http://www.uexpress.com/ups/opinion/column/js/text/1999/06/js9906152413.html THE LEGITIMACY OF SLAVERY | Joseph Sobran | June 15, 1999 WASHINGTON -- Conventional textbook history teaches that white Europeans created slavery and imposed it on black Africa. This myth is designed to make white Americans feel so guilty that they will give up their own rights in the name of "civil rights." Whites did acquire African slaves and maintained the slave trade. But the institution pre-existed the white man's relations with Africa. In fact, even after slavery had been abolished in white civilization, the European colonial powers had great difficulty in eradicating it in Africa, where it stubbornly persisted among the natives. As in ancient Greece and Rome, slavery was built into the economic life of African tribes, who knew little (and cared less) about Abraham Lincoln. In his 1921 book, "Among the Ibos of Nigeria," G.T. Basden noted that Nigerian tribes acquired slaves by four methods: "capture in war, kidnapping, purchase and pawning." Captives taken in war "were either killed and eaten, or sold as slaves, or set aside to serve as human sacrifices." Anyone venturing out of his own village risked being ambushed, enslaved and maybe devoured. (It's hard to imagine Robert E. Lee eating his slaves.) Children were often taken in midnight raids on villages. Raised as the slaves of other tribes, they usually grew up without knowing where they were born or who their parents were. Moreover, slaves were often mutilated, blinded or crippled to prevent flight. Sometimes, Basden relates, people pawned their children into slavery to satisfy even trivial debts. Theoretically this was temporary, but it rarely worked out that way: "A child thus disposed of is, in fact, seldom redeemed. None of his kin would be sufficiently interested or unselfish to subscribe the money for such a purpose. It follows that a child so pawned remains a slave for life, and any offspring born to him are slaves from birth." Did the slaves revolt? Rarely. Basden affirms: "I have never met a slave who hankered after or even expressed a desire for freedom. Indeed, in instances where the possibility of freedom has been suggested to young men they have indignantly refused to consider the proposal. On one occasion I talked at length on 'liberty,' and on all the advantages that liberty bestows upon a man, to a young fellow with whom I was closely acquainted. "He listened attentively until I had finished and then quietly remarked, 'What has N---- (his master) done to me that I should seek my liberty? I never knew my parents. I do not even know where I was born. All the love and affection I have ever experienced have come from N----. He has been father and mother to me; he has clothed, fed and educated me. Why should I forsake my benefactor and by so acting repudiate all he has done for me? Why, he is my father!'" When a slave regards his master as his benefactor and virtual father, abolitionism hasn't got much of a toehold. And the Nigerian tribes thought a slave should be grateful to his master. They didn't look kindly on the runaway slave, whom they regarded as robbing his master, not reclaiming his own rights. Even an escaped slave, Basden says, would become "an outcast without home, farm or any means of subsistence. He is not likely to meet with sympathy, for the natives would not recognize him as a freeman but would stigmatize him as a presumptuous renegade, flaunting a liberty which was not his by right. ... (T)he stigma of slavery cannot be obliterated." In the Nigerian cultures, slavery was regarded as completely legitimate -- even by the slaves themselves. It was totally indigenous and had nothing to do with the white man -- though in pre-Christian Europe, white men enslaved other white men and held most of the same attitudes as the Nigerians. In the modern world, state slavery has replaced chattel slavery, and this is widely accepted as legitimate. Through two world wars, young men (and their parents) acknowledged the right of the state to demand that they give their lives in combat. Even now, many are grateful dependents of the state, their kindly master, while the state's right to confiscate the fruits of our labor through taxation is seldom challenged. Maybe Aristotle had a point when he said that most men are slaves by nature.
The Two Great Commandments -- Master, which is the great
commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the
first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and
the prophets. -- Matthew 22:36 - 40 Bard |
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