The Literary Trotskyism of Stieg Larsson

Basically, it seems the late Swedish novelist was a bit of a legend politically, and not just for his anti-fascism...

New book on Malcolm X

Malcolm X: Visits Abroad April 1964-February 1965
By Marika Sherwood

Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) after a troubled childhood and imprisonment, became a Muslim on his release in 1952. A gifted speaker he became the major preacher and national spokesman for the Nation of Islam, indicting white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against African Americans. But tension between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, led to Malcolm X's resignation in March 1964. He now made the pilgrimage to Mecca, became a Sunni Muslim and disavowed racism. While he had crisscrossed the USA many times for the NOI, Malcolm now travlled widely in the Middle East and throughout Africa, and also paid a number of visits to England and France, addressing Muslim, student and political organizations.
An erudite man of great charisma and intelligence, he was a national and international figure when he was assassinated in New York on 21 February 1965.
This book is an introduction to Malcolm's travels in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, taken from his travel Notebooks, autobiography, FBI papers and local newspapers.

ISBN: 978-0-9519720
Special sale price £5
Email Savannah Press: savannah@phonecoop.coop.

Marika Sherwood will be launching her fascinating book - which among other things has details of Malcolm's visits to not just the London School of Economics and Oxford University but also Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester - at a Black and Asian Studies Association seminar on Tuesday, September 14 (room G37) at 6pm, Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1. Everyone is welcome - for more info see here.

Kick over this statue

The legendary 1980s band The Redskins once had a hit of sorts with a song entitled 'Kick Over the Statues' - not a bad sentiment, particularly in a country like Britain where one does not have to look too far for statues honouring various bloodsoaked ruling class 'heroes' - as chronicled by the late Colin Gill and Leon Kuhn in their marvellous little book Topple the Mighty.

It is therefore encouraging to see that a campaign has sprung up in the North East Welsh town of Denbigh against plans to build any new sculpture to pay tribute to a local ruling class 'hero', a particularly brutal imperialist adventurer HM Stanley, of 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' fame and a central figure in the late nineteenth century European 'scramble for Africa'. As the campaigners letter of protest notes:

'We call on the people of Denbigh not to erect any statue to 'honour' the imperialist HM Stanley. A statue would convey uncritical approval and celebration of all aspects of Stanley - something not possible for such a controversial figure today. It is wrong to romanticise the African "adventures" of Victorian era imperialists. The racist ideas of the day led to hundreds of thousands of Africans being killed or mistreated - Europeans believing that their supremacy entitled them to confiscate land and exploit natives and resources.'

The nineteenth century diarist, W.S. Blunt, once recorded the following note after reading Stanley's autobiography, which gives some indication as to why Stanley became such a racist barbarian after arriving in Africa:

'Stanley, before going to Africa, though ill-bred and ill-educated, was a decent working man with a modest opinion of himself and a good heart, but the position he found himself in in Africa filled him with the usual idea of being the representative of a superior race, with right of command over the people of the country he was travelling through, and little by little he got into the way of shooting them if they did not obey his orders, or provide him with food. All of his later writing is an attempt to show that he had a high motive in excuse for these violences, the cause of Christianity, civilisation and the rest, till he became a contemptible humbug.'

Invictus

I went to see Clint Eastwood's Invictus the other day. I haven't got a great deal to say about it, and what I do have to say will certainly be way too soft - for a serious Marxist critique see the piece by Louis Proyect - but for someone for whom the 1995 Rugby world cup was a distant schoolboy memory, and at the time almost certainly an event viewed purely as a dramatic sporting spectacle (and I fear, probably if supporting onyone, then supporting the England side of if I remember rightly Will Carling and Jeremy Guscott - these being my 'pre-Marx' days) it was a little enlightening. Moreover, given Michael Moore's new film is going to be bloody hard to track down at the British box office, it ain't a bad film to see (though if you can still catch it, definitely check out A Prophet). The heady mix of race, sport and politics which runs throughout Invictus put me a little in mind of such epics as Escape to Victory, and while perhaps coming close to being a tiny little bit grating in one or two places, its gentle, liberal anti-racist message is timely at a time when fascist parties in Britain are standing on a programme and propagating policies rather akin to those in apartheid South Africa. For a sense of contemporary South Africa, with its grotesque inequalities and poverty, on film, one is much better off seeing a film like Tsotsi, while something of the power and glory of the anti-apartheid liberation struggle is captured in Amandla!.

Free Nelson Mandela

Though I was a little too young to really remember the occasion myself, and indeed my only real connection to the man himself was being part of a mass crowd that welcomed him to Leeds in I think 2004, this week marks the anniversary of the freedom, after captivity for 27 years, of Nelson Mandela who was finally released by South Africa's Apartheid regime on 11 February 1990. This year, the country, which he was democratically elected President of, celebrates 20 years of freedom as well as hosting Africa's first World Cup. Back in the eighties The Specials sang Free Nelson Mandela. The people over at Philosophy Football have produced a timely T-shirt that both celebrates this message that inspired a generation to dance, march and boycott but also South Africa' achievements in its two decades of freedom. Plus the shirt helps raise funds for Action for Southern Africa successor to the Anti-Apartheid Movement - which is nice.

Hubert Harrison on how to review books

'In the first place, remember that in a book review you are writing for a public who want to know whether it is worth their while to read the book about which you are writing. They are primarily interested more in what the author set himself to do and how he does it than in your own private loves and hates. Not that these are without value, but they are strictly secondary. In the next place, respect yourself and your office so much that you will not complacently pass and praise drivel and rubbish. Grant that you don’t know everything; you still must steer true to the lights of your knowledge. Give honest service; only so will your opinion come to have weight with your readers. Remember, too, that you can not well review a work on African history, for instance, if that is the only work on the subject that you have read. Therefore, read widely and be well informed. Get the widest basis of knowledge for your judgment; then back your judgment to the limit.'
Quoted in Harrison Redux: The resurrection of a pioneering cultural journalist by Scott McLemee

Leo Zeilig on the crisis in the Congo

The history of the UN in the Congo is a story of complicity with imperialism. The UN’s first military intervention was in the Congo in 1960. The country’s first prime minster, Patrice Lumumba, hoped that the UN would force foreign mercenaries to leave the country. Instead it collaborated in his assassination. The UN is not the solution to the fighting. Nor is the "responsible investment" advocated so adamantly by the NGOs that have detailed the human rights abuses in the eastern DRC. Further involvement and "investment" from Western companies would be a disaster. The war has been fought by armed groups connected to a globalised market of looted minerals bought and traded by multinationals in the West.

The pillage of the African continent is accelerating. The scramble for mineral and oil wealth is the product of a renewed round of imperialist competition. Multinationals and governments from the US, the European Union and China are competing for access to the continent’s extraordinary wealth. This is a disaster for millions of people across Africa.

Weeks before he was murdered by Belgian and Congolese agents, Lumumba wrote:

"History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the UN will teach… Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity."

This alternative looks to the resistance of those living in the region, free from the intervention of the West.

Read the full article

Mugabe, Britain and the Abuses of Anti-colonialism

Good article by Priyamvada Gopal on why Robert Mugabe and Gordon Brown have more in common than they think:

As Zimbabwe spirals into further political chaos, Mugabe and his party’s addiction to power will further indulge an equally self-serving Western appetite for spectacles of Third World despotism. If Mugabe finds it convenient to invoke the demon of colonial oppression (which many Zimbabweans, barely thirty years out of colonial rule, remember all too well), he also enables British politicians to spout pieties condemning violence while their own nation is currently implicated in two dubious and bloody wars. Were the BBC and Channel 4 to show as many close-ups of injured and dead Iraqis as they do of Mugabe’s maimed victims, criticism of violence against innocents might be somewhat more evenly distributed than it currently is. The British government turns accusatory fingers in Zimbabwe’s direction while Mugabe shouts back anti-colonial slogans. It is a perfect symbiosis, a mutually convenient embrace of denunciation, with each party laying claim to the higher moral ground. The only innocents, however, are ordinary Zimbabweans.

Check out also this interview with Mike Sambo of the International Socialist Organisation in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwean socialists to speak in UK

With the situation in Zimbabwe becoming desperate, those near London might be interested in hearing socialists from Zimbabwe speak about the situation and the possibilities of future change from below in the country at Marxism in early July.

Egypt's strike wave hits London

'We want the dawn': Photographs from Egypt's strike wave
1 - 11 July 2008, Students' Union, SOAS, Thornhaugh St, Russell Sq, London WC1

"You want the dawn? The battlefield's right here The hero is a hero.And the coward is a coward."
Women textile workers' strike leaflet,April 2008, quoting Egypt's great vernacular poet, Ahmad Fu'ad Negm

Opening event: 6.30pm 1 July
Film showing: 'On the streets' by Nora Younis about the Property Tax Collectors' strike
Speakers: Hossam el-Hamalawy and Farah Kobaissy
All welcome - free entry

/ RSVP to Dr Anne Alexander,
Department of Politics,
SOAS / aa107@soas.ac.uk

Since December 2006 workers' strikes have swept Egypt, as textile workers, tax collectors, tobacco packers and many thousands of others have mobilised for bread and workers' rights. Photographers Hossamel-Hamalawy, Nasser Nouri, Mostafa Bassiouny, and Farah Kobaissy document Egypt's greatest wave of industrial protest since the 1940s. The exhibition is funded by the Economic and Social Research Councilunder the ESRC Non-Governmental Public Action Programme(http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/NGPA/) The organisers would alsolike to thank SOAS Students' Union for hosting the event, and SOAS UNISON and UCU for their support.

Book Review: The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker

A revolt on a slave ship in 1787

In what amounts to a pioneering and path-breaking work, in The Slave Ship: A Human History Marcus Rediker reminds us of what he calls 'the darker and more violent side' of the history of Atlantic slavery, noting that with their 'abstract, indeed bloodless statistics...even the best histories of the slave trade and slavery have tended to minimise, one might even say sanitise, the violence and terror that lay at the heart of their subjects.' Not that Rediker passes over the bloody facts of the matter, but he contextualises them within the rise of the capitalist system from its breakthrough in Western Europe to global hegemony.

The slave trade lasted almost four hundred years, from the late fifteenth century to the late nineteenth century, and saw over 12 million souls transported across the Atlantic ocean in the greatest forced migration history has ever seen. Almost two million never survived the six to ten week long Middle Passage, whether dying from the ever present danger of deadly disease or from causes man-made, their bodies cast into the sea for the trailing sharks. If one attempts to calculate the initial costs of capturing and enslaving Africans in Africa, and then add the numbers who perished within the first year of work in the New World of the Americas, then some idea of the full horror becomes apparent. 'From stage to stage - expropriation in Africa, the Middle Passage, initial exploitation in America - roughly 5 million men, women and children died. Another way to look at the loss of life would be to say that an estimated 14 million people were enslaved to produce a "yield" of 9 million longer-surviving enslaved Atlantic workers'.

As Rediker notes though, there is a 'violence of abstraction' that has plagued the study of the slave trade and slavery in general. 'Numbers can occulate the pervasive torture and terror, but European, African, and American societies still live with their consequences, the multiple legacies of race, class, and slavery. The slaver is a ghost ship sailing on the edges of modern consciousness'.

Rediker's achievement is to resurrect this ghost ship, to bring back the dead as real living people with names and faces, and to try and let us listen as far as humanly possible to the voices of the voiceless. There is abundant scholarship on the slave trade, but the view from the slave ship itself, Rediker notes, remains 'in many ways unknown'. He describes for example the 'shock and awe' experienced by many Africans on seeing the European slave ships, bristling with cannon, for the first time. How did they sail? Did magical spirits make them start and stop? As the young eleven year old Olaudah Equiano was taken on board a ship with his enslaved fellow Africans, he felt astonished and terrified at the savagery on display by the 'white men', the motley crew of mainly European sailors. What did they want from him? Only a child, he feared cannabalism and being eaten alive, but some older slaves on board offered him comfort and 'gave me to understand we were to be carried to these white people's country to work for them'. Equiano of course was to have an extraordinary life, and grew up to become an abolitionist and author of the 'most influential literary work of the abolitionist movement from an African perspective'.

Rediker is at his strongest in describing how the slave ship and its crew changed through each leg of its journey, looking from the point of view of the increasingly tyrannical ship's captain, the motley crew of mariners, and the rebellious multitude of the enslaved. At first it looked a thing of beauty when constructed, then the slaver became a 'vast machine' from the point of view of its working crew, then a 'floating dungeon' housing a 'macabre chamber of horrors' from the point of view of both the sailors and the enslaved during the Middle Passage. In the process, racial thinking and ideas emerges, and 'race' is made and remade as the ship sails its course. The systematic terror and violence that it was necessary to deploy on board by the captain and crew against the enslaved in order to prevent the ever present danger of insurrection is also an overriding theme. The captives outnumbered the crew ten to one, and an estimated one in ten voyages saw an uprising. Rediker carefully describes the complicated 'deep dialectic of discipline and resistance' on board the slaves ships, from individual attempts to resist to mass collective acts of explosive opposition.

Explosive is the right word - sometimes the slaves succeeded in blowing up the whole ship with gunpowder - and an estimated total of 100,000 people died in insurrections in the history of the slave trade - with an average of 25 people killed in each attempted rising. Most uprisings failed - the whole slave ship was built as a prison in order to precisely stop them even getting off the ground, and there was a stash of weapons and torture equipment on board to punish and humiliate. To rise up, the unarmed enslaved had to first free themselves from their iron manacles and shackles, then escape from their dungeon below deck, and then try to take control of the ship by force against a crew armed with cutlasses and blunderbusses, often protected by a barricado especially constructed on the upper deck for just such an eventuality. If they did all that, they would then need to work out how to sail the ship itself. The vast majority of insurrections inevitably failed, and then the punishment meted out against the organisers of the rebellion was brutal and sadistic - as all counter-revolutionary violence tends to be. John Newton, a slave captain who later in life was to commit himself to the cause of abolition, once wrote in a private letter describing what he witnessed on board the Brownlow during its voyage of 1748-9. After a failed insurrection, the good Christian captain, Richard Jackson, sentenced the rebellious slaves to death. The first group:

'He jointed; that is, he cut off, with an axe, first their feet, then their legs below the knee, then their thighs; in like manner their hands, then their arms below the elbow, and then their shoulders, till their bodies remained only like the trunk of a tree when all their branches are lopped away; and lastly, their heads. And, as he proceeded in his operation he threw the reeking members and heads in the midst of the bulk of the trembling slaves, who were chained upon the main-deck.'

The second group of rebellious slaves:

'He tied round the upper parts of the heads...a soft, platted rope, which the sailors call a point, so loosely as to admit a short lever: by continuing to turn the lever, he drew the point more and more tight, till at length he forced their eyes to stand out of their heads; and when he had satiated himself with their torments, he cut their heads off.'

As Newton noted, 'a savageness of spirit, not easily conceived, infuses itself...into those who exercise power on board an African slave ship, from the captain downwards...it is the spirit of the trade'. Why such murderous barbarity? In part it was necessary to counter this enslaved African resistance, what Thomas Clarkson called those moments of 'the brightest Heroism [that] happen in the Holds or on the Decks of the slave vessels'. The economic costs of slave resistance were high - and resistance 'significantly reduced the shipments of slaves' to America by an estimated one million over the full history of the slave trade.

By the end of the 1780s, as Rediker notes, abolitionists were able to use the powerful image of the slave ship, built up by the likes of Thomas Clarkson, to demonstrate 'that the vessel that had carried millions of Africans into slavery also carried something else: the seeds of its own destruction'.

What made such a cruel barbaric system last so long? Well, the plantations of the Americas were able to devour the labour of Africans because there were huge profits to be made by merchant capitalists. In 1807 alone, one year, Britain imported for domestic consumption 297.9 million pounds of sugar, 3.77 million galleons of rum, 16.4 million pounds of tobacco and 72.74 million pounds of cotton, almost all of it produced by enslaved labour. The slave ship 'was a concentration of capital, and it was the bearer of capitalist assumptions and practices about the world and the way it ought to be.' As Rediker noted in a recent interview:

We sometimes think of slavery as being pre-capitalist or non-capitalist, and that capitalism only really begins with free waged labour, but I think that blinds us to a lot of very important processes.

People were expropriated in one setting and then moved to a more market-orientated setting where their labour was exploited through usually quite violent means. In that way the slave trade is emblematic of a larger process that is happening to workers everywhere.

All these enslaved Africans were moved to the western Atlantic plantation system and their lives would be consumed by producing sugar, tobacco and rice for the world market. I like to paraphrase the great Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney who said that in the slave trade capitalism paraded without even a loincloth to cover its nakedness.

Today, when the great imperial powers are again using all kind of sophistry in order to try and re-colonise Africa, a historical understanding of the utterly barbaric methods by which European merchant capital under-developed Africa through the slave trade could not be more necessary. There could be few better introductions than Rediker's vivid and panoramic history, which surely deserves to become the classic account of life and death on the slave ships.

Black Jacobins Conference

The banner of the Haitian revolutionary armies in 1803

In autumn 1938, the late great Trinidadian Marxist historian Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989) published his magnum opus The Black Jacobins - which has become the classic history of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, and stands as one of the great works of revolutionary history. As James wrote in his preface:

The revolt is the only successful slave revolt in history, and the odds it had to overcome is evidence of the magnitude of the interests that were involved. The transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement. Why and how this happened is the theme of this book.

The Haitian revolt was not just of local relevance to the Caribbean - it was one of the great world-historical revolutions, and indeed it was intrinsically intertwined with the Great French Revolution. Not only did the revolt lead to the establishment of the world’s first independent black republic outside of Africa but it was central to the destruction of the entire Atlantic slave trade. The heroic enslaved black Africans - led by Toussaint Louverture - were central to the revolt and the people of Haiti have never been forgiven by the great imperialist powers for their part in the dismantling of this highly profitable enterprise - the fact that Haiti today is one of the world's poorest places on earth gives you some idea of the revenge that has been taken since then. All the more reason then to remember this great anti-imperialist liberation struggle and, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the publication of James's epic work, on 2 February 2008, the London Socialist Historians Group have organised a conference to try and do just that. The provisional programme is here, and keynote speakers include Darcus Howe, Selma James, Bill Schwarz, Marika Sherwood and Weyman Bennett. Highly recommended.

Marcus Rediker Speaks

Marcus Rediker, who not only has to be one of the coolest socialist historians in the world but also has one of the coolest websites in the world full stop, is on tour speaking in the US and the UK, speaking about his new book on slave ships. This tour includes London on November 6th, where he will give a paper on 'The Slave Ship and the Memory of Terror'. Highly recommended.

Edited to add: Duncan Hallas's review of Rediker's first book Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

William Wilberforce on Africans

Today being the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, I thought I ought to really put up a quote from William Wilberforce about enslaved Africans to mark the occasion. The quote I found, for some reason, has not recieved a great deal of attention so far during the official British bicentennary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade, but I found it to be quite enlightening when it comes to how we might want to remember Wilberforce. As Marika Sherwood notes of Wilberforce in After Abolition:

'He held racist views, for example believing that "negroes' minds are uninformed and their moral characters are debased...their notions of morality extremely rude," while African kings had two great vices, "personal avarice and sensuality."'

Ousmane Sembène 1923-2007

The great radical film maker and novelist from Senegal in West Africa, Ousmane Sembène, has died. RIP.

Edited to add: SR Obituary

On abolition

Lenin's Tomb has a link to film footage of Paul Gilroy and Weyman Bennett speaking last week in Friends Meeting House, London at a SWP rally to mark the 200th anniversary of the official abolition of the slave trade by Britain.

Solidarity with Zimbabwean trade unionists

From ISO Zimbabwe:

Mobilise for ZCTU 3 and 4 April Strike!
* Working Class On The Rise
* Street Battles From Bulawayo to Budiriro, Dulibadzimu to Dangamvura
* Prices Rise Daily By Over 1,000% - No To Wage Freeze
* No To Social Contract
* Reverse School Fee Hikes
* ZINWA and ZESA Hike Charges But No Water or Electricity
* Exhorbitant Kombi Fares
* Health Delivery In Shambles
* Councils Deliver Sewerage Pools and Rubbish Heaps in Residential Areas
* Immediate reversal of price increases to Dec 2006 levels. Open The Bakeries
* No to extension of Mugabe’s Presidential term. MUGABE CHIENDA NHASI
* Wages linked to the Poverty Datum Line. GONO CHIENDA NHASI
* Democratic Constitution before any further Presidential or General elections
* Repeal POSA and AIPPA. MOHADI NA SEKERAMAYI CHIENDA
* Reverse College Tuition Fees and Supplementary Exam Fees. Open The Colleges and Universities. Pay The Lecturers.
* Decommission Riot Water Cannon
* Fire The Entire Cabinet – Including The One Who Hired Them In The First Place

MOBILISE FOR 3 AND 4 APRIL NATIONWIDE GENERAL STRIKE! QINA MSEBENZI QINA! – PENGA MUSHANDI PENGA! – AHOY UNION AHOY

The British TUC is calling on workers to show solidarity with the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) during next week’s general strike.

The ZCTU’s two-day general strike, to be held on Tuesday 3 and Wednesday 4 April, comes at a crucial point in the struggle for political change in Zimbabwe.

Assemble at the Zimbabwean embassy, 429 The Strand, London WC2, between 12 noon and 2pm on Wednesday 4 April.

Of apologists and apologies

A slave ship - today marks the 200th anniversary of the British abolition of the slave trade

The British intellectual James Boswell, (1740-1795) when remembered at all, is best known for being the biographer of Samuel Johnson, who was inventor of the Dictionary among other things. Indeed, Boswell's 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson is regarded by some as the best biography ever written. Less well known about - indeed there is currently no mention of it whatsoever on his Wikipedia entry (something that I may well get round to fixing at some point) is his defence of the barbaric Atlantic slave trade and slavery. Indeed, in 1791, the same year as his celebrated biography of Johnson came out, he wrote a poem entitled 'No abolition of slavery, or the universal empire of love'. Ostensibly a love poem, its first lines are:

Most pleasing of thy sex,
Born to delight and never vex;
Whose kindness gently can controul
My wayward turbulence of soul.

Yet what follows is really a rant at those abolitionists trying to end the barbarism of the slave trade, as the title suggested. Other passages note:

Let COURTENAY sneer, and gibe, and hack,
We know Ham's sons are always black;
On sceptick themes he wildly raves,
Yet Africk's sons were always slaves;

And:

But should our Wrongheads have their will,
Should Parliament approve their bill,
Pernicious as th' effect would be,
T' abolish negro slavery,
Such partial freedom would be vain,
Since Love's strong empire must remain.

A poem that is ostensibly about the 'empire of love' turns out to be actually about a love of empire. It ends:

My charming friend! it is full time
To close this argument in rhime;
The rhapsody must now be ended,
My proposition I've defended;
For, Slavery there must ever be,
While we have Mistresses like thee!

It is not known whether the one for whom this 'love poem' was intended was impressed by such racist doggerel, but in any case in his Life of Johnson Boswell spelled out his argument in more depth:

'The wild and dangerous attempt which has for some time been persisted in order to obtain an act of our legislature, to abolish so very important and necessary branch of commercial interest, must have been crushed at once, had not the insignificance of the zealots who vainly took the lead in it, made the vast body of Planters, Merchants, and others, whose immense properties are involved in that trade, reasonably enough suppose that there could be no danger. The encouragement which the attempt has received excites my wonder and indignation; and though some men of superior abilities have supported it, whether from a love of temporary popularity, when prosperous; or a love of general mischief, when desperate, my opinion is unshaken. To abolish a status which in all ages GOD has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated. To abolish that trade would be to shut the gates of mercy on mankind.'

Today, such past apologetics for the slave trade and slavery are quietly hushed up - the complicity of the whole British ruling class in the affair - the worst crime in British history - is distinctly embarrassing. 'Stop apologising!' screams the Tory commentator Simon Jenkins, describing how he 'cheered when a descendent of the Bristol slaver, Pinney, refused to apologise for the deeds of his forefathers'. What conservatives of all stripes want us to do is forget the whole affair - they know above all that 'Great' Britain, or their green and pleasant land of England, might be tarnished or complicated by such unpleasant and brutal realities. Nationalism is an ideology which has to be constantly produced and reproduced to survive - it depends on myths, on the ideal of national unity - despite that fact that nations are always imagined communities designed to help our rulers shore up hierachical divisions of race, class and power.

Yet we have plenty of modern equivalents of Boswell today, opportunist intellectuals prepared to prostrate themselves before the rich and powerful, even if it means defending the indefensible in the process. In 2003, the Blairite warmonger Denis Macshane argued that 'It is time for the elected and community leaders of the British Muslims to make a choice – the British way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests, or the way of the terrorists, against which the whole democratic world is uniting.'

The reason why we should remember the horrors of colonial slavery and the barbarism of the slave trade it seems to me - and the reason why the heads of states, and heads of institutions and corporations who profited hugely from the trade should be made to apologise - is precisely because without such collective memories the most pernicious and racist ideals of nationalism can take hold and spread, encouraged by New Labour scum like Macshane. 'The British way' as experienced by millions of Africans and people of African descent for generations was not one of 'dialogue', 'democracy' and 'non-violence' but one of suffering under regimes of state terror. The British Empire was one of the greatest instruments of tyranny and oppression ever - and it was an historic victory for democracy when it was finally brought down. Those who resisted this Empire were demonised as 'terrorists' - and I am sure had Macshane been around in 1819 to hear the son of a Jamaican slave, Robert Wedderburn defend the moral right of slaves to murder their masters to cheers from a British working class audience, he would have defended those who sent Wedderburn to jail for sedition in 1820. Had Macshane witnessed another Jamaican son of a slave, William Davidson, help organise the Cato Street Conspiracy to try to put Wedderburn's ideas into practice, he would have been to the fore in cheering him, along with the countless unknown other slaves who rebelled against slavery, to the gallows to be hung.

Davidson's speech in court was superb, and his words ring down the ages to us today with all their power:

'It is an ancient custom to resist tyranny... And our history goes on further to say, that when another of their Majesties the Kings of England tried to infringe upon those rights, the people armed, and told him that if he did not give them the privileges of Englishmen, they would compel him by the point of the sword... Would you not rather govern a country of spirited men, than cowards?'

It is not too difficult to imagine how today's Blairites might answer that one.

Some further reading on slave trade abolition

The revolt against slavery - an excellent Socialist Worker supplement featuring articles by Adam Hochschild, Charlie Kimber, Yuri Prasad and Marika Sherwood.
Slaves and Slavery 1807-2007 by Marika Sherwood.
CLR James and The Black Jacobins by David Renton
Why I am saying sorry for London's role by Ken Livingstone.
Man's unconquerable mind by Paul Foot
Anti Slavery International on the slave trade
A Free Man - Toussaint L'Ouverture by Laurent Dubois


My past posts on the topic

Who abolished the slave trade?
On remembering Toussaint L'Ouverture
Winston Churchill on the benefits of slavery
Blair and the anniversary of abolition
Eric Williams on Emancipation

Amandla!

I watched Amandla! ('Power!') (2002) last night for the first time, and I just thought I would quickly recommend it to readers of Histomat as a brilliant introduction to the history of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Subtitled 'A Revolution in Four Part Harmony' it is about how music was the lifeblood of the African liberation movement - but it also shows how the music evolved in step with the struggle as it developed. Basically, forget going and seeing racist films like 300 - watch this instead!

Eric Williams on the 'Emancipation Complex'

Capitalism and Slavery (1944) by Eric Williams - A classic.

[In 1938, Trinidadian historian (and later Prime Minister) Eric Williams wrote the following short article for 'The Keys', journal of the League of Coloured Peoples on the centenary anniversary of the abolition of colonial slavery in the British Caribbean. Entitled 'That Emancipation Complex', I think it is worth putting online as Williams makes a number of pertinent points relevant to the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade this month]:

That Emancipation Complex by Eric Williams.

In 1833 the British Parliament passed a law providing for the abolition in 1838 of slavery throughout its territories. This measure was accompanied by a provision for the payment of an indemnity of twenty million pounds to the slaveowners. The "freed" slaves were left to fend for themselves - propertyless, uneducated, destitute, and almost naked, they stood on the threshold of a new era gazing wistfully into the future. The so-called emancipators having relieved their consciences of the "sin" of theoretical slavery were not prepared to carry their idealism into the realm of the practical and actual abolition of slavery. The "emancipated," left to themselves and compelled by the force of economic facts to work for their former masters, who now opposed their progress at every turn, were yet spirited enough to accept the challenge and to carve out for themselves and their children some sort of place in the scheme of things.

Since for the past hundred years the possessors of the "emancipation complex" have been engaged in spreading persistent propaganda to the effect that the abolition of slavery was a gift from heaven due to the efforts of a few reformers, we feel it to be our duty to prick the "emancipation bubble".

With all due respect for the idealism that inspired the "abolitionists," we call attention to the fact that such reformers have existed in all ages and throughout all periods of human history; also that it is only when the socio-economic relations of a given period demand it that any attention is ever paid on the part of the "powers that be" to the desires and counsels of such persons. The West Indies at the time of "emancipation" no longer provided a secure field for the successful investment of British capital. Many of the leading supporters of abolition themselves possessed substantial trading interests in the East India Company which was then busily engaged in the exploitation of black and brown labour in the East. At the same time multitudes of white "slaves," including tiny boys and girls and women, were being mercilessly exploited in the fields, mines and factories of Britain; and the protagonists of the abolition of black slavery merely winked an eye at such "necessary" evils. Similarly in our time effusive and self-congratulatory speeches are delivered on "emancipation" anniversary days by pharisaical patriots while Africans are being daily robbed of their lands by such gentlemen, and reduced to a level of living far lower in many respects than that which obtains in chattel slavery.

In the face of these facts we are forced to conclude that there can be no place for sentiment in a just consideration of the "emancipation" question. The discovery of America and the consequent investment on a large scale of European capital in this new land brought with them a demand for cheap labour. Millions of native Indians were enslaved and worked to death by the masters of capital. White European slaves of whom there were many thousands in the West Indies - men, women, boys and girls - proved incapable of working sufficiently well in the hot climate. Hence the demand for sturdy Africans who became the prime object of attention on the part of the capitalist slave-masters encouraged by their respective governments which incidently also reaped a rich harvest from the profits of the slave trade. The great civilisation of West Africa, as represented by the Songhay Empire, was then in decline, and the resulting disunity and chaos made of this section of Africa a tempting field for the unscrupulous capitalist adventurer. It was to this part of Africa that the slavers directed their efforts. A parallel to this state of things could be seen a few years ago in the case of China whose citizens, after the disintegration of their empire as a consequence of the imperialist attacks of the Western powers, were sold as indentured slaves in the South American and Caribbean countries. This practice was to some extent countered by the attitude of the Japanese government which sternly opposed the exportation of orientals into slavery in the West. Here it may also be mentioned that in the earlier part of last century during the period of German disunity thousands of indentured German slaves were worked to death in the forests and swamps of South America.

The African, like the Briton, like the Chinaman, like the Indian, like the German, was thus a victim of socio-economic conditions inherent in the contradictions of a system of society which employed him for the making of quick and handsome profits. For those who understand the real nature of slavery there can be no "emancipation complex". Emancipation should mean freedom to compete successfully - and therefore with equal instruments - with ones fellow-citizens in every branch of endeavour. In the West Indies, as elsewhere, the appalling conditions of today are the direct result of the "emancipation" so fervently acclaimed by the theoretical eulogists of imperialism.

For the benefit of those who are yet victims of the "emancipation complex," we quote the following from the Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 23; 14th Edition. Pages 537-538:-

"One of the most important developments in the history of the West Indies was the abolition of slavery. In the French, British, Dutch and Danish islands the negro and mulatto element had become so numerous that it was no longer possible to hold them in bondage. Long continued agitation and repeated revolts, particularly in the French colony of Haiti, where the white population was nearly exterminated, made it necessary to remedy the evil. In 1838 the British freed all slaves in their West Indian possessions, the French and Danes following ten years later."

For which let us thank such leaders as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Henri Christophe, and countless unknown heroes.

Congratulations on "emancipation" are quite out of place in a world in which so much remains to be done.