Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

The Government are to be congratulated on the arrangements that they have made to celebrate the bicentenary. This was, after all, the largest forced migration in human history. Not even the visionary Wilberforce could have foreseen that a great-great granddaughter of slaves would take part in this debate, 200 years later, on equal terms with other Members, some of whom might be able to trace their ancestry back to slave holders. The slave trade reshaped Britain, the Americas and the Caribbean, and Britain was involved in it for more than 300 years. I want to make the House think for a few minutes about the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade because it is easy, as we celebrate its abolition, to gloss over its sheer violence, darkness and shame. The slave trade happened in collusion with some Africans in the interior. The first stage of the slave trade supply chain was the collection of slaves from interior Africa. They were tied into columns, loaded with 40 or 50-lb stones to make it harder for them to escape and marched hundreds of miles to the sea. Some came by canoe to the slave ports. They were tied up in canoes and lay in water for days in the bottom of boats with their faces baked by the sun. Like my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister, I have visited one of the slave ports: Elmina Castle in Ghana. When the slaves reached the slave ports, they were put into stockades, sometimes by the thousand. At that point, about 20 per cent. of them died. They were then packed into galleys on ships where they lay side by side in spaces measuring 5 ft by 3 ft. Over the course of the slave trade, at least 450,000 black Africans died as a consequence of the Atlantic passage alone. They were packed in galleys and lay in their own urine and faeces during the weeks that it took to cross the Atlantic. They were sometimes released once a day, but sometimes not at all. When the ship reached harbour, the slaves were brought out on deck, where they were inspected and handled like animals. Many slaves—one in 10, I believe—died within a year of landing in the Americas or the Caribbean. At the height of the Atlantic slave trade, the average life expectancy of a slave in the West Indies was seven years. In north America, it was reckoned at one point that a profit could be made if a slave was worked to death in four years. Some of the accounts of the slave plantations in the West Indies and slavery in north America have the power to shock even today, given the brutality with which the slaves were treated as they were worked to death over seven or four years. I sometimes wonder whether the extraordinary brutality of the slave plantation experience in the West Indies marks Caribbean life today. I am a tremendous admirer and lover of my parents’ country of Jamaica, but it has the highest murder rate in the world. If we try to trace the roots of brutalisation and read accounts of what happened to those generations of slaves in the West Indies, there may yet be a link.