being is mankind’s ultimate power and most despicable weakness. The status quo, greed and the Bible propped up slavery over the centuries, however it is a weight rightfully shrugged from the shoulders of our collective conscience.

* A useless one nonetheless as his grave was robbed.