So, I was on my way home from Big Drag practice tonight and I was listening to the BBC on NPR. The theme of the broadcast was slavery. Slavery is bad. We all know that. The stories got me thinking about how sticky the whole situation is, though.
The first story was a British man of African descent who went back to Ghana to "find out something about himself." He was convinced that, as a black man in Britain, he was never going to feel like he fit in. After all, European history was not
his history, African history was. So, he took a trip back to Ghana to find his roots. What he found out was that his Great, Great, Great Grandfather was a Dutch slave trader. Not only that, but his mulatto Great, Great Grandfather took over the family business and was a slave trader as well.
What struck me about this is that we've been sold the image of European conquerers riding in to Africa and herding up native Africans and shipping them off for sale in the new world. This is giving white westerners entirely too much credit (or blame as the case may be). The shocking reality is that the Africans were complicit in the whole affair. Fact is, there was already a flourishing slave trade within Africa; Westerners did what they do best which is recognize a commodity and figure out how to profit from it.
Not that this excuses the westerners in any way. If you ask me, the most evil thing anyone ever did was build a fence around a plot of land and declare it theirs. It's a short journey from there to claim ownership of things, then animals, then other people... Now we even debate ownership of ideas. "Let's get ready to rumble" is owned by Michael Buffer and his brother. What the fuck?!?
The whole point of making a commodity of something is to profit from the transactions involving that commodity. It is not a zero-sum game - that is to say, it is not quid pro quo. Every transaction is based on someone getting more out of the transaction than they put in and, thereby, profiting from the exchange. Somewhere, there is a loser... By definition, if someone is getting more than the material investment they made in a commodity at the point of sale - either someone sold it for less than it was worth or someone bought it for more than it was worth.
I'm getting away from my original point here, which is that the real evil here is commodification. The fact that the commodity was a human being makes it just that much more evil.
The second story was of a Creole that traced his lineage back to a French slave owner and his slave/wife. The Frenchman would emancipate each of his children as they were born. With the birth of the last child, the slave owner emancipated both the child and his wife and died shortly after. Seems it was not uncommon for New World Euro Ex-Pats to use the slave trade as a sort of mail-order bride service. How many of us have mixed heritage?
My own Great, Great, Great (some number of greats) uncle was Solomon Le Gare. A crazy hugenot who fled France and landed in the new world. He was the model for Simon Legree in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is a fact that makes me cringe every time I think of it. However, chances are that ol' Solomon fathered children by one of his slaves. I probably have distant relatives in the Charleston area who are African-American.
The lasting impression that these stories leave me with is that there is no such thing as "African History," or "European History," or "American History..." There is only
our history, and it's pretty f'd up.
