This article was originally published in The
Guardian, UK.
Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world.
In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel
4 [UK], Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of
this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African
slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why was there
no substantial public monument of national contrition equivalent
to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no
recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made
possible the vigor and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there
not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of
African slaves?
These are timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush,
their hands still wet with Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand themselves
as the saviors of Africa. The G8's debt-forgiveness initiative
was spun successfully as an act of western altruism. The generous
Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit, governments
must agree to "conditions," which included allowing
profit-making companies to take over public services. This was
no gift; it was what the merchant bankers would call a "debt-for-equity
swap," the equity here being national sovereignty. The sweetest
bit of the deal was that the money owed, already more than repaid
in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the
west and Japan, and oil from nations who bank their profits in
London and New York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left
the rich world. No one considered that Africa's debt was trivial
compared to what the west really owes Africa.
Beckford's experts estimated Britain's debt to Africans in the
continent and Diaspora to be in the trillions of pounds. While
this was a useful benchmark, its basis was mistaken. Not because
it was excessive, but because the real debt is incalculable. For
without Africa and its Caribbean plantation extensions, the modern
world as we know it would not exist.
Profits from slave trading and from sugar, coffee, cotton and
tobacco are only a small part of the story. What mattered was
how the pull and push from these industries transformed western
Europe's economies. English banking, insurance, shipbuilding,
wool and cotton manufacture, copper and iron smelting, and the
cities of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, multiplied in response
to the direct and indirect stimulus of the slave plantations.
Joseph Inikori's masterful book,
Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, shows
how African consumers, free and enslaved, nurtured Britain's infant
manufacturing industry. As Malachy Postlethwayt, the political
economist, candidly put it in 1745: "British trade is a magnificent
superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African
foundation."
In The Great Divergence, Kenneth
Pomeranz asked why Europe, rather than China, made the breakthrough
first into a modern industrial economy. To his two answers abundant
coal and New World colonies he should have added access to west
Africa. For the colonial Americas were more Africa's creation
than Europe's: before 1800, far more Africans than Europeans crossed
the Atlantic. New World slaves were vital too, strangely enough,
for European trade in the east. For merchants needed precious
metals to buy Asian luxuries, returning home with profits in the
form of textiles; only through exchanging these cloths in Africa
for slaves to be sold in the New World could Europe obtain new
gold and silver to keep the system moving. East Indian companies
led ultimately to Europe's domination of Asia and its 19th-century
humiliation of China.
Africa not only underpinned Europe's earlier development. Its
palm oil, petroleum, copper, chromium, platinum and in particular
gold were and are crucial to the later world economy. Only South
America, at the zenith of its silver mines, outranks Africa's
contribution to the growth of the global bullion supply.
The guinea coin paid homage in its name to the west African origins
of one flood of gold. By this standard, the British pound since
1880 should have been rechristened the rand, for Britain's prosperity
and its currency stability depended on South Africa's mines. I
would wager that a large share of that gold in the IMF's vaults
which was supposed to pay for Africa's debt relief had originally
been stolen from that continent.
There are many who like to blame Africa's weak governments and
economies, famines and disease on its post-1960 leadership. But
the fragility of contemporary Africa is a direct consequence of
two centuries of slaving, followed by another of colonial despotism.
Nor was "decolonisation" all it seemed: both Britain
and France attempted to corrupt the whole project of political
sovereignty.
It is remarkable that none of those in Britain who talk about
African dictatorship and kleptocracy seem aware that Idi Amin
came to power in Uganda through British covert action, and that
Nigeria's generals were supported and manipulated from 1960 onwards
in support of Britain's oil interests. It is amusing, too, to
find the Telegraph and the Daily Mail which just a generation
ago supported Ian Smith's Rhodesia and South African apartheid
now so concerned about human rights in Zimbabwe. The tragedy
of Mugabe and others is that they learned too well from the British
how to govern without real popular consent, and how to make the
law serve ruthless private interest. The real appetite of the
west for democracy in Africa is less than it seems. We talk about
the Congo tragedy without mentioning that it was a British statesman,
Alec Douglas-Home, who agreed with the US president in 1960 that
Patrice Lumumba, its elected leader, needed to "fall into
a river of crocodiles."
African slavery and colonialism are not ancient or foreign history;
the world they made is around us in Britain. It is not merely
in economic terms that Africa underpins a modern experience of
(white) British privilege. Had Africa's signature not been visible
on the body of the Brazilian Jean
Charles de Menezes, would he have been gunned down on a tube
at Stockwell? The slight kink of the hair, his pale beige skin,
broadcast something misread by police as foreign danger. In that
sense, his shooting was the twin of the axe murder of Anthony
Walker in Liverpool, and of the more than 100 deaths of black
people in mysterious circumstances while in police, prison or
hospital custody since 1969.
This universe of risk, part of the black experience, is the afterlife
of slavery. The reverse of the medal is what WEB DuBois called
the "wage of whiteness," the world of safety, trustworthiness,
welcome that those with pale skins take for granted. The psychology
of racism operates even among those who believe in human equality,
shaping unequal outcomes in education, employment, criminal justice.
By its light, such all-white clubs as the G8 continue to meet
in comfort.
Early this year, Gordon Brown told journalists in Mozambique
that Britain should stop apologising for colonialism. The truth
is, though, that Britain has never even faced up to the dark side
of its imperial history, let alone begun to apologise.
Dr Richard Drayton is a senior lecturer in imperial and extra-European
history since 1500 at Cambridge University. His book The
Caribbean and the Making of the Modern World will be published
in 2006. Dr. Drayton can be contacted at [email protected].