Two hundred years ago you could buy a human being for three to four pounds worth of cheap rum, produced at five and a half pence a gallon, transport him/her in a three-foot-three-inch space on a ship owned by a European or North American, operated under a charter company in which kings, queens, parliamentarians, mayors, churchmen, merchant, and industrialists invested, and sell that human being back for 30 to 80 pounds. Some 15 million people from Africa were bought and sold this way. This was the slave trade.

The suffering was such that many preferred suicide by jumping overboard or starving themselves to death rather than go through the ordeal. But even when they tried to starve themselves they were force-fed human excrement as punishment and to keep investments in them alive. In March, the international community commemorated 200 years since the passage of the act to abolish this trade.

Jamaican historian, Douglas Hall, reproduced the diaries of the Jamaican slave owner, Thomas Thistlewood, appropriately titled, In Miserable Slavery. Thistlewood matter-of-factly noted his regular sexual exploitation of his female slaves, one of whom was his house slave named Phibbah. He recorded 3,852 sexual acts with 138 women, mostly slaves, during his 37 years in Jamaica. On his dying, he still did not give Phibbah freedom, delaying that for years after his death. We do not know if she lived long enough to enjoy this freedom from the man who used her for sex more than 2,000 times for 35 years and for whom she bore a child. This was slavery.

Slavery was only possible because for 400 years, Phibbah and millions of people like her had no rights, could own no property, could not testify in court, vote, be elected, or invest, but who laboured for free on plantations and in trades, and were forced to work for the very system that was established and backed by governments, law, investments, markets, and often by religion, to perpetuate slavery. To run away and be caught, or to even slightly transgress on the sensitivities, privileges and profits of their masters and mistresses would bring unimaginably sadistic acts.

SOCIAL DESTRUCTION

Slave trading destroyed families, villages and societies. There is no greater tragedy than for mothers to systematically lose her children and for children to similarly be separated from their parents. Slave traders preyed on people. They would wait until adults went to their fields to work. Children would be snatched away while they played. Children could not play in peace. They often had to post lookouts in trees to warn them of slave traders. Child and adult captives not deemed fit and healthy enough to labour were sometimes capriciously killed. For those who went aboard ships, the real horror began. Olaudah Equiano, a former slave wrote:

"The white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner, because I had never seen among my people such instances of brutal cruelty. The closeness of the place, the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each scarcely had room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died. The wretched situation, once again aggravated by the chains, now insupportable, and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, the groans of the dying, rendered the whole scene of horror almost inconceivable."

A number of former slaves had written or were interviewed about their tragedy. What comes across are modern minds and human emotions familiar to us hundreds of years after. Their stories were not about the economic rationale of slavery, humanitarian arguments for abolition, or the nature of the power structures that supported the system. Their accounts displayed incomprehension towards the often petty daily circumstances of vengeful and spiteful cruelty in a sadistic system in which those with power over them simply took pleasure or took out their miserable moods on them in the most dehumanising manner.

Their stories are about their parents being sold off to other plantations; having their wife and children sold off to someone else and risking escape to find them but never seeing them again; about watching their mothers whipped for no good reason and crying inside knowing they could do nothing about it; about knowing their sisters were being raped in the Great Houses; watching the children eat from troughs with the pigs and dogs; seeing them go to bed hungry and stealing chickens to feed them knowing that the penalty was severe whipping and even death if they were caught. Their stories were about seeing the master drunk from too much peach brandy while they were denied water; they were about torture for the simplest slip or suspicion of slight.

SHOCKING EXPERIENCES

Societies, like individuals, can be traumatised by shocking experiences. Slavery destroyed the social and human capital that we now know to be essential to carry on a society. Reparations therefore have to mean more than repatriation of labour value stolen and taken abroad. It has to mean more than rearranging a world trading system built by powerful states from the days of slave trading. It has to involve social repair as well.

Ex-slave societies have re-established family and community bonds and have produced human excellence. But they now face their own decisions about what trade-offs to make between commercial and human relations. This was the problem at the very start when cheap rum and worthless trinkets were used to deceive people in Africa into selling their own people to the bearers of these gifts.

People must pursue their material needs without trading away the human values by which societies are made healthy. Formerly enslaved people must repair their own human relations. They must help each other just as other ethnic groups help each other in family, education, and business. In business they cannot deceive people with shoddy goods and services for profit the way the slavers did. They cannot steal from each other the way their labour was stolen by slavers. They cannot kill each other and treat life as cheaply as the lives of 15 million Africans were treated. They cannot rape their women and abandon their children.

The mothers who lost their children and the children who grew up without parents, then and now, must be recompensed through construction of a caring society. We must invest in human development. Social investment will help to win the trust of people who never learned to trust and get people to be productive when they never thought that their labour was to be for their benefit. We cannot trace all our problems to slavery but we can be sure that slavery, undermined and delayed our ability to build the basis for a successful society. Four hundred years of labour was lost. We have little time to recover it and to repair the immense social deficit.

Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, Mona, UWI. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm