BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY The Experience of the Slave Trade and Slavery: Slave Narratives and the Oral History of Grenada, Carriacou and Petite Martinique , Part 1
| By David OmowaleOttobah Cugoano was a victim of the slave trade. He ended up in Grenada. In his treatise, "Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery"1, he describes those involved in the trade as ‘robbers of men, the kidnappers, ensnarers and slaveholders, who take away the common rights and privileges of others to support and enrich themselves’ and as ‘those who make no scruple to deal with human species, as with beasts of the earth.’2 Here is a description of those who benefited from the slave trade from a man who had himself been traded and enslaved. No academic could have described it better. Along with Cugoano, several thousand of Africans wound up in Grenada during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. After its abolition in 1807 and after the abolition of slavery itself in 1838 many others arrived as ‘liberated’ Africans, that is, captives who were found in the holds of the ships of other European and American merchants by the British who policed the Atlantic, following their abolition of the trade. Many of the victims of the slave trade were not as fortunate or privileged as Cugoano who was taken to England, freed and educated and was able to describe his experience in the form of literature. But even though those unfortunate thousands died in their chains, unable to describe their experience in writing, the rich orature they left behind enable us to derive some insights into their experience. The oral history, recorded mostly in work songs and songs of the Big Drum and Nation Dance traditions, are the voices and memories of thousands of victims of the slave trade who did not have the luxury of writing down their experience. They tell of their bewilderment, their anxieties, their relationship with one another and with their enslavers, their desire for freedom, their valiant attempts to assert their humanity, their resistance to enslavement and what daily life was like on a slave plantation. So the oral history will inform this essay, supplemented by the written descriptions of those, like Cugoano, who experienced slavery first hand and some secondary sources which support the oral accounts. An estimated 22 million Africans were taken across the Atlantic from Africa. Sixty per cent (60%) of those that survived were landed in the Caribbean3. Although smaller in size than the British and French North American colonies, the islands of the Caribbean were wealthier because of plantation slavery. Grenada, for example, was wealthier than Canada and more valued by both the French and the British. In fact, according to Hochschild, ‘in 1773 British imports from tiny Grenada were eight times those from Canada.4 Some Africans were betrayed by their fellow Africans and sold into slavery. This is beyond argument and the narratives of Cugoano, Olaudiah Equiano5, and Asa Asa6 attest to this as a fact that cannot be excused, though Cugoano stated in his narrative that ‘if there were no buyers there would be no sellers’.7 From the narratives we learn that the procurement of African captives varied. Some were kidnapped, some were victims of raids, others were prisoners of war, others were debtors who could not repay their debts, yet others, like Daaga, who led a revolt in Trinidad8 were raiders and suppliers (in Daaga’s case, to the Portuguese) who were tricked on board the ship and transported to the Caribbean. Cugoano was kidnapped: ‘I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first to cause my exile and slavery.’9 Olaudiah Equiano was also kidnapped. Asa Asa was taken in a raid: ‘A great many people, whom we called Adinyes, set fire to Egie in the morning before daybreak; there were some thousands of them. They killed a great many people, and burnt all their houses. They staid two days, and then carried away all the people whom they did not kill… They sold all they carried away to be slaves. I know this because I afterwards saw them as slaves on the other side of the sea…’10 From accounts such as those of Cugoano, Olaudiah Equiano and Asa Asa, we know that once kidnapped or otherwise captured the victims were repeatedly sold to middle men until they reached the coast and were finally sold to the European traders. According to Asa Asa: ‘We were taken in a boat from place to place, and sold at every place we stopped at. In about six months we got to a ship, in which we first saw white people…’11 Olaudah Equiano describes the same repeated selling until finally he arrived at the coast: ‘I was sold again, and carried through a number of places…’12 and ‘I continued to travel, sometimes by land, sometimes by water, through different countries, and various nations, till, at the end of six or seven months after I had been kidnapped, I arrived at the sea coast.’13 Cugoano describes the same experience. From Cugoano we learn what the African middle-man usually got in exchange for fellow African captive: ‘I saw him take a gun, a piece of cloth, and some lead for me…’14 So from these narratives we have an idea from African victims themselves about the mode and method that were used by those who traded in human species. Slavery was not unknown to Africans. They practiced it. What was unknown to them was the type of slavery practiced in the Americas – chattel slavery, in which the human being was reduced by law and practice to an object that could be bought and sold, battered and given in exchange as a gift, without any human rights. Cugoano understood this difference: ‘Some of the Africans in my country keep slaves, which they take in war, or for debt; but those which they keep are well fed, and good care taken of them, and treated well…But I may safely say, that all the poverty and misery that any of the inhabitants of Africa meet with among themselves, is far inferior to those inhospitable regions of misery which they meet with in the West Indies…’15 This difference is made even clearer in William Styron’s essay ‘Slave and Citizen’ in his collection of essays entitled The Quiet Dawn: ‘Unlike the Spanish and Portuguese, the British and their descendants who became American slave owners had no historical experience of slavery; and neither the Protestant church nor Anglo-American law was equipped to cope with the staggering problem of the status of the Negro; forced to choose between regarding him as a moral human being and as property, they chose the definition of property. The result was the utter degradation of a people.’16 Many of the Africans kidnapped or captured in raids or wars were taken from the African interior and upon reaching the coast saw the sea, the ships that were to carry them across the Atlantic and the Europeans who traded in them for the first time. They reacted with terror and bewilderment. That terror and bewilderment would continue throughout the Atlantic crossing and upon arrival in the islands of the Caribbean, for example, Grenada, Cariacou and Petit Martinique. Olaudiah Equiano tells us: ‘The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror…I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits and that they were going to kill me.’17 18). Later, on board the ship, Olaudiah Equiano shared his terror and bewilderment with members of his tribe who were captives like him: ‘I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair?’18                                                                                    |
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