The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker; Penguin Books; Price: Rs.1,198; 355 pp
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Reading this history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is a gut-wrenching experience as one relives the unbridled greed and unimaginable human suffering which was the sub-text of the slave trade, which denuded the Black continent in the 16th-19th centuries of its working population, setting the development of Africa back by several hundred years. African-American scholars have named this involuntary migration, the ‘Maafa’, which in Swahili translates into ‘holocaust’ or ‘great disaster’.
Marcus Rediker, professor of maritime history at the University of Pittsburgh and author of several meticulously researched books on seafaring and piracy, pieces together documentary material, public memoirs, oral and overlooked narratives found in provincial archives, to write this compelling history of the slave trade that flourished in Britain and America for over 400 years. This tragedy of epic proportions snatched more than 12 million able bodied, working age people from Africa, who were shipped abroad in the most dehumanising conditions imaginable.
Interestingly last year (when the book was published) marked the bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Bill 1807, passed by the mother of all Parliaments in Britain following a campaign masterminded by Charles Fox, Lord Grenville and William Wilberforce. Though the slave trade became illegal in 1833 following legislation of the Abolition of Slavery Act, it took another century before bonded labour was actually eliminated. Regrettably, illegal slavery and trafficking in human cargo continues to this day.
The remarkable aspect of Rediker’s study of this dehumanising business which powered the world’s first industrial revolution is that even when he uses factual data, he highlights human experiences of horror and terror (without sentimentalising or sensationalisation), that shaped the daily hell of unfortunate Africans cruelly uprooted from home and hearth to serve in foreign cotton and sugar plantations and dismal factories that signalled the rise of capitalism.
The journey into “this peculiar hell” begins with “stories of the people whose lives were shaped by the slave trade”. Those “swept into the trade’s surreal, swirling vortex” were not only millions of slaves but people of all sorts — thousands of sailors, hundreds of merchants, planters and politicians, pirates, petty traders, murderers and visionaries.
Thus The Slave Ship includes the narratives of the defiant Captain Tomba from Sierra Leone, whose failed conspiracy leads to the cruel death of three other “less valuable” males aboard who are forced to eat the hearts and livers of the executed, and of an anonymous male who “ripped open his throat with his own fingernails”.
The human sharks aboard the vessels were no less predatory than the sea-sharks which tended to trail slave ships all the way across the Atlantic into American ports. In fact, the histories of terrorism and zoology intersect more curiously than the overt links traditionally traced between slavery and colonialism, profit and exploitation.
The slave ship itself — “a strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory” — served different purposes at different times: a floating warehouse and open air market; a workplace that transformed the captives into commodities. A curious amalgam of racism, exploitation, capitalism — the most dramatic interface of slaves with their captors took place on ship decks.
Another type of interactivity was enacted in the holds of slave ships where black people of all descriptions, genders, age profiles, classes and communities were crowded in shackles and manacles. Although confronted with dismal futures and surrounded by the stench of premature death, the wretched captives developed new bonds of kinship, created a mixed new language and fashioned new cultural practices. By detailing these tales of resistance and creativity, the author has paid lasting tribute to the indestructibility of the human spirit and the virtue of optimism. It makes the narrative relevant to tracing the history of human rights in the context of contemporary globalisation.
The slave trade has been long abandoned, but Britain and America are still trying to come to grips with the shame and guilt associated with a morally reprehensible, violent and ethically indefensible phase of their economic and national histories. The rationale of reading this book lies in the fascinating insights provided into the origins of mercantile capitalism, understanding the multi-racial composition of the social fabric of European civilisations and identifying the cross-cultural encounters that spawned the diasporic communities which characterise the new globalised world.
Jayati Gupta