August 24, 2008
Maybe there's something else out there as vile as racism, but I can't think what it would be. I have just read Lawrence Hill's magnificent, heartbreaking novel The Book of Negroes, and I am filled with horror, wonder and fury.
Horror at Hill's crackling account of the unspeakable violence of being abducted and enslaved. Wonder that people can go through the hellfire of slavery and emerge with their minds intact and their hearts still warm. And fury at the persistence of racism, whose heat still scorches us all.
The Book of Negroes is the story of Aminata Diallo, a girl of 11 captured by slavers who murder her parents. After walking three months to the coast, Aminata is bundled onto a reeking slave ship and sold to a South Carolina plantation, then to a Charleston businessman. Escaping while visiting New York, she emigrates to Nova Scotia as a Black Loyalist, emigrates again to Sierra Leone, and ends her life in London as a living witness for abolitionists working to end the slave trade.
But that bare outline does not begin to describe the violence that Aminata endures. She is beaten and raped. Her husband repeatedly finds her and is torn from her. Both her children are ripped away. Equally painful is the cultural and psychological violence that she and her fellow-slaves suffer. Africans from dozens of different nations are tumbled together -- Igbo, Ashanti, Yoruba, Fulani, Mende and many others – so that they are all isolated, unable even to speak to one another. It's as though someone had captured Finns, Scots, Basques and Greeks, and lumped them all together as “Europas.”
Nor are the Africans permitted to generate a new identity. They are forbidden to learn, teach, read or write. They develop two languages:Gullah, which they speak among themselves, and a form of English to use with the “buckra,” the white people.
This robbery of culture and identity is not accidental, argues an unnamed writer on a website called AfricanDNA.com:
“Slave owners wanted our ancestors to think of themselves as nameless objects of property, plain and simple, like a chicken or a cow,” s/he writes. “I am convinced that this still impacts our people today, crippling our ability to know ourselves by connecting with our family's past.... We have internalized generations of doubt and fears about who we are as a people and what we can accomplish, just as White racists wanted us to do. And we continue to pay a terrible price for this.”
Yes, exactly. Many of Aminata's companions go mad, or kill themselves. No wonder that the effects of this horrific experience linger on. Afro-American slavery dates from the same period as the Highland Clearances, the deportation of the Acadians and the decimation of the Mi'kmaq. If the rest of us still feel the sufferings of our ancestors, how can we fail to weep at the anguish of the Africans?
But we do fail, to our enduring shame. Stories of racism bubble up in this newspaper almost on a daily basis: slurs in Digby, teenage battles in Cole Harbour, constant harassment for the offence known to black people as “DWB” – Driving While Black.
So it is no surprise that Aminata's experience during eight years in Birchtown, Nova Scotia is one of exclusion, poverty, broken promises and lethal violence. And it is no surprise that she chooses to emigrate again to the new free colony on the Sierra Leone River – the very river where she was branded with a red-hot iron and thrust aboard a stinking slave ship 40-odd years before.
The Book of Negroes is hard, vivid and unsentimental, and Aminata is not a soft character. Though she is capable of great love, she is also tart and clear-sighted, shrewd and cunning. Her salvation is her adaptability, her skill as a midwife and her love for languages, which repeatedly allows her to eavesdrop on people who think she cannot understand them.
As a child, she learns a bit of reading from her father, whose copy of the Qu'ran is the village's only book. Although she is a girl, she yearns to be a djeli – a village storyteller, a recorder, a magician who conjures with language. And she knows that in the end, her words are the tools to give meaning to her life of loss and pain.
“I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion,” she writes. “I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.” Someday, “one of these people will find my story and pass it along. And then, I believe, I will have lived for a reason.”
-- 30 --
Showing posts with label slavery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slavery. Show all posts
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Chocolate Wars
My initiation into the world of protest movements took place in 1947, when I was 10 years old. For a middle-class kid in postwar Canada, strikes and demonstrations were someone else's news. But when the candy manufacturers jacked up the price of a chocolate bar from five cents to eight cents, I joined with other kids by picking up a placard and going on strike.
I remember it vividly – a couple of dozen kids waving signs in front of the confectionery stores in the shopping district (there were no malls) just a few blocks from our school. DOWN WITH EIGHT-CENT CHOCOLATE BARS! BRING BACK THE NICKEL BAR!
At the time, I thought this was a local battle – but in fact it was a strike by all the children of Canada. It began in Ladysmith, BC, and rapidly spread across the country. Mobs of kids marched down Bloor Street in Toronto. Ottawa kids demonstrated on Parliament Hill. Adults were sympathetic; the end of wartime wage and price controls had resulted in a tide of rising prices, but nobody had expressed the general resentment until the kids tackled the candy companies.
The boycott worked, too. Chocolate bar sales plunged by 80%.
And then the tide changed. Ludicrous as it seems, right-wing outlets like the Toronto Telegram denounced the movement as a communist-inspired threat to national security. The Mounties muttered darkly that the boycott had been cooked up in Moscow. Reds under the bed. Principals, parents and priests fell in line. The strike soon faded away.
I think I remember that prices did go down, but only briefly. After things cooled off, the companies quietly raised the price again, and this time it stuck.
What astonishes me, as I revisit the 1947 boycott in Carol Off's fine book, Bitter Chocolate, is the way the protest prefigures so many themes in the world I would grow up to live in. Inflation, for instance, which had been unknown during the depression and the war. And the attempt by all the elites – the police, the press, the educators, the politicians, the churches, you name it – to discredit protest by ignoring the grievances and blaming Reds, furriners and “outside agitators.” the system used the same technique against labour, against the peace movement, against women's organizations, against students.
But the most powerful weapon of all was time. A government, a university or a wealthy company can always outwait its opponents.
My childhood experience of unfairness apparently typifies the chocolate trade throughout history. Bitter Chocolate (Random House, $34.95) is sub-titled “Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet.” In it, Carol Off makes the case that chocolate is the blood diamond of the candy-box, rooted in conquest, corruption, slavery, child labour and hypocrisy. Her story begins with Cortez , who conquered Montezuma's Aztecs, learned the value of the cocoa bean, and promptly enslaved the Aztecs. Cocoa plantations in Central America and the Caribbean were subsequently manned by slaves transported from Africa.
The story seemed different in the 19th century, when British chocolate manufacturing was dominated by earnest Quakers. Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree were benevolent capitalists who, Off says, “managed what was near at hand with impeccable regard for human dignity.” They built model communities around their model factories, and often supported progressive measures like a minimum wage and family allowances.
But their cocoa came from a couple of Portuguese-owned islands in the Gulf of Guinea, which were, a century ago, the world's leading source of cocoa. And the cocoa was produced by a vicious system of forced labour – as it is to this day, notably in the backwoods of Cote d'Ivoire.
Cote d'Ivoire was once a prosperous place, an “African miracle” based on cocoa. Then cocoa prices dived, and the economy was savaged by the “assistance” of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. With newly-impoverished Ivorian farmers desperate for labour, smugglers began trucking children from nearby Mali and Burkina Faso. By 2000, the US state department estimated that 15,000 Malian children were working in the cocoa plantations. “Many are under 12 years of age, sold into indentured servitude for $140 and work 12-hour days for $135 to $189 per year.”
The only hopeful note is the emergence of new “fair trade” companies like Green & Blacks, who established a mutually-respectful cocoa business with the Mayans of Belize, and marketed a premium chocolate bar called Maya Gold. So far, so good – but in 2005, Cadbury Schweppes bought control of Green & Blacks. What next? Will the fair trade movement transform the multinational? Or will the chocolate barons eviscerate the standards of fair trade?
That's the industry we were taking on as school children in 1947. No wonder we lost. But what a good foe to have chosen!
-- 30 --
I remember it vividly – a couple of dozen kids waving signs in front of the confectionery stores in the shopping district (there were no malls) just a few blocks from our school. DOWN WITH EIGHT-CENT CHOCOLATE BARS! BRING BACK THE NICKEL BAR!
At the time, I thought this was a local battle – but in fact it was a strike by all the children of Canada. It began in Ladysmith, BC, and rapidly spread across the country. Mobs of kids marched down Bloor Street in Toronto. Ottawa kids demonstrated on Parliament Hill. Adults were sympathetic; the end of wartime wage and price controls had resulted in a tide of rising prices, but nobody had expressed the general resentment until the kids tackled the candy companies.
The boycott worked, too. Chocolate bar sales plunged by 80%.
And then the tide changed. Ludicrous as it seems, right-wing outlets like the Toronto Telegram denounced the movement as a communist-inspired threat to national security. The Mounties muttered darkly that the boycott had been cooked up in Moscow. Reds under the bed. Principals, parents and priests fell in line. The strike soon faded away.
I think I remember that prices did go down, but only briefly. After things cooled off, the companies quietly raised the price again, and this time it stuck.
What astonishes me, as I revisit the 1947 boycott in Carol Off's fine book, Bitter Chocolate, is the way the protest prefigures so many themes in the world I would grow up to live in. Inflation, for instance, which had been unknown during the depression and the war. And the attempt by all the elites – the police, the press, the educators, the politicians, the churches, you name it – to discredit protest by ignoring the grievances and blaming Reds, furriners and “outside agitators.” the system used the same technique against labour, against the peace movement, against women's organizations, against students.
But the most powerful weapon of all was time. A government, a university or a wealthy company can always outwait its opponents.
My childhood experience of unfairness apparently typifies the chocolate trade throughout history. Bitter Chocolate (Random House, $34.95) is sub-titled “Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet.” In it, Carol Off makes the case that chocolate is the blood diamond of the candy-box, rooted in conquest, corruption, slavery, child labour and hypocrisy. Her story begins with Cortez , who conquered Montezuma's Aztecs, learned the value of the cocoa bean, and promptly enslaved the Aztecs. Cocoa plantations in Central America and the Caribbean were subsequently manned by slaves transported from Africa.
The story seemed different in the 19th century, when British chocolate manufacturing was dominated by earnest Quakers. Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree were benevolent capitalists who, Off says, “managed what was near at hand with impeccable regard for human dignity.” They built model communities around their model factories, and often supported progressive measures like a minimum wage and family allowances.
But their cocoa came from a couple of Portuguese-owned islands in the Gulf of Guinea, which were, a century ago, the world's leading source of cocoa. And the cocoa was produced by a vicious system of forced labour – as it is to this day, notably in the backwoods of Cote d'Ivoire.
Cote d'Ivoire was once a prosperous place, an “African miracle” based on cocoa. Then cocoa prices dived, and the economy was savaged by the “assistance” of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. With newly-impoverished Ivorian farmers desperate for labour, smugglers began trucking children from nearby Mali and Burkina Faso. By 2000, the US state department estimated that 15,000 Malian children were working in the cocoa plantations. “Many are under 12 years of age, sold into indentured servitude for $140 and work 12-hour days for $135 to $189 per year.”
The only hopeful note is the emergence of new “fair trade” companies like Green & Blacks, who established a mutually-respectful cocoa business with the Mayans of Belize, and marketed a premium chocolate bar called Maya Gold. So far, so good – but in 2005, Cadbury Schweppes bought control of Green & Blacks. What next? Will the fair trade movement transform the multinational? Or will the chocolate barons eviscerate the standards of fair trade?
That's the industry we were taking on as school children in 1947. No wonder we lost. But what a good foe to have chosen!
-- 30 --
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