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THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE
by Trevor G. Marshall
PAGE 10
Someone asked a question - were the Africans who were brought here enslaved before they came here? The jury is still out on this. The initial judgment of historians was that these people had been slaves and that the European did them a whole great favour by releasing them from a fate worse than death which is perpetual slavery and possibly slaughter and sacrifice and bringing them here and subjecting them to the kind of mercies they did -kind of out of the frying pan, into the fire. Other persons argue that everyone in Africa was free, and that there was no slavery and that the Europeans did a horrendous deed in bringing Africans from their idyllic fields to this region. The truth is somewhere in between. What we have found is that initially somewhere between 1500 and 1700 when Barbados took off as a slave market, the recruitment exercise of these persons was by capture, simple body snatching, shanghaiing. It didn't work initially in England because many of the poor whites were also captured and used the three F's - force, fraud or fear - to procure persons who came unwillingly. We find that from the 1700's to the mid-1900's in Africa certain empires developed as slave-raiding and slave trading entities, Oyo, Sokoto, Benin and the greatest one of all, Dahomey had an empire as large as the entirety of western Africa, and engaged in extensive slave trading. For that purpose they traded in arms, the initial stock-in-trade which Europeans bought was iron, tin and copper goods and by the 19th century they bought firearms which were utilised to force people into subjection and to transport large numbers of Africans.
Some estimates of the number of Africans who came to the Caribbean and to the Americas are as many as 40 million, dispassionate scholars now say it is between 10 and 15 million who came over a period of 4 centuries. It is obvious that some of those persons had been in a situation of bondage in Africa, it is also obvious that not all of them had been slaves and some were actually snatched, and we know that whole villages, whole groups of people were sold into slavery. The slave trade became a useful exercise or useful way of getting rid of rivals, twins and defeated enemies in battle, persons, even of royal blood, some princes of royal houses came to the Caribbean as slaves. But in the next set of forced migration to the Caribbean, Indians and Chinese, one also found in that Brahmins, Mandarins came as well as Coolies, the manual labourers came so it was a kind of trade wherein any number could play, force, fear or fraud. People also volunteered to come as slaves when they saw that their friends and loved ones were brought. Children, babies in arms, pregnant women, all people came on the slave trade and, as I say, the jury is still out as to whether the large number of them were slaves when they came here. We think that the first group of Africans that came to Barbados were captured. Ligon the first historian suggests that; also Richard Dunn in his book "Sugar and Slaves" suggests that up to 1713 Barbados was stocked with Africans who were captured by the Englishmen and brought here rather than being sold by people of their own colour. We know that people are rather sensitive on this issue because in the 20th century as we move into the 21st, when you are looking to apportion blame for the slave trade, the Jews can say that they did not sell their brothers, then we tell them that Joseph’s brother sold him. There was a slave trade between Israel and Egypt, but the rest of the world can say "you can't blame us, your people sold yourselves, so you in the Western hemisphere were sold to the Europeans by your own people". So we are there in a kind of situation which is psychologically unmanageable. There was a slave trade in Africa, particularly in East Africa as the Arabs for centuries sold Africans to people in the eastern borders of the Mediterranean, thus the name "Slav" became attached to those darker-skinned persons who now live in Georgia, Armenia, Macedonia, Yugoslavia etc who are dark Europeans and there are obvious African genes (blood) in them.
-- © Trevor G Marshall, 2000. This document is the property of the author. Quotation or reproduction without the permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
