Quotable

I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, Brazil, I heard the most pitiful screams, and could not suspect that some poor slave was being tortured.... Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal .... I have seen a boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean. It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.

From Charles Darwin's journals here:

On empty apologizing and vacuous legislative rhetoric

Naked bids by politicians to hold onto power compel them to do bizarre things. Sometimes the actions seem so much out of turn and extraordinary that it makes one reflect on our opportunistic tendencies. A latest example of this was the successful effort by Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee based house member in the United States Congress, (a white individual who represents a majority-black district in Memphis) spurring and passing a bill in the Congress that apologized to black Americans for "fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow" segregation.

Oh, by the way, he faces re-election seven days from today.

The apology seems to have come about 140 years after slavery was abolished.

A fashion trend that seems to be overtaking the legislatures around the world is apologizing for atrocities so egregious that detailing some of the incidents might induce the throwing up of ones last meal. It seems to me that telling the descendants of peoples long after they were subjugated, appropriated, abused and taken advantage of economically, socially and culturally serves only to reopen sore and healing wounds and nothing else. If however, the politicians had told us that along with the apology came a grant that served to open up a number of hospitals, public schools and recreation centers in economically blighted areas with appropriate rehabilitation programs, it might have come with some meaning. Of course, then, the government would be labeled communists and pandering to socialist ideals. Either way, an empty apology is not going to wake anyone up and would do little to help the downward slide perpetuated by racial policies from long ago.

In related news, Canada delivered an apology to indigenous people who as children were ripped from their families and sent to boarding schools, where many were abused as part of official government policy to "kill the Indian in the child."

Also, the Australians apologized to the "Stolen Generations" i.e. aboriginal children taken from their parents to be raised by white families in order to enforce the following policy: "Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the race and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white..."

On June 15, 1920, Duluth, MN police arrested several young black men accused of raping a white woman. That evening, three of them – Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie – are taken from jail by a mob and lynched. As was common, a postcard was made to commemorate the event. (Picture ripped from here)

Lyrics from a recent song ‘Beer for my Horses’ by superstar country singer Toby Keith

Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he'd done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see


STRANGE FRUIT – a poem by Lewis Allan
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Slavery: Modern day effects

Could there be a direct link that can be proven and backed by numbers about the correlation between African countries most ravaged by slavery and those that are the most underdeveloped today?

Even if there were one, can it be verifiably measured?

Assistant Professor of economics at Harvard University, Nathan Nunn believes that the African countries with the biggest slave exports are by and large the countries with the lowest incomes now.

That relationship, according to him, is not a coincidence - one actually helped to cause the other.

It's a sweeping, ambitious recasting of slavery's horrific commerce. It is also a work of risky estimates and serious statistical gymnastics. Somehow, Nunn had to account for some 17 million slaves by their ethnic origins - a task some historians say can't accurately be done, but that Nunn nonetheless undertook, mining slavery data compiled over decades by other scholars. He also had to prove that his findings of cause and effect weren't polluted by a long list of variables that seem likely to have affected Africa's economies in the last 600 years. Nunn, a 33-year-old assistant professor, didn't shy away from this either, devising ways to control for everything from climate to natural resources to geography to Islamic influence to a country's particular brand of colonialism.

For the moment, Nunn said, he can't say what the implications of his research might be. But his first, tentative steps in that direction are intriguing. Meshing his numbers with those of other scholars, Nunn has found that the countries he identified as having the most slaves taken are also the countries that have the most ethnic fractionalization today. It may well be that the ethnic fault lines driving Africa's worst conflicts have powerful roots in slavery, which required Africans to turn on one another in order to capture one another, severely weakening communal ties and preventing the spread of services like education, health facilities, and access to water across a large population.

The Boston Globe explains the otherwise hard to read mathematical paper with a great degree of clarity. For those numerically and statistically inclined, here is a pdf link to the 32 page paper.

SignandSight puts it right when it made the following comment on this effort:

For one, it seems to support arguments long held in some development camps that the best use of foreign aid dollars lies not in conventional relief efforts - the food drops and water wells and antimalarial nets - but in long-term investments to rebuild economic and political institutions.

Image from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Description (from source above): Two slaves against a backdrop of sugar fields. Woman, on right, is seated under a tree, with basket filled with fruits and vegetables; she wears bead bracelets, armlets, earrings, and a large bead necklace. The man, wearing a loin cloth, holds a spade in one hand and a cutlass or knife in the other, with a bunch of sugar cane under his arm. Letters A-D, very briefly identify the images in this scene. As translated: A, Negro; B, Negress; C, Sugar Cane; D, A "pagaal," or basket for carrying produce

Ghana diary

Recently a friend of mine traveled to Ghana - partly in order to search for her roots and partly to enjoy the local culture. I spent a long time absorbing the wealth of detail she gathered during her trip there. She also gave me permission to post some pictures of the local life there and I got to be an armchair voyeur of the culture there. Among the many images, two sets of images struck me the most and I want to describe them to you.

The first was the underground dungeons that ware holding cells for slaves in the 1700's before they were loaded onto ships waiting at the harbor for onward transport to the plantations of Caribbean or the Americas. The images are haunting, severe and speak of a time that remains a bloody spot on blotting paper of humanity.

This excerpt from an article in the venerable economist some time back makes the situation a little more explicit:

The dungeons can still shock, two centuries after their last inmates were freed. Damp and fetid in the tropical air, immersed in virtual darkness, this is where slaves were kept, often for months at a time—before being led down a tunnel through the “door of no return” to ships riding in the surf, ready to begin their appalling voyage over the ocean.
Just one of the countless inmates left a written record. Having been sold to white traders for a gun, a piece of cloth and some lead, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano recalled waiting in the dungeon till his time arrived: “To conduct us away to the ship, it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking
of whips, and groans and cries of our fellow men. Some would not stir from the ground, when they were lashed and beaten in the most horrible manner.”

Of course, there are always two sides of a story as the following passage pitches to us tellingly:

A smokescreen still covers the African role in this pernicious trade. It is an awkward fact that the traffic could not have existed without African chiefs and traders. Europeans rarely went far from their forts; slaves were brought to them. Indeed, when the Europeans arrived the slave trade and slavery were already integral parts of local tribal economies. One of the few Ghanaian historians to touch these issues, Akosua Adoma Perbi, writes that “slavery became an important part of the Asante state [the Gold Coast's most powerful] right from its inception. For three centuries, Asante became the largest slave-trading, slave-owning and slave-dealing state in Ghana.”

The second aspect of her trip that struck me was a more joyous one. The aspect of coffin making among the Ga tribe of coastal Ghana. They believe that once an individual dies, they need to move onto the nether world in style and hence they tend to make coffins that represent some aspect of a person's life to ferry the person onward in afterlife. If the person was part of the fisher folks, then the coffin would be carved out of wood and would resemble a fish or a fishing boat. If the individual worked for the armed forces or was a security guard in the government, then the coffin would resemble an aspect of military life – say a cannon or a tank. This aspect of Ghanian life seems to be both frivolous as well as artistic.

The coffins seem to be made with a lot of love and care for something that is going to be buried into the ground never to be seen again - almost represent an aspect of mandala-art to me - done once beautifully, but destroyed forever by its erasure. Nevertheless, these photos capture both the sordid aspects of the slavery that flourished until recently as well as the artistic aspects of Ghanaian afterlife.

After enjoying the wealth of cultural detail second hand, I told her that after our children grow up, I would persuade my wife to take a trip over to the gold coast of Africa and see all this for real.

Hope you enjoy these pictures as much as I did.

The calm and serene seas of the gold coast hides the atrocities that must have taken place here 200 years ago.
Entrance to the dungeons. The slave masters used to live upstairs while the slaves holed up in the dungeons below.
The male and female dungeons were separated for obvious reasons (of course, a wooden engraved sign like this would not have existed then - this is for the tourists - I guess). The discoloration on the sides is from excrement. About 150 slaves were crammed into a room of this size with standing room for most. Until the ships came (sometimes three and four months late), the slaves had no choice but to defecate and urinate on themselves.

The 'point of no return' - an underground passage stright out of the dungeons into the holds of a cargo ship waiting to transport them for a triangular trade whose apex players included the Americas, Ghana and England. (The “triangular trade” as it was known, whereby slave-ships left European ports for west Africa with rum, guns, textiles and other goods to exchange for slaves, and then transported them across the Atlantic to sell to plantation-owners in America and Caribbean, and then returned with sugar and coffee, also fuelled the first great wave of economic globalisation.)

Afterlife for fisherfolk

The intricacy is amazing and humbling

Destined for someone from the armed forces - I am sure...

A shoe merchant, perhaps?