"Sins of the fathers" by James Pope-Hennessey

A history of the slave trade with rather more vivid description than most.

If the title were not clear enough, the first chapter makes the author's position plain, describing slavery as "that vast complex of international crime by which, in four centuries, a total of fifteen million men, women and children of African blood were delivered into transatlantic slavery, under conditions so hideous that another nine million are estimated to have died during crossing.” (C 1) This is not academic history. This is the position of the prosecution. Swiftly he dismisses the economic argument: that the British transatlantic slave trade came into being because of the labour requirements of the agriculture being developed in the New World and ended because the sugar islands were no longer so important to the British economy. He also denounces the position that the slave trade was a marginal activity: "a trade in which so many Europeans and Africans indulged for centuries cannot have been run exclusively by money-maniacs and pocket sadists." (C 1) In essence the purpose of this book is to know who to blame.

But I found the moral analysis of the blame too narrow and naive. I propose that slavery is wrong and that the transatlantic slave-trade was a particularly nasty form of slavery involving other great moral wrongs such as kidnapping, false imprisonment, torture, mutilation and murder. But from this I would go on to say that, with the exception of the slaves who were victims, all the participants in the slave trade bear some moral guilt. Pope-Hennesey seems to disagree. He excuses the Africans who kidnapped the slaves in the first place and then sold them to the slave-trade captains. He quotes an ex-slave as saying ‘If there were no buyers there would be no sellers’ and comments "that is the crux of the matter, and the final word that can be said on African ‘guilt’.”(C 10.1) Such a point of view is also used to excuse prostitutes, redefining them as 'sex workers' and instead to attach moral blame to their clients. But if this is then extended to the drug industry we are presumably blaming the addicts and excusing the dealers. It seems to me that the African slavers may be less guilty than the slave captains and the plantation owners but they cannot be entirely excused.

Similarly, Pope-Hennesey acknowledges the existence of slavery among the Anglo-Saxons (abolished in England by the Normans although the serfdom with which it was replaced was not much better) and endemic in some African societies but seems to consider these as innocent variants. Whilst I agree that the transatlantic slave-trade offered extreme horrors and extreme immoralities I don't think one can consider any form of slavery as morally acceptable. Furthermore, Pope-Hennesey does not mention the slave trade that existed during the middle ages in the Indian Ocean, possibly involving up to twenty-two million slaves, and the more than one million Europeans captured by Barbary pirates between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. If we start believing that slavery was a one-off moral horror it may make us complacent when we need to be morally alert to any erosion of the freedom of individuals.

This aside, Pope-Hennessey has provided some wonderful descriptions of horrors and many fascinating facts:
“Just as the colour black was, for most Europeans, connected with night, witches and the Powers of Darkness, so, to many Africans, white was often of the colour of devils, and the semaring of the face with white clay was calculated to inspire terror.” (C 3.4)
Many of the plants associated with Africa (eg maize, yams, and coconut palms) were in fact plants from the New World or the Indian Ocean imported during this period. This was partly because the slave traders built gardens around their forts: “To have strange and inadequate, often repulsive, food added to the other health hazards of a lethal climate was asking too much." (C 4.1)
The reason it took so long for the Europeans to find West Africa was that “mariners would not venture beyond Cape Bojador, for fear that they and their ships would plunge over the edge of the world-platform into oblivion.” (C 4.2) I’m not sure this is true. The accepted view was that the world was round (and sailors were always prepared to sail beyond the horizon) but that the temperatures as you progressed south became too hot for wooden ships and humans to bear.
The word ‘fetish’ derives from the Portuguese ‘fetiços’, images; the word ‘ju-ju’ is from the French word ‘joux’, toys (C 5.2)
“You might buy a parcel of youths and girls in the market at Bridgetown, Barbados, or Charleston, Carolina, but you could never really be sure what exact quantity of hatred, hostility and magic you were carting back to the slave-barracks of your comfortable Palladian home.” (C 5.2)
The Oba of Benin was “so heavily sheathed in polished gold that when he rose to his feet he had to be propped up by two slaves, who likewise operated his arms for him when he wished to gesticulate.” (C 5.3)
Portugal retained their fort at Whydah until it was annexed by Dahomey in 1961. “The Portuguese representative at Whydahr burned his motor-car in front of the fort as a protest, whereupon Dahomey issued a celebration postage-stamp showing the charred wreckage of the Citroen.” (C 5.3 fn)
Slaves were branded by their owners: SPG denoted slaves of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (C 6.1)
“To work on ships which often were merely floating coffins - the ships taking slaves to Rio de Janeiro were in fact called tumbeiros from the Portuguese for tomb - was at once brutalizing and nauseous.” (C 7.1)
“The primitive, rickety basis of gracious living in the West Indian Islands required a cohort of house-slaves” (C8.3)
“The first line of defence for any vanquished or occupied nation, as for any camp of war-prisoners, is calculated cunning and deceit.” (C 8.4)
The African concept of style was influenced by the slave-trading ships:
“the upper floor of any two-storied Efik house is still called a ‘dek’.” (C 12.2)
“King Pepple would sometimes sport a pair of scarlet leather boots which seemed too small for him and which caused him to topple over when he was drunk.” (C 13.3)
“Negro proverbs” include “‘If you knock de nose de eye cry’ ... ‘as de ole crow fly, so de young one do too’.” (C 13.1)
Slave girls were inevitably raped. Some slave traders “were thought to have literally worn themselves away copulating in the night dews on the coast.” (C 13.3)

December 2018; 280 pages

"Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi

A woman gives birth to two daughters in an African village an a land that will become Ghana. The sisters do not know of one another. Both are very beautiful. One is captured and sold to America as a slave. One becomes the 'wife' of the English slave trader. As the African proverb says: “separated sisters ... are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.” (p 39)

This story alternates between the descendants of these two women. Each generation is given a chapter of about twenty pages. Thus the book is essentially made up of short stories, linked by the ancestry of the protagonists. This story is then intended to encapsulate the society in which they grow. Thus, on the American side of the 'pond', we have a slave, followed by a runaway in Baltimore whose wife is kidnapped under runaway slave legislation and reenslaved, followed by a convict working on a chain gang, followed by a gospel singer, followed by an angry young man who works for the NAACP and becomes a drug addict, followed by a failing PhD student. This makes the people become representative; they are icons. But it is extraordinarily difficult, in twenty pages, to introduce a character and give them a potted biography and link them to their parents and show how they reflect the history of their time and at the same time turn them into a meaningful character. At the start I was prepared to invest in the characters; they felt real. Towards the end the characters seemed just another shell rolling off the production line. They felt superficial and contrived. 

The story heads towards a resolution which, despite the little twist, one knows from almost the start that it will reach.

It is important to tell the history of colonialism, slavery and racism. Wicked things were done by ordinary men and women; terrible things were suffered by ordinary men and women. Somehow people survived. The problem with this book as fiction is that it became didactic. It was a little like watching a Brecht play. I wanted to become involved in the emotional life of the characters, I wanted to suffer with them, rage with them, triumph with them, love with them. But the instruction always kept me at arms length.

Some great moments:

• “Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.” (p 38)
• “They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that are wrapped around the wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.” (p 93)
• “Anna said ‘there won't be no violence in this house’. Five minutes later, Daly kicked Eurias in the shins, and Anna spanked him so hard he winced every time he sat down that day.” (p 121) A rare moment of humour. There aren't many laughs in this book.
• “Who ever heard of sweeping dust from dust?” (p 179) 
• “Maybe the Christian God was a question, a great and swirling circle of whys.” (p 186)

A drama documentary in book form. January 2018; 300 pages

A review of the audiobook by the Book Chatter blog points out the two-part structure of the book in which "The first half reads like a fable. It is vibrant with the culture of the African people. The story-telling is itself true to the culture of these people, full of their belief systems. ... The second half becomes more straight forward in its manner of relating the stories of the characters, as we get closer to modern day."

But Book Chatter seems to love the book for its informative aspect: "Gyasi depicts a beautifully functioning African culture that becomes fractured by the slave trade. The horrors of slavery and it’s aftermath are put in perspective with this broadly sweeping novel. We are still dealing with the aftermath today, and Gyasi bravely posits the question of where will it end." Well, yes. As an academic work, as the PhD that Marcus is trying to write at the end of the book. But as a novel?

I discussed this book in my reading group. We identified the themes of fire (very explicit, although there were some mentions to its that some of us had overlooked) and scarring. There were a lot of characters with physical scars. There were clearly a lot of issues that could be discussed. But my reading group is made up of aspiring writers and what the book is about are of less interest to us than how it was written. We were intrigued how the prose changed from village rustic in the early chapters to more modern in the later chapters though we were uncertain whether we could distinguish individual voices. Despite the Book Chatter review mentioned above, we failed to appreciate why the book is divided into two halves except in so far as the American Civil War and the emancipation proclamation took place between the two halves. We agreed that there were passages which demonstrated that this young writer really could write. But our verdict was that she had set herself too large a challenge with the structure of this book. There were so many characters who were started but for whom there was insufficient opportunity to develop to their full potential. We wanted more depth.

"The Search for the Niger" by Christopher LLoyd

In the golden age of African exploration, the British Victorian explorers wanted to find the source of the Nile. On the other hand they knew where the Niger started, but where did it go? This book tells the horrendous story of the explorers who died to try to discover that answer.

The biggest cause of death was malaria. They knew about cinchona bark, they had made quinine, but few realised that it could be effective against malaria. They never understood that malaria was carried by mosquitoes (they believed the miasmatic theory, that diseases came from decaying atmosphere, hence mal aria) so they never protected themselves against them. Then there was dysentery and all of the other diseases endemic to the area including bilharzia, guinea worm and yellow fever. If they survived disease they were likely to fall prey to the militant Muslim slave traders who preyed on the Negroes, destabilising the sub-Saharan region so that it was a patchwork of warring tribes where lawlessness and anarchy meant banditry and death. The mortality of Europeans on the West African coast at the end of the 1700s was estimated at 70% per year! That's about 30 times worse than the trenches in the First World War. Those who returned often found the financial promises that had been made to them were worthless; only those who published best-selling books prospered (usually until they went back and died). Why did they do it?

Mostly because they were either mad or desperate and so driven that inevitably joint expeditions fell apart!

From the government's point of view the aim was to encourage trade (mostly in palm oil, essential for lubricating the new steam engines) and to discourage the newly illegal slave trade. They did not want the hassle and expense of colonies.

In the end they discovered that the Niger travels north-east past Timbuktu (a fabled city, tremendously disappointing when it was found to be a largish town of single storey mud huts), to to edge of the Sahara. It then makes a sudden turn south east  and eventually flows south into the Bight of Biafra which is on the underhang bit of Africa. It does not meet the Nile (this was proved when someone pointed out that its source wasn't high enough to provide the potential energy needed for the river to cross Africa). It does not drain into Lake Chad (an incredibly shallow freshwater lake with no river draining it) not evaporate in the Sahara. It skirts the mountains of Kong which were thought to be much bigger than they are and an impenetrable barrier.

This is an old-fashioned history. We learn about the greats of West African exploration: Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton, Richard and John Lander, Macgregor Laird, Dr Barth and Dr Baikie. I'd only ever even heard of Mungo Park and even then I didn't know what he did. These are, of course, all Europeans (and predominantly Scots). The black people, often called negroes, are depicted in traditional stereotypes of ignorance, in thrall to "ju-ju" and "witchdoctors". The Muslims are mostly fanatical, blood thirsty, slave traders. There is an awful sentence on page 149 which refers to "the psychological antipathy of the African male towards manual labour". It was published in 1973; one would have hoped that publishers and their editors at that stage would have been able to avoid such relentlessly negative categorical depictions of human beings.

Questions that it left in my mind:

• Why did they do it? Why did they do it? Why did they do it? Why did they do it? 
• How lucky were they to be able to hang on to the notes for their journals through attack, captivity, illness, walking miles through deserts, near starvation, shipwreck ...?
• How did they send letters (which they did regularly) to the coast? How did the postmen get through when they often couldn't? (Presumably this is evidence, as if it were needed, that the servants were better travellers than the masters.)

I did discover that the name Niger is not linked to the Latin word for black, as I had assumed, but to the African word n'ger-n-gereo which simply means Great River.

Readable although somewhat episodic; it does little more than describe the tribulations of explorer after explorer without asking the big questions about this important part of the world.

September 2015; 208 pages