Dear Editor,
The month marks, for those sensitive to some anniversaries, a milestone of unusually powerful significance in the history of the modern world.
One speaks here of the abolition of slavery set August 1 in 1834, and all of the pamphleteering that immediately pre-dates it.
And the date is also meaningful because it fixes another point or transition between that narrow defining of ‘international rights’ and ‘sovereignty’ that permits nations to do as they please on the high seas or within fixed borders, and the collective right or responsibility to work on human salvation beyond our political frontiers. In short, one could pursue the slave trader on the high seas or wherever they are found. We had, with the armed suppression of the slave trade done by foreign vessels, moved again into a phase that would authorise hot pursuit across borders, humanitarian invasions, and armed intervention in foreign territory. It had been done before of course, but now there was an entire new elaboration of arguments and justifications available.
Emancipation, and the accretion and extension of the ideas and practice of human rights that it helped release, must be placed in its global historical context. It is the single event that, in modern times, could be said indisputably to have:
-freed millions of people of all races across all continents from varying forms of human bondage, either immediately, and then over the last almost two centuries, in a process that continues until today.
-served as an important foundational event on which a multitude of discourse on all kinds of rights would be set. It would deny the oppressors a certain arrangement with with ‘race as a concept.’ It would help set in motion, serving as precedent, the language and later the mode of agitation for suffragism/feminism, indigenism/native rights, and the entire vocabulary of ‘rights’ now fixed in UN conventions and charters.
-facilitated, specifically in the New World and in our own geo-historical location, a major transfer of creativity and art forms, and one of the most significant infusions of intellect and talent into the international cultural spheres.
To the extent that the oligarchies allowed the expression and penetration of African and African-influenced forms, their own cultures were enriched and gained commercial advantage, generated superstars, created innovation.
And this in an ever-widening variety of fields.
Abolitionism had been, because of the influence of the Quakers and other movements, given a religious dimension. It was a theme of the revivals in American spirituality for the First Great Awakening. It benefited from the European Enlightenment. Abolition was therefore born and becomes possible in a religious and cultural context not replicated in other civilisations, including some African, that also had servitude or caste distinction.
But more than anything else it was a triumph of the resistance of the enslaved populations, over the centuries, and their steadfast refusal to submit to a certain definition of themselves.
The anniversaries of the abolition of human slavery in the British Empire should, if truth be told, become cause for a general celebration by its beneficiaries world-wide; whatever their race, their sex, or their social condition.
The economism that would later, with CLR James and historian Dr Eric Williams reveal other aspects of the emancipation dynamics, were then mostly hidden from public view.
As later the needs for female engagement in the industrial production in the post-war West would be obscured in righteous talk of womens’ right to work, to control births and to provide sex and companionship outside the constraints of the abstinence of an idealised nuclear family model.
What emancipation, we conclude, as a category of event, would bring in its train is the primacy of the idea that the rights and dignities of the human being are inalienable from the human condition itself.
And therefore, there had to have been a reform of women’s rights, rights of the child, the handicapped, the foreign born in some places, the sexually ‘othered’, the caste, religious minority, etc…
In short, after the justifications for limiting human rights that ranged from the pious to the pseudo-scientific to the simply preposterous, we now live the marxian anti-thesis of a proliferation of rights; sometimes to their reductio ad absurdum. A phase in human history where the ethical bases for our civilisation have to be re-conceptualised and re-fixed. And this in the absence of the economic determinants felt to have been persuasive or decisive in 1838.
Abolition would also have helped, serving as example, to bring an end to certain embarrassments in Africa and the Middle East. The Emperor Haile Selassie, a major historical figure and modernising leader, would witness himself greeted and divinised during a visit to Jamaica, while his attempts to abolish slavery at home were, until the nineteen sixties, usually fruitless. Middle Eastern potentates carved into being by British concern for oil and influence would hear themselves reminded of the Quranic injunction to free (not abandon) slaves as they drifted (some as long as the nineteen eighties), into the twenty first century with social relations that often were not legally ‘slavery’ (and generally had nothing to do in status or practice with the forms that had developed in the New World), but were not full social equality either.
So, one thing to be remembered is that while emancipation brought to the fore certain ideas, in practical terms freed slaves were abandoned to penury in most colonies, often denied education and voting rights, subject to economic sabotage in Guyana and elsewhere, and, post-independence, often obliged to live reduced to an underpaid labour force. In short, the struggle had to continue.
And in this way, in the twentieth century, a Civil Rights revolution, this time fixed on the application of ideas of human rights, would occur in the New World, and would have as important an effect on global human rights ideas as had emancipation a century previously. The civil rights movement in the United States, and agitation in London, and Paris, by the mostly West Indian population settled there, would be followed and supported by Caribbean peoples at home, many of whom had already achieved independence, and hence, full human rights as they chose to define them.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
