Remembering slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

By Vanessa Cort
It is fitting that an International Day for the Elimination of Discrimination should be followed by one dedicated to remembering victims of slavery and the iniquitous Transatlantic Slave Trade, particularly in this decade for people of African descent.

The majority of people around the world have a broad understanding of slavery and what it entails and the institution of slavery is said to date back to the “beginning of time” or at least of human existence on this planet. It has crossed all ethnic lines and cultures.

The International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, however, seeks to jog the world’s memory of the abhorrent nature of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which enabled millions of Africans to be enslaved far away from their homeland.

The Mesopotamians, 4,000 years ago, gave us our first glimpse of slavery though fragments of texts reveal that slavery dates as far back as 11,000 years ago. Codes written indicate that slaves had certain rights and could win their freedom.

The 1619 project on slavery in America tells us, “Africans and Europeans had been trading goods and people across the Mediterranean for centuries – but enslavement had not been based on race.”

It further states: “The Transatlantic Slave Trade, which began as early as the 15th century, introduced a system of slavery that was commercialised, racialised and inherited.” African slaves were not seen as people but as commodities – bought, sold and exploited.

There is a school of thought which says that there was never a “Middle Passage” because no one could have survived a journey of that distance in that timeline and under the conditions described.

However, historical records dispute this argument, going back to the 15th century when the Roman Catholic Church divided the world in half, giving the Portuguese a monopoly on West African trade and the Spanish the right to colonise the New World.

Pope Nicholas V issued a proclamation, which not only affirmed Portugal’s exclusive rights to West African territories, but also granted the right to invade, plunder and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

Queen Isabella of Spain backed Christopher Columbus’ exploration but rejected the enslavement of American Indians, claiming they were Spanish subjects. Spain then established a “contract,” that authorised the direct shipment of captive Africans for trade as human commodities in the Spanish colonies in the Americas.”

Other European nations followed suit, competing for the “contract” to colonise the New World and “a new form of slavery came into being.”

This was endorsed by European nation states seeking economic and geo-political power and led to what the 1619 Project terms: “The largest forced migration in the world,” as upwards of 12 million men, women and children of African origin were forced into the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The American slave trade is thought to have begun in 1619, when 20 men from Africa were sold in Jamestown, Virginia after being wrested from a Portuguese slave ship.

There followed a horror story of millions of Africans being stacked, packed and chained in the holds of ships – many dying on the way from a litany of diseases – and their dead bodies tossed into the oceans. Sketches, etchings and pictures of manacles used provide damning evidence of the measures employed to transport slaves.

The horror continued, with vivid descriptions of the inhumane and barbaric treatment meted out to landed slaves at the hands of white slave masters who considered them chattel.

The US Constitution, following the Revolutionary War, according to HISTORY.COM.EDITORS, “tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person…”

And Thomas Jefferson, the architect of the American Declaration of Independence, was a lifelong enslaver, who reportedly inherited slaves, fathered enslaved black children and relied on slaves for his livelihood, yet arguing that ‘Black’ people were inferior to whites.

The theme of this Remembrance Day programme is. “Fighting slavery’s legacy of racism through transformative education.”

For as the UN says: “The racist legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade reverberates today in harmful prejudices ad beliefs which are still being perpetuated and continue to impact people of African descent across the world.”

Transformative education, is considered a means of empowering learners to change the status quo and essential for teaching and learning about slavery, “…in order to build inclusive societies based on dignity and human rights for all people everywhere.”

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