Skip to main content

Bury the Chains

A former colleague drew my attention to a key series of texts to read in the field of 'development studies', one of which I happened to be reading: Adam Hochschild's 'Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery."

Reading it you can see why.

First because it is a hopeful book where what was simply a commonly accepted reality became, within a relatively short time frame, a great injustice. Second because the great injustice was campaigned against utilising many of the now recognisable tools - the use of mass petitions, newsletters to keep supporters up to date, paid organisers and such like. These were invented first during the campaign against slavery. Third because this campaign seeded many others, for example, against child labour in Britain, where comparative use of  the imagery of slavery was an essential rallying point.

But also, on the shadow side, in the recognition that no campaign is ever fully complete. Emancipation was won but the material and political conditions of newly freed slaves in the West Indies and elsewhere were not greatly improved and the struggle against colonialism and for equality and freedom would last for more than another century (if arguably it does not continue today).

It is, also, as a book, a wonderful illustration of 'cognitive dissonance'. Your passionate commitment to a particular cause - abolition - did not necessarily make you a thorough radical. Wilberforce, abolition's parliamentary standard bearer, was in virtually all other areas of his life and concern a thorough-going conservative and defender of privilege (though in his private actions he continually demonstrated a care for others such that his behaviour was not always, or often, of his own opinion). It would be good to remind ourselves of this when we hurl accusations of 'hypocrisy' at one another. We are manifold beings, multiply souled, of many contradictions.

It, also, raises powerful moral questions in the epilogue about the passage of time. You visit a Jamaican plantation house on a holiday and there find a wax figure of a white woman being served tea by a wax figure of a black woman. You do not find in the neighbouring fields wax figures of pregnant women cutting sugar cane or wax figures of black men being maimed as they feed the sugar mill. Nor would you imagine seeing at a former concentration camp a set of wax figures formed as an orchestra playing for the guards or indeed entering a gas chamber. How have we permitted ourselves to sanitise slavery in a way we would not sanitise the genocide of the twentieth century? You can say that slavery was not genocidal, which is true, but does organised suffering and death allow such subtle differentiations and if so why?

But, finally, it is a story that justifies Margaret Mead's observation that what changes the world is the catalytic effect of a few, determined just people. The first committee to abolish the slave trade was an assembly of twelve, mostly Quakers and the remarkable Anglican Deacon, Thomas Clarkson. Hochschild would add to being just, being able to feel empathy with the suffering of others but perhaps in the book's only false note, he wishes to separate that from the faith the twelve had in 'sacred texts' and the author of the texts. It is true you can have one without the other but it was not true for the abolitionists. Their empathy was both felt and a sacred duty.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...