By Tatalo Aremu
On the enslavement of nations
Historical projects, more often than not projects of conquest and domination, are often forced to assume new forms to protect their hegemony. No new historical development ever jumps on the world stage fully dressed, well-rehearsed and ready for action. They would have been incubating somewhere else in rudimentary or elementary forms, awaiting the cue or signal that their appointed hour with destiny is at hand. With the arrival of AI and other precursors of a new age of technology that are unlike anything the world has seen before, some early barons of ancient factories and hand-wrought artifices would be wondering whether there is any correlation between what they handed down to us and what we have made of it. If Charles Dickens with his plethora of bleak novels about the social disequilibrium and the horrors of human degradations of his time were to be shown a glimpse of the modern factory, he would have thought that we had truly reached the end of history and the advent of a new type of humankind.
By the same token, historical developments do not terminate abruptly or cease suddenly with a resounding thud. Sometimes under the pressure of other developments, they undergo a slow transformation of their inner essence. At other times, their outward form and formula begin to wear off revealing new possibilities. It is like the dialect of a particular language which after a prolonged estrangement by distance from the mother tongue or protracted isolation due to circumstances of geography and evolution becomes a new language in its own rights and takes off in a novel trajectory of its own.
Some developments in the past fortnight lend credence to the claim that the phenomenon of slavery has not completely ceased but has merely assumed new forms in order to deal with historical emergencies. While the restructuring of the fundamental categories of capitalism proceeds apace, the whole notion of forcible labour, enforced migration, the substitution of persons for ownable property and the selling and transfer of such property in the new international slave markets also indicate an ongoing radical reset of the operative parameters of human toil. How else does one explain the sheer audacity of the World Bank Chieftain, a man of Indian extraction himself, who came here to tell us that there would be at least fifteen more lean years before things normalized in the country? Is this how they do it in his home country?
But there are other developments across the globe that indicate how the international showdown between hegemonic capitalism and the nascent and contradictory forces arraigned against it is shaping up. First, the new Labour government in Britain spurned once again the idea of reparations for what has been adjudged as the complicity of the British Empire in the international slave trade which led to catastrophic displacements of populations, unimaginable suffering and irreversible demographic distortions. The British argument is that it is better to work for a new dawn of progress for humanity rather than to dwell on the errors and mistakes of the past. But the past does not cease to haunt us just because we have decreed its banishment from the imagination. Shortly after the British dismissal of reparation, King Charles on a state visit to the former colony of Australia was pounced upon by a Native female senator who heckled and pilloried him to distraction. She told him to his face that she did not recognize his sovereignty over her either now or in the past. A few days after this at a gathering of Commonwealth dignitaries of the Caribbean section of the association in Samoa, the selfsame King Charles was politely informed despite the highly convivial and literarily intoxicating atmosphere that massive reparations for the injuries of the past could not be off the cards.
What are the main drivers of this new surge of resentment against the well-heeled nations and affluent societies of the western world emanating from the peripheries and hell-holes of humanity? In the first three decades of the twenty first century and despite hiccups here and there, the relative prosperity of core western nations appears undisturbed while other societies in Africa, Asia and Latin America have plunged deeper in the catacombs of catastrophes and human degradation. In countries such as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and most recently in the Middle East, war has torn off the veneer and comforting veil of modern civilization revealing the horrors of human regression into a savage state of nature and a post-apocalyptic world of horrific suffering.
The last frontiers of civilization are besieged on all sides and the gates are heaving and tilting as a human tornado threatens to overwhelm them. In Central America, hordes of refugees and would-be immigrants trudge thousands of miles through the inhospitable jungles in order to reach the American border. Many never made it as their remains are eaten by wild animals. In Africa, millions of young hopefuls and other wannabes trek through the hot and scalding sands of the Sahara Desert. Those who survive are then packed in rickety canoes and sagging dug-outs to take their chance against the intemperate seas as they clutch at anything in desperation and utter disorientation. Those who have read Simon Schama’s gripping and unforgettable account of ancient African slaves traversing the middle passage would appreciate what it means to be trapped in the belly of a ship in the middle of nowhere.
Now, the middle passage to nowhere is everywhere. It is a site of biblical suffering and aggravated anguish. It is in Sudan where state and central authority have collapsed. It is in Myanmar where the deranged military cartel feed on native Burmese as well as the Rohingya nationals who are subject to periodic pogroms accompanied by violent expulsion. It is in the jungles of Latin America where people reenact the Chinese long trek through hostile and snake-infested territory to reach freedom. Finally, the middle passage is in the gutted, shell-shocked and drone-dismembered apocalyptic hell of Gaza, Beirut and central Lebanon where human civilization has disappeared and children eke out a feral existence amidst rubble and rubbish. Now the question must be broached. Is this what vast wealth and increased prosperity has brought the human race? Is there a nexus between modern capitalism and a new form of human enslavement which is as sophisticated as it is insidious? Finally, does the growing disparity between some core western countries and a few outliers from the periphery and the rest of the world point at a new type of inequality that borders on modern slavery?
To answer the question we need to broaden our historical perspective. In 1944, Eric Eustace Williams, a Trinidadian of French Creole extraction, published his Oxford University Ph.D thesis with the title, Capitalism and Slavery. The original title of the thesis was far more intriguing and directly polemical: The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery. Williams’ argument was succinct enough. The abolition of slavery by western countries was not dictated by the noble and humanitarian altruism it purported to be but a function of economic pragmatism due to declining profitability. But some critics believe that this argument can actually be turned on its head in the sense that the relative prosperity might have forced Britain to take a visionary look away from indentured labour and its economic and political discontent.
The irony of both countervailing arguments is that they demonstrate the fluency, fluidity and the extraordinary capacity of capitalism to change direction and to restructure its fundamental categories for greater efficiency. So while capitalism divested itself of its vast holdings in human toil and labour, it went ahead to acquire even more humungous holdings in national resources. In the past while it was humans who were abducted and forced into slavery, now it is nations who are dragooned into the slavery of permanent peonage and everlasting indebtedness. In the past, natives had to be hunted down and captured before being transported overseas as slaves, whereas in the current epoch it is individuals who willingly deliver themselves into modern slavery as indentured workers in modern factories. Either way, it helps the west to absolve itself and to salve its conscience. At the highest level of human endeavors, such individuals are subsequently absorbed into the social matrix of the west and are forever lost to their originating societies. Like the original slaves, it is a journey of no return but at least transplantation is to be preferred to the old plantation. Either way, capitalism is absolved of ingrained and inherent racism.
Some elementary or rudimentary form of capital-holding and capital-dispensing has been present in all human societies since the dawn of human civilization. What has happened in the last six hundred years is that some nations, people and societies have proved more adept at valorizing and capitalizing on capital far more than others. Not only that, they have also through wise investment of resources from wars and other predatory ventures been able to build institutions capable of justifying, explaining away, predicting and rationalizing the course and trajectory of the dominant economic system they have put together for and on behalf of humanity. Framing the current economic conflict and global inequities as a war among nations rather than a war of deprived people against political, economic and religious slavery is a strategy of containment which helps to mute and modulate the prospects of global conflagration. That way, things get far less rowdy and confrontational.
In the final analysis, only nations that cock a snook at the west either militarily or economically have managed to spring the trap of economic slavery or what has been aptly described as “the development of underdevelopment”. Numerous examples spring to mind: Russia, China, North Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, India, South Korea and Indonesia. These nations, either through military hell-raising or through an adaptation of what they consider to be benign and beneficial about western capitalism to aspects of their own indigenous cultures, have managed to reprieve their people and their countries from the clutches of poverty and millennial misery. On his way to becoming the founding prime minister of his country, Eric Eustace Williams suffered many tribulations. He was denied prestigious teaching positions on account of what was considered his earlier intellectual contumely. As prime minister, he successfully fought off an Anglo-American conspiracy to seize a chain of islands belonging to Trinidad and Tobago. After a haughty face-off, even the Russians told him to stick to what his country was best known for which is Calypso and Steel Band. But he remained proud and defiant till the end.
Given the tradition of some form of communitarianism in virtually all African indigenous cultures, African economists should come together to fashion out an authentic economic system for the continent which is distinguished by inclusive growth and a concern for the plight of the poor and the most vulnerable in the society. Without this, it is as sure as daylight that postcolonial Africa is willingly knocking at the gates of economic slavery all over again.
Culled from The Nation