SLAVE REVOLTS THAT BLAZED A REVOLUTIONARY TRAIL FOR ALL
The Bicentennial of William Wilberforce's bill outlawing the slave trade in 1807 is leading to many reflections on the relationship between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary action, between the actions of the white ruling class driven by changing political conditions and the self-organisation of the slaves themselves.
NORMAN TRAUB explores how other revolutionary movements influenced the later and then looks at some of the challenges facing the radical left in Africa today.
IT IS TWO hundred years since the British Parliament passed the bill. But because the legislation decreed that abolition should be gradual it took another fifteen years for even the trade to stop.
It was not until between 1834 and 1838 that the actual emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies to took place, leaving thousands of children, women and men in barbaric conditions.
The emancipation of the slaves is interconnected with a series of revolutions between 1776 and 1825 that remade the Atlantic world. The American, French, Haitian and Spanish- American revolutions each in turn radicalised the next.
While the American Declaration of Independence decreed that "all men are created equal", liberty according to the newly independent state could only be realised in specific communities organised by the law of peoples.
As slaves lacked such a community, according to the new state, the slaves and Indians were excluded from the provisions of the constitution that accorded power and honour to white slaveholders in what was essentially a white man's republic.
A few states, including Pennsylvania, agreed partial measures towards abolition in 1780. By dealing a heavy blow to the legitimacy of the British Empire and the British monarchy, the American Revolution persuaded many Britons of the need for thoroughgoing national and imperial reform.
It was in the aftermath of the defeat of British rule in America that the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain was founded in 1787.
The first major breach in the systems of slavery in the Americas was opened by Jacobin revolutionaries in France and the black peasantry of Saint Domingue, part of the island of Hispaniola, which was later to become the state of Haiti.
The French Revolution first ignored slavery, then accorded civic rights to coloured proprietors. Saint Dominigue in 1791 torn apart by the struggles between supporters and opponents of extending citizenship to freecoloured proprietors became the focal point for a massive slave uprising in August of that year.
The declaration by the National Convention in France in 1794, striking down slave property, was spurred to action by delegates from Saint Dominigue and occurred at a time when the radical pressure of the sansculottes on that body was at its height.
Added to that, the pressure of the slave revolt and war culminated in the revolutionary emancipation of 1794, which denounced privilege including that of the "aristocracy of the skin" and neutralised the claims of property and of intermediary bodies such as colonial assemblies.
Laurent Dubois in Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, (Cambridge University Press, 2005) declared that the insurrection in Saint Dominigue was the most concrete expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed in France's 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man were universal and that they could not be quarantined in Europe or prevented from landing in the ports of colonies.
The slave insurrection led to the expansion of citizenship beyond racial barriers and struck a mighty blow against slavery, where it was strongest - in the plantation zone. To quote Dubois: "If we live in a world in which democracy is meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part because of the actions of those slaves in Saint Dominique who insisted that human rights were theirs too."
The failure of all attempts to crush the new black power encouraged the abolition movements in Britain and the US and supplied an urgent reason for their governments to end the slave trade in 1807.
In 1816 Haiti's President Alexandre Petion helped Simon Bolivar mount the invasion that ultimately defeated the Spanish Empire in the Americas by giving him arms and ammunition and allowing hundreds of Haitian fighters to sail with him.
In return Bolivar promised to adopt measures to extinguish slavery in the lands he was to free.
Former slaves and free men of colour were to comprise a high proportion of the main liberation armies, usually between one third and one half.
All the Spanish American republics decreed an end to the slave trade, and by 1853 slavery had been peacefully abolished there. Having motivated rebellions against slavery in Latin America and the US in this period, the Haitian revolution would later inspire those working for an end to colonialism in Africa in the 20th century.
The slave plantations established in the New World became by the end of the 18th century the motor of the Atlantic trade, eventually supplying about a third of all European imports.
The wealth created by slave labour in the plantations was a crucial element in the accumulation of capital that made the industrial revolution possible and enabled British capitalism to establish global hegemony ahead of its rivals.
The gang slave labour system, notwithstanding its many destructive and inhuman features and the integration of agriculture and industry in the plantations embodied some principles of productive rational organisation.
The plantations provided super-profits to the merchants in England, which enabled them to offer credit to early industrialists and manufacturers.
A market for goods from the metropolis was created by the demands from the slaveowning colonies. Britain's colonial markets absorbed 38% of her exports in 1770.
They also supplied raw materials like cotton, which was uniquely well adapted for the industrial revolution. The demands for the products of the slave plantations, sugar and tobacco in the metropolis came from the oblivious consumers, completely unaware of the human or ecological cost of satisfying their pleasures.
Slavery was overthrown because it became politically untenable, perishing in stormy class struggles in the colonies and the metropolis.
The secular thoughts of the enlightenment were important for the movement against slavery.
Political economists argued that labourers, who needed to earn to feed themselves and their families, would work more effectively than forced labourers.
While slave plantations may have still been profitable in the British West Indies in the 1820s, their economic significance to Britain had diminished with the expansion of imperial wealth. Trade with the Caribbean was in collapse.
Resources available to metropolitan governments allowed them to finance compensated emancipation schemes to slaveholders.
Eleven million Africans were transported as slaves between the 16th to 19th century.
The continent from which they were stolen was now engulfed by colonialism and imperialism in the search for global markets. Africa became caught up in new struggles to rid the continent of colonialism.
Today, people across Africa have won formal political independence from the yoke of colonialism, but their economies are completely dominated by imperialism under the new-fangled shackles of neo-colonialism.
The debt trap in which African countries were caught in the 1970s and 80s has now become a new permanent mechanism for the transfer of wealth from the peoples of the South to the dominant classes of the North and the local elites of the South.
The loans to the debtor countries under the control of the international institutions, the World Bank and the IMF are granted only if the governments accept structural adjustment programmes (SAP). Governments have to privatise public services, reduce spending, and cutback their welfare budgets.
These programmes were supposed, by encouraging exports and attracting foreign investment to lead to a reduction of debt.
Instead of decreasing the debt burden, by 1996, the era of SAPs had led to a 400% increase in debt to $230 billion since 1980.
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) had a higher debt as percentage of GNP than any other major Third world region, with sub-Saharan Africa's percentage debt at 73 while the Middle East and North Africa was 36 and South Asia 30.
Martin Meredith sums up the state in which Africa finds itself in some facts and figures:
"…fifty years after the beginning of the independence era…. Africa's prospects are bleaker than ever. Already the world's poorest region, it is falling further and further behind all other regions of the world. Its average per capita national income is one third lower than the next poorer region, south Asia.
"Most African countries have lower per capita incomes now than they had in 1980 or in some cases in 1960. Half of Africa's 850 million live on less than $1 a day.
"Its entire economic output is no more than $420 billion, just 1.3% of world GDP, less than a country like Mexico. Its share of world trade has declined to half of what it was in the 1980s, amounting to only 1.6%; its share of global investment is less than 1%.
"It is the only region where per capita investment and savings has declined since 1970. It is the only region where school enrolment is falling and illiteracy is commonplace; two in five Africans and half of all women are illiterate, compared to one in every eight adults in Latin America.
"On a list drawn up by the United Nations Development Programme, all twenty-five countries that rank lowest in terms of human development are African. Africa has also found itself on the losing side of globalisation, lacking both the skills and infrastructure to attract the multinational corporations that drive it.
"The scourge of AIDS has inflicted a terrible additional burden. SSA is home to just 10% of the world's population but bears more than 70% of the world's HIV/Aids cases.
"With the pandemic just in its infancy, by 2004 some 20 million people had died from Aids; 30 million were infected by Aids and their number was rising by an estimated 3 million new cases each year.
"Botswana has the highest infection rate in the world; more than 37% of its population of 1.6 million are HIV positive; in the age group of fifteen to forty nine the infection rate is 40%
"By 2010 average life expectancy is expected to fall to 27 years; half of all children in the country are likely to be Aids orphans. Other countries in the region- Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Swaziland are similarly affected.
Teachers die at a faster rate than replacements can be found. (from Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa, From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair, Publicbooks 2005)"
A new scramble for Africa is taking place for control of its oil. The US imports 15% of its oil from the Gulf of Guinea and this is estimated to rise to 25% by 2015. China imports more than a quarter of its oil from Africa and is Sudan's largest foreign investor.
The US sees China's growing presence in Africa as a threat to its interests. A new US imperial grand strategy has become a reality following September 2001. The US military is now truly global in its operations with permanent bases on every continent.
The National Security Strategy of the US of 2002 declared that "combating global terror" and ensuring US energy security required that the US increase its commitments to Africa.
The US European Command based in Stuttgart is in charge of US military operations in Sub-Saharan Africa and now devotes 70% of its time to African affairs. It centres its activities on those states with substantial oil production and /or reserves in the Gulf of Guinea, stretching roughly from the Ivory Coast to Angola.
Throughout Africa, activists in the struggle against privatisation and unemployment have sprung up. Social forums have been created to resist the privatisation of water and electricity.
Peasants have set up regional networks to resist neoliberal attacks against small agriculture.
There is the resistance to the pollution of the environment by the oil companies such as Shell in Nigeria conducted by the Ogoni Peoples Movement.
Trade unions have not played a prominent enough role within the social forums that would lead to more effective responses from these bodies.
Coordination at a national level has led to the formation of African Social Forums in the various countries. The radical left in Africa is weak and not yet in a position to have a visible impact on the social forums.
Kwame Nkrumah, who became the president of Ghana when it freed itself from colonialism championed Pan Africanism as necessary to liberate the continent of Africa.
What is required in Africa today in the struggle against neo-liberalism is a permanent Pan- African solidarity of the social movements, the trade unions and the anti-capitalist political organisations.
As the unity between the global justice movement in the metropolitan countries and the Third World is forged, a new internationalism could emerge.